author_by_night | La Mort de Livejournal

To elaborate on the final answer (I wish some things hadn't changed, but I've accepted it as is), the parts I wish hadn't changed were the people themselves. People on LJ used to show a hell of a lot more respect for one another. I miss that.

Perfectly stated! I completely agree. There's a lot less respect these days.

When I first started using LJ, it was mostly to communicate with people I had met through Harry Potter fanfiction and RPG boards. Eventually, I switched from using LJ for fandom to using LJ to make friends and talk about my life. My RPing became private between just a few people and we only discussed or worked on that through AIM, or other instant messaging. But even those slowly died as real life got too busy.

A few years ago I tried to get back into the Harry Potter fandom on LJ, by joining one of those huge sorting communities. I loved doing the activities and getting involved again, but I only did this for maybe a year before the drama just became too much for me, and I left. I just don't have time or energy to let my pleasure time be filled with meaningless arguing, you know? I don't use LJ for fandom at all anymore. I'll use tumblr instead (which is not without it's problems, but it's so much easier to avoid).

My journal at first documented my own personal life and journey through depression. It is now much more. It is a lifeline to friends I have made over the years and many of whom I now know in person. It is a community of friends for me, no more no less. Cosmetic or coding changes don't bother me. LJ has had its ups and downs but it is still the place I consider my online home after almost 11 years. And thankfully, I still have a core group of people I started with who are quite active. A website can shut down at any time, even a place like Facebook! Talking constantly about the anticipated death of Live Journal does nothing to keep it alive

With Livejournal getting new owners and the owners actually listening to users over the last few weeks, I am optimistic.

Also I love livejournal for its ability to discuss. I invested in a permanent account years ago. I can't imagine really shifting 100% elsewhere.

Also I love livejournal for its ability to discuss.

This is really where I find joy in Livejournal. It's difficult to follow long text-based conversations on Tumblr, and 140 characters just don't cut it for discussion.

This. If LiveJournal has one thing going for it, it's the long-form discussions. I don't think there's another platform out there that's so well-tailored to it. I'm on Twitter, but I hate when people try to discuss difficult, nuanced issues on there: it's about the worst place to do it. Facebook isn't much better, and it always seems like a busy, noisy place. Tumblr, being designed for images/photos, just can't hack it: it is SO HARD to keep a discussion going on there, and it can clog up your feed. I mean, bad stuff happens on LJ (some people are just determined to be jerks), but the design fosters discussion.

Who knows? Maybe LJ will have a revival as people realize that there's a social site out there that's designed for in-depth discussion.

Sometimes I think it would help if I just went and looked for new friends on LJ. There's still people here, just not everybody I remember.

I don't want to go with Dreamwidth because I hate the way they handle friends. I loathe Facebook for several reasons, although I do have an account. Twitter doesn't allow deep thought to be expressed well. LJ really has what I need; I just wish more people were still here.

I think what's been more difficult in recent years is that it's harder to find good LJ friends to replace the ones who have fallen away/moved on. Of my current friends list, probably half currently post. Years ago, I used to find friends by reading friends' friends pages, but a lot of people seem to post friends-only now.

The health communities and meeting similarly afflicted people was the reason I joined, and I have met most of my closest friends here, real soul-mates even though we live on all points of the globe.

I'm in so many communities here, and keep making new friends and that is why I love LJ and plan never to go.

I joined for the community of fandom, and the interaction, which I don't feel like I am getting on tumblr. LJ used to be liek a club meeting or something. I don't know I knew names, I knew people.

On tumblr I just . . . even people I knew from LJ change their name and I can't keep anyone straight and it's more like going to a convention. I have fun, but I don't feel like I'm making a lot of lasting connections and the fandom discussions just are not the same. :/

On tumblr I just . . . even people I knew from LJ change their name and I can't keep anyone straightstraight

THIS!!! All of my original Tumblr friends were friends from LJ, but I don't really know who any of them are, anymore. That is one of the features of Tumblr I hate most...especially since I will often go for months and/or weeks without logging in, so I miss those changes.

It's all very impersonal, for the most part. And there is no good way to catch up on someone's posts even if you could ID them because there are too many, and people often don't post about IRL in the same way because of the public nature of it. So I'm often sad that I don't know what is happening anymore with so many former friends.

Twitter is better in that regard at least, because tweets can be private/f-locked, essentially... /rant

I can't even remember what I originally used LJ for. I know I made this journal in 2003 and it was under a different name (AWritersFantasy) when I initially registered it. I..think I just vented about stuff happening in life? But not the way that I do today. Not even close, ha. Honestly, I wish I had done a better job of it back then, because I don't even remember a lot of things from high school and it would be nice to have some kind of recollection of it.

It was my freshman year of college (fall 2004) that I started really joining communities and interacting with others and adding more people. Since then I've been hooked.

That's... eerily close to how it was for me! I used it more as a teenage angst space, then the summer I graduated high school (2004) I got a new LJ and, like you said, really got into communities and stuff. It helped that a fandom website I went to shut down temporarily for repairs, so there was a bit of a mass friending.

Edited 2014-06-14 12:10 (UTC)

I've mostly stopped talking about fannish stuff on LJ altogether, as my fannish posts have been met with a deafening silence for some years now. I limit fannish conversation to Dreamwidth (where a lot is still going on) and Tumblr (which is a bad platform for communication, but at least people there will talk to you) now.

I'm afraid I'm getting the same deafening silence over at Dreamwidth. Tumblr is awful for in-depth conversations...but that seems to be where everyone is.

LJ used to be the place I came for squee in multiple fandoms, support from my friends (both RL and online), and exploring fanworks (mostly videos and fic.) Now... well, it's a ghost of its former self, and I'm really sad about that. Most of my friends (again, both RL and fannish) migrated to other platforms when the first round of changes arbitrarily came down, and it's been dwindling ever since. :(

I keep going mostly because I'm too lazy to set up another place, and am worried about sinking too much time into a more addictive social media site.

I can't believe I've been using LJ for over ten years omg. I went through lots of period of inactivity in the last few years, mostly because many of my friends who used it in college a lot have moved on. I guess I didn't? I dunno. I've always used it to connect with other fans, though I never really got too into communities outside of icon making groups. Mostly I would find new friends with similar interests and we would do things like this, discuss amongst ourselves.

You can't really have these kinds of discussions on any other social media platform. Even most blogging sites, like Wordpress or Blogger, the comments are designed to be left, but you don't really see a lot of interaction between the blogger and commenter. And, of course, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr seem to promote a post it and move on sort of lifestyle.

I feel like this past year a lot of people have been coming back to LJ, those that know of it's power, and I'm happy to have an active flist again!

I still can't believe I'm using LJ after 6 years, and I mainly use it to write day to day and musings here and there. Tumblr is where I got for fandom stuff.

I lurked in fandom for years, and then joined LJ when I found out about it from authors on sites like Checkmated and Phoenixsong. I created a journal mostly so I could comment and not be anonymous, or read higher rated fanfic that was posted to friends only. I still read and write fanfic as time allows, but I didn't expect to make true friends, some of whom I have met IRL, and many more that I hope to meet IRL. Now, I don't leave LJ because I want to keep in touch with friends. And I don't post my fanfic anywhere else. :)

The main reason why I've switched to DW as my main journal is because of how buggy LJ has become. The last few years it has seemed like it's down/sluggish more often that it's not. Also, there's more fannish discussion going on DW than on LJ, so my f-list there is more active.

I'm pretty monofannish, and my fandom's canon is all but closed (there's a tie-in comic, but everyone hates it). Fic and meta dried up, and the majority of people I used to talk to left LJ or moved to other fandoms. :/

I answered "other" to two questions: The first one is what I mostly use it for, which has changed a bit from all fandom stuff to a mix of fandom and other, more RL related things (like Photo Scavenger and Monthly Diary Day). All my friends are still people I met through fandom. Maybe of them, however, have moved on to other fandoms in which I have no interest, so I don't follow them as closely.
And for other fandom platforms - I have a DW journal which is usually a mirror of my LJ (automatic cross post) and I have FB - which I use for RL stuff and other hobbies. I am on there much more than I am on LJ because I have a wider range of interests to follow on FB.

I came to LJ because of a fandom thing (the Sunnydale Socks RPG) but I joined and stayed because it allowed me to connect to a bunch of real-life friends. This was back in the day before Facebook, and aided by the fact that the town I went to school in had a large and active community here. But then Facebook came along and real-life relationships started to drift over there but I stayed here because even in the early days Facebook gave me a creepy vibe.

So for a long time I used LJ for myself as a diary and occasional publishing platform (not fan fiction, but how-to guides and art projects and stuff like that). And now I've finally started using it to connect with new people and new communities.

I honestly like most of the changes that've been made to LJ in the decade-plus that I've been here, I just wish that they'd been handled in a better manner.

I've had problems being online - some RL, some medical (which I suppose is RL). But it bothers me that more and more people seem to be leaving. And there seems to be so much less discussion of shows. I do like the writing but even that is slowly dying off.

I joined LJ back in 2003 when the cool kids started mentioning it on forum posts. It began so I could read more fandom stuff and fic, but my own LJ was pretty much always my day to day ramblings.

Today I read my flist every day, comment when I can but post less often on my own LJ(mainly because RL keeps getting in the way and I sort of got out of the habit). I do join in memes, and post in a couple of communities too.

I have a couple of blogger blogs specifically on craft that I use for showing and talking about specific projects, and I use facebook for RL friends and family, but neither fill the hole that would be LJ if it went.

People comment on my blogs, but I have to put a new comment if I want to reply and I never know if they have seen it - most times I hear nothing back.

Facebook is useful for viewing family photos posted by relatives (I don't put pictures of people on my own account) but while it has it's place to moan about the football score or parking tickets, it isn't as satisfying as a full blown conversation here.

And I don't get twitter, or tumblr at all. Both seem a bit pointless to me. #WTF?

I have been here a long time and hate seeing it die slowly and painfully. I have made good friends here and will be here till it shuts down. That's just me.

I joined LJ for the fandom stuff (discussion and fic). Nowadays, it's more where I connect with friends I've made over the years, some of whom I've met in RL.

There is still fandom discussion and fic posting on LJ, but it's died off a lot. Being monofandom, I'm back to posting on forums (which I don't like that much) and I now post fic on A03. But LJ is still a big part of my life. I'll be here until it disappears, or I do.

I joined LJ mainly for fandom - especially the discussions. It used to be possible to have long and stimulating conversations about canon, fanon, fic recs, the challenges of writing. There no longer seems to be much appetite for it. I tend to accuse Tumblr of destroying our collective fannish attention span, but who knows really - perhaps it's bigger than that.

Whatever the cause, LJ fandom activity has shrunk in every way possible. It's not just there are fewer participants, but the posts and fics are markedly shorter, there are fewer (and shorter) comments to them, and far fewer comment sub-threads. I used to love the rambly chats (remember when commenting would take place over several days?), so for me it's dispiriting.

Anyway, I still socialize on LJ to some degree, but even that has died down a lot. I've gotta admit I'm side-eyeing my paid account.

Edited 2014-06-15 19:59 (UTC)

Came here from a link off

eilowyn's post and I figured what the heck, I will comment because the reason I left LJ is so radically different from everyone's here.

I left because I'm a WOC and it was really hard to find other fen of color on LJ. We had one community that wasn't very active and it covered all sci-fi media, not just one. I would go through my f-list and it was very white. A lot of the critical thought or discussion would completely ignore race. People would very much stay within their little fandom circles, all parroting the same opinions, and I got tired of it. It felt like a circle-jerk, excuse my language.

At least on Tumblr it feels more democratized. My dash is filled with so much amazing commentary on race and socioeconomic status and gender and so much more. I see posts I would have never seen because someone reblogged it. Even if I follow someone, get to see stuff they reblogged from the people they follow and so on. I'm exposed to so many more opinions and viewpoints than I ever was on LJ.

I should add too that Tumblr has plenty of extensions that make being in fandom a lot easier. I don't have to worry about someone posting something triggering in a community I follow like I do on LJ because my Tumblr Savior can block anything with my trigger words on it. There is one community I had to stop following on LJ because one user always posted stories with graphic depictions of sexual assault. So part of me also left LJ for my own mental health.

I sort of think of it like this (and it might upset people). LJ is sort of like high school. There are cliques and popular people and people tend to stay with other people who validate their opinions or have similar views. Tumblr is like college where you are thrown into situations with people who have all kind of viewpoints and nobody cares if you are popular, nobody knows how many friends you have, and you learn so much more about the world.

But again, this is just my personal experience and how I feel about it. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings because I did have good times on LJ, I loved my time here, but I never felt like I truly belonged.

Edited 2014-06-18 04:44 (UTC)

Reading my f'list now, because I've missed the life updates on LJ of a friend who isn't on Facebook. I logged into my e-mail, found out she was in town, and then checked her LJ for updates on her life.

I feel bad that while I've been saying I hate Facebook, for the past few years I've gotten used to it. I have to admit the interface is nice, easier to use than LJ and Twitter. Everyone seems to be on Facebook these days. On LJ the only updates I usually see are from a vintage ads community. I should probably take that off my reading list.

When I log into Livejournal, when used to Facebook, I have to find myself remembering that I can't "like" posts. I won't be getting a red update about someone tagging me on LJ.

I originally joined in 2009 because a friend from another place had an account, but my friend and I fell out and haven't spoken since, and through reading fic through HPFF, I found all the HP comms and just became hooked! I've made so many friends for life here, I have so many close friends and want to stay in touch.

I want to be here as much as I used to be, I really, really do, but I'm struggling to manage my time now my offline life is continually changing in an ever positive way, and I'm becoming more and more busy.

I miss LJ and the people here so much. I miss my friends and I miss reading and writing. I'm really hoping to be able to start to manage my time better like I used to be able to do, because I want to have both my busy offline life and my online life too.

I guess the adjustment will just take time, unfortunately. But ultimately, I'm never going to go anywhere! I won't leave LJ, I'm just busy at the moment while my life sorts itself out. Eventually I want my LJ to be as active as it was! Maybe not participating in 50 fests a year anymore, but a few at least, and posting regularly!

Edited 2014-06-21 17:04 (UTC)

I used to post about everything I watched/listened/read entertainment wise, and some personal stuff, but now I just post (and it's mainly just weekly reviews) about one show because I have regular readers of those reviews because so many people have migrated away from LJ. But I just don't get the discussion on other platforms. And you can't separate those that you are friends with and aren't on tumblr (where you can get discussion). I mean anyone can comment on your posts and they can be (and often are) filled with negativity and nastiness. It's just not fun. So I just deal with the fact that I no longer have the same fannish experiences as I had before.

Hi, can we link this at metanews?

Sure! :)

I came for fandom, I am still doing fandom, but a lot of my flist are now more like old friends who have moved on to different fandoms. Sure, there are still some people who are both but the line is more divided between friends and fandom than it used to be.

I like AO3 for archival purposes but I don't think of myself as using it the way I use LJ, following fests and individuals. My Tumblr, Twitter, and FB are all not-fannish (or at least not strictly HP like my LJ is) though FB especially I do have friends who I know from fandom but we don't get into the nitty gritty of writing or slash or whatever there.

The reason I do stay here (as opposed to Tumblr especially) is for the people. Friends, discussions, real human interaction. I could just write and throw my fic into the wind but I like the social aspect.

As for LJ drama, well, I've certainly had my fair share but I've (mostly) learned that one doesn't have to attend every argument they are invited to. ;)

I joined LJ for fandom and I still write reaction posts, but the fandom discussion around them is mostly absent just because my friends now watch different shows if they're on LJ at all, and there are so few people in general it's hard to add new fandom friends.

When I attempt meta, nobody much responds anymore; I think we've moved apart about what we're interested in. When I write about real life, I still get interaction, and since FB is very public, LJ is the place I can talk about things I don't necessarily want to share with everyone I've ever met.

I have a Tumblr, but I prefer it for visual imagery, and think it's awkward as anything for discussion. I don't post or reblog fannish material -- I use it for other things -- though I do follow some fannish Tumblrs.

Edited 2014-06-26 09:32 (UTC)

I said "other" for what I still do over here. Basically I still come over here for a few comms that I'm active in and to check the journal of a few friends who are still here. I used DW primarily, but, tbh, even that not so much.

The other thing that I don't think was mentioned in the poll but which does have an impact is the device on which I use the internet these days, i.e. my smart phone. I find the LJ/DW site clunky to use on my phone so I don't. I only come on these sites when I'm on my cranky old laptop. The rest of the time I'm on AO3 and Tumblr, both of which work well on my phone.

What I miss most about LJ are the people - it hit a brilliant sweet spot for both personal connections between a RL but geographically spread friends group and fannish connections. People have fallen away, changed to posting on FB or on Tumblr, and while I am active in both places, neither feels like home, the way LJ did in my first few years here.

Social platforms are always going to be largely fuelled by the people on them, but none of today's offer the opportunity for filtered and detailed discussion that LJ did back in the day.

Something I want to note on my answers: I think a major problem on this site is getting to know what others do aside from big communities or friends circles.
Social capital as a sorting factor for like the Recent Entries page works well for the Russian community as they're pretty active. The first 10000 people in the ratings list all have a social capital number greater than 10, even more have it. So the stock from which to pick for preparing such a site is very large.
But in the English speaking community, it's only between 1000 and 1500 people. Even if there are 20000 being still active, you only get to know what a very small amount does.
And I think that's a big problem.
(You can do lots of efforts in using the Home-site and using Non-cyrillic - for the "Popular Entries"-feature - as well as Cyrillic rating - for the "Recent Entries"-page -, but that requires you have a lot of spare time and a lot of boredom.)

La Mort de Livejournal

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