Livejournal Versus Websites

[author_by_night]

(This public post mostly refers to Harry Potter fandom, but can apply to others. I just don't know how it works in other fandoms in terms of websites over LJ. But if it's like that in other fandoms, or just the opposite, I'd still love to know.)

When I first came into fandom, messageboards were huge. But now, I've noticed a decline. Messageboards (and websites overall), old and new and revamped, seem to get far less traffic.

My question is - what's the cause? Obviously there are many reasons. Without naming names, some boards over time became so big that it got confusing for the members. Then suddenly, many members left, and it eclined from there. There's also the fact that members who had time to run the sites and messageboards and/or be active in keeping things going there had less time.

But could Livejournal have an impact as well? I wonder if people aren't choosing Livejournal over messageboards and websites, and that's what I'm asking. I know with me, I do certainly find it's sometimes easier to post on Livejournal.  For one, LJ doesn't have the "newbie stage" - the newbie stage being the stage wherein new members are more or less ignored on the basis of being new. For another, I myself am a very elaborative person; at a board, half of what I'd want to say would probably be considered "tl;dr" ("too long, don't read"),  so I have to shorten it. But when I shorten things, I'm often too vague and make no sense.  On many occasions, discussions at messageboards have prompted Livejournal responses, because I'd rather not write a full page reply. ) However, on a website, I do know what I'm going to see and discuss; it's harder to have a firm idea of that with Livejournal, because even LJ communities change.

Thoughts?

Comments

[chocolatepot.livejournal.com]

I think LJ killed forums by being so much less hierarchial. Post counts and member statuses are very intimidating. And it just works better for networking and meeting people - clicking on the person's name takes you to their personal journal, which looks different from everyone else's, and gives you a sense of who they are. Friending and reading an flist is something you can't do on forums. It's MUCH easier to post on a post by someone you don't know than to jump into a discussion. LJ comments are made for getting multiple replies to one comment and being able to have several discussions at once with different comment threads - and you don't have to quote things to reply to comments, even when other people have replied before you.

Also, signatures are really annoying.

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with LJ being less hierarchical. I do remember times at even the most open messageboards where being a newbie was very awkward.

As for signatures, I don't mind all of them, but I do have a certain aversion to the ones that make page loading very slow. I wish more admins would ban them.

[chocolatepot.livejournal.com]

What I don't like about signatures is that you see them over and over, and they can prejudice you against a person very easily. If I'm talking to someone about Snape and we have similar views, I can like them - and when I find out they think R/Hr is really stupid and boring, I don't care as much because I already liked them. But if they have a sig that proclaims how much they hate something I like, I probably won't bother. I like how on LJ you can't tell someone's opinions before they say them (in comments, I mean) unless they have a really telling icon.

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

I think comment threading is HUGE because it makes conversations much easier to follow-- a lot of forums will have a page of "Yeah, me too!" or "[insert inside joke]" followed by every members sig line and at this point I just don't want to scroll by all the junk (thank you, LJ, for not encouraging sig lines). I still like email lists, but unthreaded forums really frustrate me these days (even a lot of the threaded ones are hard to navigate).

So anyway, what you said.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I agree on all points. Also, I may be just a snob (which people have accused me of, disclaimer), but I feel that because of the lack of comment threading and because of huge signatures and because of the "noob" status displays, it's actually harder to discuss things meaningfully at any length. Another way to say that is that I tend to get the impression that people on messageboards are idiots, and I think that it's actually the messageboard format contributing to that impression quite a lot.

[daniellafromage.livejournal.com]

I think you certainly may have a point. I think there was a big increase in fandom activity away from message boards and websites in late 2003/early 2004 - perhaps not coincidentally when LJ started giving away free accounts.

To name a name, I think FictionAlley sees much less traffic now than it used to in its heyday (2002-2005ish). Without going into the changing fandom opinions about its most prominent board members, I think this is mostly due to the more-accessible LJ. More fic gets posted here, there's generally more discussion - there's generally more of a community feel which can't be replicated on a message board.

(I need to get back into fandom! I only have one Harry Potter icon now!)

[parsimonia.livejournal.com]

I think that because having a livejournal is so multi-purpose, it's more organic somehow to have fandom-related communities that you can join or leave according to your level of enthusiasm for that fandom or community without having to leave LJ.

At the same time, you can have a random thought and post it in your journal as a part of an entry about how the grocery store never sells the kind of rice you love anymore, and friends may respond to either part of your post's content. It's more relaxed, and the individual has more control.

Plus, I think that inevitably, enthusiasm for a fandom may start to dwindle as hype about it dies off, as in HP. I guarantee you it's going to be a much smaller place in a few years.

[farting-nora.livejournal.com]

To not name a name (but you can probably guess) one forum got so authoritative that it got to the point where the fun was gone. All the fun threads were deleted, and people were getting mod smacked left and right for the slightest bit of disagreement or off-topicness.

It was a site that was fun way back when, but around the time OotP came out, just got too many people for the fun stuff to be allowed, then when activity started to decline, the admin didn't reverse any of their old no-fun rules, so it pretty much died.

I don't like the idea of going from an oldbie on one site, to a newbie on another, so I just use LJ now.

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean, and I agree.

[house-illrepute.livejournal.com]

name and shame, please?

was it the CoS Forums?

Mugglenet?

They both grew too big for my tastes, I think.

[farting-nora.livejournal.com]

Sugarquill, actually.

After Book 7, things would have gone better with the declining membership if members had been allowed to start their own topics again, and of old fun threads had been resurrected. It almost seemed like they were trying to kill the site.

[nore-fortuna.livejournal.com]

I noticed a huge decline on TBC in the last couple of years, in our heyday (with less members too) we were averaging 1,000-1,500 posts a month... the last *year* we had 3,500 posts. I just figured it was because our membership in general is younger so everyone is busy with school and work.

[bragg247.livejournal.com]

We've talked about this before, I think - I don't think LJ has caused the decline so much, as there's just been a decline in general. The HP fandom was gargantuan once, but it was never going to be sustainable, even if the series had gone on forever. (Like you, basing this mostly off HP, as the only other fandoms I've been even slightly a part of are for long-dead series, and as such will always remain on the miniscule side.) From what I've seen, the decline's been fairly universal - journals, sites, forums, the whole nine yards. I think some big boards getting too self-important for their own good and driving people away probably helped things along, but not much more than things like the Strikethrough fiasco did.

~bragg247

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I agree that Harry Potter fandom isn't sustainable, although I do think it's probably going to be much smaller eventually. Sort of like when the books first came out, before the rest of the world caught onto the fact that you could harvest your obsession into the net, when there were patches of huge fans here and there, but those patches had a fairly moderate number and all. And I think that eventually it'll be a completely different fandom.

[valerie-valerah.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, that's exactly what happened to me, although mostly because I found LJ more convenient. Instead of having to go to several different websites to check on all of my fandoms, I can just go to my flist and see what's new in my fandom communities. Not only that, but I can also see what's up with my non-fandom friends. I've always been more of a lurker, anyway, and rarely post to discussion threads.

[alexiscartwheel.livejournal.com]

My first foray into internet fandom was almost a decade ago (yikes!) when I frequented a small-ish (at least by more recent standards) but very active X-Files forum. Discussions primarily analyzed the weekly episodes, and I like that their was a ready-made group of people who shared that interest. However, that site is long gone. A forum, sadly, can only last as long as someone's around to keep it going.

My start in the HP fandom was also through forums, at first primarily Fiction Alley. By that point it was already too huge, though. I felt like the only way to feel any actual sense of "community" was to post exclusively in one area of the boards, but that severely limited what topics you could discuss. Yahoo!Groups were also still pretty popular with HP fandom back then too, but the sheer volume of posts was overwhelming to deal with.

I've only been on LJ since September, but I have noticed that fandom on LJ is quite different than on forums. I do miss the built in community that a smaller forum has, but I like that it's easy to find info on a variety of fandoms on LJ. I'm primarily a fandom-lurker rather than partcipant (XF and HP are exceptions, not the rule), and LJ is great for lurking and for finding fanfic. But I still feel like, as far as having focused discussions, like on a particular episode, book, chapter, whatever; it's easier to jump in and participate in a forum than to comment in the personal journal of someone I don't know.

(Sorry for the lengthy comment... you're not the only one with a tendency for tl;dr!)

[jetamors.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I'm trying to think of how to organize my thoughts. I was pretty heavily involved with both fandom and non-fandom messageboarding back in the day, but I haven't frequented them in several years. I basically used message boards for two different reasons: to read fic and to discuss stuff (or to lurk and listen to others, more often).

As far as reading fic goes, almost any format is better than message boards; the colors were usually unappealing, you were forced to scroll through feedback to get to the next chapter, and often if a thread went un-updated for too long, it'd disappear and the fic would disappear with it. These things aren't problems on LJ; thanks to the magic of ?style=mine I can read posts in any format I want, and while fic can be taken down, it has to actually be deleted by someone; it doesn't just disappear with the passage of time.

I think there are a lot of discussion forums still around, but the thing with discussion is that you have to have something to discuss :) HP isn't an open canon anymore, at least not officially, and a lot of the things we used to wonder about have been definitively resolved in canon. But I think things might be different in other fandoms that are still open. I do know of several rather active fandom and non-fandom forums, though since I'm not really into that kind of thing right now, I don't know if they're more active or less active than similar boards in the past. You have to remember also that a lot of the bigger blogs essentially function as message boards with extreme restrictions on new threads (well, and no post count, I guess XD), so there's probably a lot of overlap there, at least in non-fandom circles.

To the extent that there is a decline, I think the reason is probably that nowadays more people are comfortable with opening their own websites and setting up their own forums. In Roswell, which was my first fandom and fairly popular back in the day, there was one major discussion forum and two or three fanfic message boards that I knew of; it was easy to keep up. But nowadays, forums are much more common, and so unless your site draws people in another way, you simply can't build membership.

For one example, I read manga that's been translated by people online--we call it scanlations, because the English text is edited into the pages. (Sorry if I'm telling you stuff you already know.) And most of these scanlation site have a forum attached. Now, the groups that do quick scanlations of popular series', or are the only translators of a popular series, will get a lot of traffic, and because of that they're able to build membership. But the forums on less popular or less active sites are usually ghost towns; there are only so many times you can say 'YAY X', after all, and without five or six people interested in hardcore discussion, things peter out rather quickly.

As people have gotten more used to the Internet and now have the ability to open all these different sites/blogs/LJs/message boards/whatevers, you also get a lot more balkanization, IMHO, and that's one place where LJ (and blogs, for many non-fandom areas) is way superior to message boards. If you're not forced to rub elbows with people you disagree with, you're less likely to have a lot of discussion. This isn't a big deal on an LJ community, because as long as people have it friended they'll be able to see any new posts without going to any effort. But on a message board it's the kiss of death, because without new content, people are just going to stop visiting the site.

[romaine24.livejournal.com]

I'm a forum admin for small fiction site called Cipher. http://www.cipher-wotr.com/forum/index.php


Most of the fiction posted is HP fanfiction, but original fiction and other fandoms are encouraged.

On the forum we have quite a lot of active members. Many of us are fanfiction writers and others original fiction or interested readers. What I love about our site is that it is not just one ship or two. We also are comprised of *het* and *slash* members.

On LJ I've found that most folks stay within a ship or two for HP, and het and slash hardly ever meet. On our forum we discuss more about writing in general, and personal things. Occasionally, our previous owner, Morrighan, will run her writing academy.

So while there maybe a decline in forum and message board participation, there are still a few thriving pockets left. LJ, after all, can be a big scary place for newcomers. There's nothing like joining a forum and having ten people welcome you and ask about what you like to read and write. Any questions you have, you know who to ask, and you know you won't get flamed for it.

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

Your site sounds (and looks) interesting. :)

[romaine24.livejournal.com]

Thanks for coming over. You have some messages :) I warned you we were a friendly bunch.

[jetamors.livejournal.com]

Sounds good! :) The make-or-break factor for most message boards is probably getting and retaining active members, which can be difficult these days, but it looks like you all are doing well.

[quivo.livejournal.com]

Hey, btw, I've been trying to register at the cipher forum, and it looks like there's a problem with the NoSpam verification question or something. It keeps, well, not showing any question, just the field for answering it. I also tried to send an email using the contact form provided, but there's a NoSpam field there (and no question) as well, so...

[romaine24.livejournal.com]

Thanks for letting me know. I've reported the issue and hopefully I will have answer for you soon. My apologies.

[quivo.livejournal.com]

No problem! I hope it's not a hard fix, I can't wait to join :)

[romaine24.livejournal.com]

Our fix-it admin and previous owner Morr said to email her at cipher_wotr@yahoo.com

If she can't fix it right away, she will add you in manually.

Just mention in the email my name and that you were having the problems registering. She already has a record of the issue.

you can always contact me at romaine2424 @ yahoo.com

Hope to see you soon!

[mjcwrites.livejournal.com]

It's Morr, and you're fixed. I think it might be your internet browser--I can see the no spammer question on IE, Avant, and Firefox. Some of the smaller browsers have problems sometimes.

Anyone else has a similar problem, just email the webmaster at cipher_wotr at yahoo.com.

[romaine24.livejournal.com]

As you can tell from her icon, Morr is a goddess we worship *snicker*.

[mjcwrites.livejournal.com]

*snerk*

And ABN, hope it's okay, but I borrowed some of your original post (linked back to you) to carry this dicussion over to my LJ. Good topic.

[tinnidawg.livejournal.com]

I think when the fandom was new, more people were joining in the fandoms and that was when the message boards took off.
Around the third book, fandom was well established on LJ and they also had free accounts.
As the fandom took shape,people started looking for the part they felt was interesting or enjoyed participating in, that is when journals took over from message boards in a way. IMO the younger fans still frequent the message boards.
A total newbie will not be able to find anything much on LJ. They hit the boards and find stories recced on LJ, and slowly they settle down to interatcing with others on LJ as they get to know them.

Surfed in through newsletters

[sylvanawood.livejournal.com]

I've been active in another fandom as both, newbie, moderator and later forum owner and admin. That was in the late nineties, up until 2003. Now I maintain/moderate a HP-related community on lj.

Forums are fun as long as they are small and you know everyone who comes there and discusses frequently. I always liked the possibility to structure a forum, to offer different sections for canon discussion, off topic, fun stuff, fanfic, you name it. But maintaining a forum costs both, a lot of money and a lot of work, and if you see that people either feel entitled to direct the way your forum goes because they donated for its upkeep, or leave because people aren't nice enough/are too sappy... it's not such fun any longer. All forums have to deal with trolls sooner or later, and if you're not careful and react too paranoid, you'll soon have a very restrictive structure which may attract the opposite type of people you actually want to have there. Mods who seem to see the moderator job as a way to enhance their self-worth and start acting up as mini-dictators don't make things smoother either.

Blogs are different. Everyone gets their own journal, has their own friends. Even if you're active on communities, write meta, fanfics: you don't really need them to have a voice. If you disagree with my moderating and bitching about the way you post, you go to your own journal and post it there, complain, and get replies and sympathy. If the stupid archive x doesn't accept your fanfic, you go to your own journal and post it there. You'll have the say, you have a voice and are seemingly independent. It doesn't even cost money, and you get a decent look and functionality for free, or with the plus account, too. I think that felt independence, together with easy use, keeps people moving from forums to blogs. The lj kerfuffles from last year show us the limits of how independent we are, though. It's much easier to maintain a forum or archive than writing your own blogging software, so you're stuck with the ones who do, and they usually want to make money with it, something fandom forum owners seldom want. At least in the sleepy little fandom corner I used to hang out.

Re: Surfed in through newsletters

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

Good point. :)

[thickets.livejournal.com]

I never was active really on any fandom message boards, though I've been in the fandom since 2000. Where I was active was mailing lists. Oh, the days of eGroups. Actually, I think by the time I wandered over to HP, eGroups had already been bought by Yahoo! (I still always type in www.egroups.com though just because).

Just as messageboards seem to have declined since LJ became popular, so did mailing lists. And how. I think that culture is largely dead all across the board. LJ is so much simpler, though for awhile, even though I had an LJ starting in 2002, I was kind of lost about where the fandom had gotten to -- I didn't know the communities, I only knew a few websites. Finally I caught on and for awhile, fandom has been in a real golden age. Personally I think it's just starting to decline all over though. LJ's recent problems have definitely dealt a few blows. I'm not sure where it will move to next, if it has to move.

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

It took a while for me to catch on too. I'd heard of LJ, but didn't realize how big it was becoming. Then a site I was going to had technical problems for about a month, and we all sort of congregated on LJ. (Some of those people are still on my flist.)

I remember egroups! I never went much, but I remember seeing them. Of course, I also remember really, really simple messageboards that actually looked like bulletin boards.

[queenitsy.livejournal.com]

I think it definitely depends on the fandom. Mine (Newsies) is actually pretty huge, for a small fandom (it's got an insane amount of fic on FFnet, for a movie that came out 15+ years ago and isn't a franchise of any sort), but no one has been able to get more than a little pocket of it on to LJ. The main activity is on Yahoo!groups, on a juggernaut, 10-year-old list. The offshoots of that list have all also been on Yahoo!. Nearly all the fic is on FFnet.

A lot of the members, especially the older ones, are *on* LJ, but the fandom itself really isn't here. Because so much of the fic is on FFnet, I think, that's where people go to read it; that's where people review it; because there are pretty much no reviewers anyone else, that's where people post it. The mailing list works similarly.

(Here via metafandom, btw.)

[lennoxmacbeth.livejournal.com]

I kind of take a different stance than many of the posters here. I prefer websites and forums to LiveJournal. I like fic archives where you can go to a person's profile and find a list of all their fics, then click on a fic title and read it.

For discussions of various topics, I like organized forums so that you can read based on one very specific subject, then leave that thread and go to another thread to read about another topic.

That's the main reason I've stuck with MediaMiner.org all of these years. The format is easy to follow, and batshit is at a minimum.

LiveJournal gives me just the opposite. I find myself jumping all over the place; for Pirates of the Caribbean fandom alone I have a buttlong list of comms to scroll through every time I want to post a fic, and each comm has different rules for posting. This can be in the header, this HAS to be in the header, none of this type of feedback, put some out of the LJ cut, put only the header out of the LJ cut...it's a pain in the butt to keep track of.

With a website, feedback is what it is. If someone wants to be wanky because they got constructive criticism, and the feedback was within site rules, not much they can do about it. With LJ, again, the comms all have different rules. Some have Thumper Rules, some have Oreo Cookie Rules, some have ambiguous rules, some have no rules.

With a forum, only mods lock or delete posts. If you're an idiot, it's usually there indefinitely for the world to see. On LJ, people can delete their posts, or FLock posts, or delete their LJ or whatever reaction they think they have to take to make it look like they weren't being batshit.

For a long time, I wondered - due to these reasons - why people claimed to prefer LJ over websites and forums. Then I realized - these WERE the reasons people prefer LJ over other sites. They have near-complete control over their own posts, but can wank enough to be protected from criticism in other posts.

Someone's picking on you? Get a bunch of your friends to run in and post in your defense. Got ridiculed for your fic? Delete it from your LJ and pretend it never happened. No one standing up for you? Make some socks and create your own real-life drama - there's no mod around to lock your thread. Few rules, little structure, and not having to take bruising of the pwetty widdle ego from anybody.

No wonder LJ grew so fast. :/

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

Huh, interesting. I do think LJ allows more batshittery - although I will say, there's definitely been socks and defensiveness on forums. (But even the one I'm thinking of, from what I know, was largely based on LJ. She just took it to forums.) Still, it's certainly easier to have socks on LJ and to get a following of people who only know half the story.

[lavenderfrost.livejournal.com]

I'd be surprised if people weren't choosing LJ over message boards. I did message boards before I came here, now I avoid them when I can because they give me headaches. Lack of threaded comments, the signature issue, the fact that to find the myriad things you may be interested in, you have to search and register at so many different message boards to keep up with it all?

No, thanks.

I'm not big on compartmentalizing - it can reach a point where it's too much of a pain in the ass. You have to find and join fandom-specific boards and slash and het and gen boards and whatnot, and that's just the fannish side of things. I have to hunt down a whole NEW set of sites and boards for my other-than-fandom interests.

Whereas with LJ? I have an account, which automatically lets me keep up with all the fannish and non-fannish stuff I like through my f-list, lets me keep track of my friends AND provides a personal me-space that can be used for fandom and Real Life as I see fit. It's so freeing, because I could never talk very much about what was going on with my life on all the message boards I'd frequent. Their purpose revolved around a specific fandom, but with LJ, RL-talk and Me!posts mixed in with fannish posts are the norm.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Before LJ, all my fandom activity was on messageboards and I far prefer LJ. I like having my own space while also being able to easily interact with others through communities or posts in individual journals. And as others have mentioned, threaded discussions FTW (and comment emails and tracking and all that stuff which is making it even better). And I really love that everything is in one place. Before if you were multifannish, that involved joining a bunch of different messageboards or mailing lists, and now everything is just right there on my flist.

here via metafandom

[gillyp.livejournal.com]

LJ for sure. I run a Sentinel fan-site with message board and it's dead and has been for some time; pretty much everyone who used to participate is on LJ now. I'm thinking of junking the site this year; it's redundant.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

here from metafandom (on LJ!). I must say, with the never-ending rounds of hassle with LJ (and now that GJ is no longer an option) I often wondered if we were right to put so much emphasis on blogging over message boarding.

However, I think lots of people--certainly including me--got hooked on the one-to-many aspect of LJ versus the many-to-many aspect of message boards. Some people do have fandom-only LJs, either for privacy reasons to restrict circulation of their RL identity, or because most of their flist would rather hear them talk about Snape than about dahlias, but by and large, a given LJ, or even a given LJ post, could include a discussion of last night's episode, some fic recs, and 500 words about buying shoes for the kids, or My Boss Is An Idiot Part 709, or Who I'm Going to Vote For or whether the poppy seed muffins were better with or without the cream cheese icing. YMMV whether this is a bug or a feature.

[ancarett]

Here via metafandom and I wanted to thank you for an interesting post. I think that LJ has some technological advantages over discussion boards for fiction discussion. I've lost track of story discussion on boards which don't support threading beyond the top level. LJ's ability to reply to a comment is excellent for organizing discussion!

Anyway, I thank you for bringing up this point. It really got me thinking!

[seleneheart]

Here also through metafandom and I have to agree that threads on forums are confusing. This is so much of a better way to organize the give and take between poster and commenter, or between one commenter and another.

I think LJ works really well for newbies, although I can't say I participated much in the forums, other than as a lurker. (mainly because they were too confusing).

[quivo.livejournal.com]

So, the real problem forums and message boards face in competing with LJ for users is that joining the former is generally harder than joining the latter. The reasons joining a message board is usually hard for new people to do include:

• Actually joining is difficult to do, because all message boards don’t run on the same software or come under the same hat of website styles. If you’re logged in on LJ, you can participate in any smaller community on LJ. If you’re logged in on Wordpress.com, you can participate in pretty much any Wordpress blog, anywhere. But if you’re logged in at FictionAlley.org, you have to log in at Mugglenet to participate there as well.

• Actually joining isn’t an easy decision to make, especially when the prospective user is new to fandom or new to the web or new to anything important about the community. Because the usual basis for such decisions is, well, will I be welcome? Can I join in? What am I joining for? With LJ, there are a thousand and one communities made available to you if you join. With Wordpress, you can comment on most Wordpress blogs, and there are scads of interesting blogs with interesting content out there. With most forums, the forum itself is usually the default available draw. Successful forums are mostly either tied to some other site that supplies the wank or the meta or the fic or the random musings that fire up discussion, OR they create that sort of thing in and of themselves, or rely on other sources to create it for themselves, and do a good job at pointing to those sources and providing a general place to discuss everything. But that is harder to do with a forum than it is with an LJ or even, to an extent, with a Wordpress or Blogger blog.

Of course, once users have joined the community/board, there’s the issue of keeping them there. But that’s more of a universal problem that all websites have in keeping their online communities happy than a dealbreaking sort of thing— which the issue of getting people to join really is. The way I see it, LJ and Wordpress and Blogger are like the internet on a smaller scale, with smaller communities forming within. Forums and boards are therefore competing with mini-internets in that way, just like they would have been competing with stuff like AOL and Compuserve earlier on. And since single sign on not easy to handle for even one huge site, I highly doubt that smaller forums and boards are going to do anything but continue to slowly die out.

[quivo.livejournal.com]

*facepalm* The first sentence should start with "I think" instead of "so". I tl;dr-ed to myself for a bit then condensed for the comment, so. :P

[mjcwrites.livejournal.com]

I've had occasion to give this one a lot of thought, both as a forum member and admin. LJ gives people a community they can control, rather than being subject to someone else's rules and the whim of the moderators and admins. I think that's one of the biggest draws of LJ. Second, novelty. Blogging is still relatively new, and I still remember when it first showed up in one of my forums. Everyone rushed out to get one. It's a networking tool that allows you to reach more people. You usually have to seek out a forum for a certain interest; in LJ you get friends-of-friends-of-friends stumbling across your blog.

I still prefer forums, though. I find the range of topics FAR more diverse, and it's a lot more organized than LJ. I could find the subject I'm looking for in a forum a lot faster than here. I also find it fosters a greater sense of community. Even LJ communities often have pretty strict posting rules; I'm a member of a few where the mod deletes anything that goes off topic. I know the members of my forum far better than I know any of the members of my LJ communities.

I think the pendulum will swing back the other way eventually. Forums are going to have to work harder to earn their members--I speak from experience there--and LJ's going to have to counter, but I don't think forums are going to go the way of the dodo.

[veradee.livejournal.com]

Here via metafandom. I've never posted to messageboards but was a member of several Yahoo groups and still are of two or three.

Originally, when I discovered LJ, which was admittedly rather late, I thought that it was a great idea, becuase I regarded it as a kind of network. I always thought that the point was that - at least in theory - everyone would be able to read everyone else's posts, comment and maybe become friends.

But lately I've seen more and more people f-lock their LJs. It's their prerogative, and I can see their point if they post a lot of personal stuff, but I've even seen people f-lock their LJ who only post fandom stuff. In my opinion that's completely counterproductive to the idea of LJ, though. On top of that many of these people manage to give no hint about what their posts might be about. Let's say I read a fic somewhere and like it a lot. Therefore, I want to check out that person's LJ, expecting to find more fics and other fandom stuff etc. But if the LJ is f-locked and I'm given no information about the owner, why should I even friend it? Who knows if all the posts aren't about the writer's sick puppy and adulterous husband?

Therefore, LJ seems less and less like a community to me, but rather like a myriad of small entities, many of which clearly meant to be closed and cut-off from the rest of the world.

[tunxeh.livejournal.com]

Others have mentioned the nonlinear ordering of comment threads within a post, but I think the linear ordering of posts on one's flist is also important. It makes it easier to catch up, gradually, when for whatever reason one falls several days behind (as I have, now): one can just read with ?skip=... for a while, gradually reducing the skip until caught up, rather than having to remember what threads one was interested in and find one's place in each of them. Additionally, it's much easier to create a new post on livejournal than it is or was to create a new thread on Sugarquill.

[xueyie.livejournal.com]

Here via

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I won't say the message group is replaced entirely as at least several of my fandoms rely on them, which are quite active.

As a lurker, I will say LJ is more lurker-friendly as you can specilize, instead of scanning all. There is also a more private space for personal squee or rant. Moreover, it allow syou to handle multiple fannish involvements in one interface, which is very convenient. That is why I am mainly lurking on LJ now.