Hello? Is anyone still here?

[lostcarpark]

I find myself using LJ less and less, and the arrival of G+ which seems to be growing into the type of community I used to find in LJ once upon a time, makes me wonder if that's the natural successor to LJ.

The other option seems to be Dreamwidth, which seem to be doing some very neat things, and seem to be more interested in developing a community than LJ have been for quite some time. However, I can't help wonder if they're just trying to plug the holes in a sinking ship.

I recently realised that most of my LJ activity has been deleting anonymous spam comments. LJ seem to have given up trying to prevent spam. There used to be a tickbox on the delete form for "mark as spam". That has disappeared, suggesting they have no intention of doing anything to curtail spam. The simple solution for me is to disable anonymous comments.

Looking back, it's a bit of a pity. I remember the science fiction community we used to have on LJ, and that has all but evaporated. We have bits and pieces of it on other social networks, but it seems much more fragmented, and too easy to miss interesting stuff. It would be wonderful if we had something like that again.

Comments

[viclet.livejournal.com]

Still here, but only tend to post to communities these days, and comment on other people's posts. I guess I ought to write up my activities more, even if only for me, but I'm too busy doing them!

[dougs.livejournal.com]

I'm here, I post and/or/comment occasionally, but I endeavour to at least skim-read my entire friends-page.

It's my principal RSS aggregator.

[nwhyte]

A lot of the standard chatter has migrated to Facebook and Twitter. It's a shame since those are much more ephemeral but they require less energy for a lot of people.

Myself I'm going to shift to Wordpress on my own site, cross-posting to LJ, as soon as the everything is in place.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

For what it does, LJ surpasses all other platforms I've encountered (haven't really investigated Dreamwidth).

It is suited to medium to long form content.
It builds a personal archive for each user.
It keeps things chronological.
It archives things WELL, so it's intuitive to find old entries.
It threads comments.
It gives you a logical feed of all those you're interested in one long list.

Blogs do all but the last one. Twitter, G+ and Facebook fail horribly at the accessible archives.
Twitter is not about long content at all, and the others don't seem to excel at it - eg, try putting something up with multiple links and pictures so everyone can share it easily.

But none of this is any good if people don't post or read it, and it's diminished somewhat by the new owners' obsession with celebrity, stupid stories about goats, and pointless ephemeral "gifts" in the form of gifs to clutter your info page.

[flick.livejournal.com]

There used to be a tickbox on the delete form for "mark as spam".

It's now a whole separate button: instead of the red X, click on the red crossed-out-circle next to it.

[mortonhall.livejournal.com]

Most of the hard core users I know are either migrating to posterous or wordpress. Apparently it is possible to import your whole LJ to Wordpress (sans pictures). Of course, there are folks who took the leap to dreamwidth sometime ago.

I'm going to miss the community that was formed here but can see the writing on the wall. People are leaving in droves.

It was nice whilst it lasted.

[etherealfionna.livejournal.com]

I'm only here today because I saw this cross-posted on G+, and decided that it was about time I did some spam busting.

The community that I used to enjoy here is pretty much gone, very few people that I actually know post regularly, and I hate the feeling of talking into a vacuum. I do *miss* it, though, Facebook and G+ don't take its place and I've never really got the hang of Twitter.

[davesangel.livejournal.com]

I tend to just read LJ these days rather than post anything on it, don't really have the time for anything other than email and (occasionally) Twitter.