Bastard's Notebook

I'm posting this once, so I can refer people back to it later. I'm posting it without cut-tags because too many people seem to be incapable of remembering how to use them these days. All other gripes can be dealt with in the comments. I'm sure there'll be at least some.

All right. I've seen it multiple places in multiple journals.

"Livejournal is dead."

Ladies and gentlemen, if that's your belief, frankly I have a few things to say to you, starting with the generous advice that you should take your whiny little opinion and proceed to stuff it directly up your rectum. now that half of you have left in an offended huff, let me explain further, for the rest of the audience that isn't frightened by polysyllabic wording.

Yes, the userbase on LJ is shifting around a lot, especially thanks to services like Twitter and facebook. Yes, a lot of us have accounts on those sites as well, and some are migrating over there more and more, rather than here. Hell, I usually end up dividing my time 50/50 between my friendslist and TweetDeck these days. Does this constitute the death of LJ?

No.


Why? Ok, let's start simply:

1. Length of content. Twitter maxes out at 140 characters. Facebook, while allowing more than that in notes, still won't let you do status updates that are longer than that. Which means, if you've got something of more substance than "I'm on the toilet taking a monstrously foul dump." you're going to have to post it elsewhere. LJ and other blog services allow for that. Not to mention the ability to decently combine pictures and text. Or video. Or all three and other flash widgety bits all in the same post. There's things you can do here with content that you can't get away with on the new guys.

2. Networking/support. So, three of your best friends have decided to switch over to doing a wordpress blog. Or dreamwidth. Or similar. Some of them are coming back, or are doing things like cmpriest and linking them to automatically crosspost, because their readerbase isn't moving with them, or can't be arsed to deal with setting up readers and such to follow all the separate blogs. Reading over a friendslist is easy by comparison.

3. The other services... well, Facebook is a mess. No decent support for large content, rampant copyright infringement in their sponsored "games", not to mention 20 million annoying updates that, were they appearing in your email inbox instead of on a web page, would be considered nothing more than spam. Not to mention a layout that looks like it was created by paralyzed flounder. Twitter's decent for short stuff,but looks to be running into issues with cashflow/userbase, largely created by Facebook's blatant grab of the 140-character-status-update.

Of the reasons... well, #1's the best, obviously. But the real best reason you should stay on LJ? The reason LJ isn't dead yet?

You.

You get what you give, here, and everywhere else. You want more friends? People who post interesting stuff for you to read? Then you need to post interesting stuff. That's the point of having things like an LJ- putting up interesting content for the world to view. Keeping a journal that's of interest to others (and yourself). Your friends left you on LJ? Maybe that's because you stopped posting anything of interest, stopped reading and commenting on other people's posts, and just decided to get bored and angsty and spending your time on LJ doing nothing but whining. Want to fix it? It's easy- start posting again. Post interesting stuff, or post personal stuff, or just start commenting again, but quit blaming those of us who aren't shitting in the pool- we're here. If you're whining that LJ doesn't have interesting content on it anymore, then you're the only ones that that statement is true for.

And if your friends left, and you do need something interesting to read? (Other than me, of course) I heartily recommend some of mine.

flemco The artist behind Two Lumps, who posts some downright interesting stuff in general.
daemonwolf Creator of awesome jewelry and other bits.
tongodeon Just read it. He does some killer political/social commentary, among other things.

And that's just a few.

It ain't dead. It isn't broken. you just have to figure out how to use it, and then keep using it.