I miss LiveJournal.
Not necessarily LJ itself, but the culture of it. The precursor to full-on blogging, it was blogging for our friends, but with a community attached. Friends could follow you, and you had the option of creating filters so that only a subset of your followers could see certain posts. You could join interest groups. Everything was chronological because back in the day, it hadn’t occurred to anyone to mess with this.
The next step was individual personal blogs. A lot of my friends had one, but a lot did not. There was an awkward split between bloggers and LJers, which resulted in crossposting from my LJ to my actual blog, in the hopes that my entire intended audience (my ACTUAL FRIENDS) would see it, regardless of which platform they used. Blogging also had the disadvantage of having everything be publicly available to anyone. Sure, you could lock down your blog and require your friends to create an account and log in to read it, but let’s face it, that’s a pain in the ass for all concerned, especially in the time of “account fatigue” where people are loath to create yet another account on yet another site, even for a friend. Believe me, I tried. ? It was the early days of blogging and people were still afraid of posting too much personal info online, so I tried to friends-lock this blog, but what actually happened was that I’m pretty sure only about 3 of my friends had the time/energy/mental bandwidth to actually create an account in the first place. This ALSO blocked my feed from the handy-dandy RSS readers most people used so no one was alerted if I made a new post unless they actually went to my blog and logged in. Ain’t nobody got time for that, so I can’t blame ’em.
I miss Google Reader.
All the blogs I followed, both personal and “professional”, in one place for easy reading from any device, in chronological order. It was easier for me, psychologically speaking, to go to a single site and read all my blogs within it, rather than opening up a bookmark folder and clicking on each one individually.
It’s definitely a chicken-and-egg scenario, but at the same time as we lost the tools for easy personal blogging and blog reading, there was a big shift from long-form blog posts to short Facebook posts and shares.
Facebook is pretty much the only contact I have with some people these days. Like many of you, I am trapped there. Facebook has SOME of the features of all of the above formats. You can filter posts so they are only seen by a select few, you can join interest groups, and it’s a single feed of all your friends in one place.
But our posts are slaves to the algorithm. Filtered or “friends only” posts are given less importance than public posts, it seems, so that even your friends who are ON that list might not see them. Or if they do see them, it could be served up days later instead of in a chronological timeline. (But don’t worry, they liked that meme I shared, which shows we were both on FB, but only being shown what the algorithm thought was most important at the time). Following groups or pages is no guarantee you’ll see any of their content at all, unless you force the algorithm by immediately interacting with several of their existing posts to “tell” it that you want to see that content. (because joining a group isn’t enough to let it know you want to see posts from the group, apparently).
What’s the solution? Who knows.
Writing a long-form post has been made fairly unattractive, by way of getting little to no feedback when your friends don’t even see it, don’t see it for days, or simply because it appears lower in their feed than a quick post that’s short enough to have a pretty, colourful background. (Don’t get me wrong, I actually love those backgrounds. But they provide a very real pressure to keep posts short and easily digestible both because a) only short posts get to have one and b) I swear posts with background get a slight advantage in the algorithm). Often, because of our ever more busy culture, people might see your long post, but feel like they “don’t have time” to commit to it right now, especially since the post is snipped for length. People can’t even make an informed decision about whether they have time or not when they can’t see how long the post might be, and expanding it to see feels like committing, so they scroll past without expanding it. Often intending to come back later to read it, but we all know that’s not what usually happens in the fast-paced world of social media. (People genuinely forget, and also FB assumes that since you’ve already “seen” it, it both doesn’t have to show you again AND it thinks you were uninterested in that sort of content because you didn’t interact with it.)
What’s the solution? Who knows.
I’ve seen this discussion go round and round for years. No one has found a viable solution yet. New social media platforms tend to fizzle out before a critical mass migration occurs (either because the platform itself sucks, has some scandal, or just because it’s so hard to break into the niche that Facebook occupies), and it’s so hard to pry people off of it. I could leave Facebook for another platform at any time I wanted. We all could. As long as I was ok with mostly speaking to myself, since only a tiny percentage of my friends would see what I post there. Facebook, for all its flaws and reasons for me to leave, still serves the purpose of actually connecting me with my friends. In order for any of us to move, we have to convince all the people we care about to move along with us. Even this whole long post is just a venting of vague frustration.
