An Odd Change In A Dying System
Back in The Day, when I had infinite people reading me on LiveJournal, I’d post an entry and the comments exploded. I’d hit “post,” and five minutes later I’d have fifteen comments.
Now, I make a big ol’ important post and sometimes I don’t get a comment for half an hour. That used to unnerve me – is this a bad entry? Did I say something wrong? – until I realized what was happening. English LiveJournal is slowly dying.
What used to happen was that the LJ friends page was like Twitter or Facebook now – so constant a stream of data that you just refreshed your friends’ page and wham, new entries. Maybe you didn’t check it twenty times a day like I did, but the friends page was a ritual where my latest entry popped up in real time. I was a part of the info-stream.
As LJ use has declined, though, the traffic patterns have changed for me. People no longer read my blog as part of a daily pulse; it’s in their RSS feeds, or bookmarked separately, or they wait for me to post the interesting links to Twitter (since I don’t Tweet-spam every post). I still get roughly the same number of comments, but as opposed to arriving in one explosive comment-dump, they now arrive scattered over the course of two days, like late passengers departing a red-eye connection. I’m read at their convenience, not the convenience of LJ.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is a little weird. Some days I post a SRS ENTRY and then wait until I get one comment just to ensure someone’s listening. By the time I get out of the tub, I have like three comments, which used to be the sign of an entry falling on its face. Now, I’m patient; the user feedback will arrive in due course.
If you write it, they will come.
Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.
This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/214409.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.
Tags: blogginess, rage rage against the dying of the lj
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