I think it’s me who has changed. I used to have a livejournal. I was part of a clique (or more accurately, a few cliques). I had friends lists that were exclusive and frequently pruned.
At some point, I stopped being as social online. I’m not sure when it was. I don’t remember any defining moment. Gradually, the hyper-personal details filling those posts stopped being interesting to me. I know it happened with my online friends as well, as they started dropping off as well. Maybe I stopped because other people did and my friends list just became sparse and not very interesting. I don’t really remember.
I remember when blogging was all the rage, as this post mentions. Even at that point, I was burnt out on it and thought to myself “there’s no way this will become the next thing.” In some ways I was right: a lot of people tried to write long form posts about things they thought other people might find interesting. A lot of people found out how very difficult that is, though, and stopped. Blogs are still a thing with corporations and other businesses, theoretically to give you a peek behind the scenes, but more realistically as another marketing tool.
The personal stuff I remember was engaging and no-holds-barred. But that stuff was also behind a screenname (and for closer online friends, a first name). Your offline/in-person friends often didn’t see that stuff. It made everything more intense.
I think after writing this, it may have just been the popularization of social networks that killed that stuff. Former communities on livejournal moved on to myspace or facebook as group pages where people used their real names. It was no longer -._.xXx.WaRHaMMeR.xXx._.- or some delightful guy who went by DeoDoRaNT, but Jim Wilkins and Tom Smith. And they didn’t post the same funny stuff because now their other circles of friends, their formerly-offline friends, saw that stuff they were posting. And really, it’s just not as funny when the mystery around “who IS that guy?” is completely destroyed by the fact that you can see him, you know his full name, and you know he drives a 1997 Honda Civic in the town of Maplewood, NJ.
Another perspective regarding comments. You have to be a pretty big fish to attract enough comments that having a comment section is worthwhile. Outsourcing comments to another site like reddit solves a multitude of problems. You don’t have to worry about moderating or correcting all the bullshit yourself; there are plenty of others to help. (To say nothing of treading perilously close to the dreaded censorship line.) One doesn’t necessarily have to participate, though. I may be active on HN (and to a lesser extent, Twitter) but fuck me if I’m going to wade into a thread about one of my own posts.
And big picture, I find the whole blogosphere conversation thing kind of exhausting. Response and counter response. Probably for the best that that model died out.
I think it’s me who has changed. I used to have a livejournal. I was part of a clique (or more accurately, a few cliques). I had friends lists that were exclusive and frequently pruned.
At some point, I stopped being as social online. I’m not sure when it was. I don’t remember any defining moment. Gradually, the hyper-personal details filling those posts stopped being interesting to me. I know it happened with my online friends as well, as they started dropping off as well. Maybe I stopped because other people did and my friends list just became sparse and not very interesting. I don’t really remember.
I remember when blogging was all the rage, as this post mentions. Even at that point, I was burnt out on it and thought to myself “there’s no way this will become the next thing.” In some ways I was right: a lot of people tried to write long form posts about things they thought other people might find interesting. A lot of people found out how very difficult that is, though, and stopped. Blogs are still a thing with corporations and other businesses, theoretically to give you a peek behind the scenes, but more realistically as another marketing tool.
The personal stuff I remember was engaging and no-holds-barred. But that stuff was also behind a screenname (and for closer online friends, a first name). Your offline/in-person friends often didn’t see that stuff. It made everything more intense.
I think after writing this, it may have just been the popularization of social networks that killed that stuff. Former communities on livejournal moved on to myspace or facebook as group pages where people used their real names. It was no longer
-._.xXx.WaRHaMMeR.xXx._.-or some delightful guy who went by DeoDoRaNT, but Jim Wilkins and Tom Smith. And they didn’t post the same funny stuff because now their other circles of friends, their formerly-offline friends, saw that stuff they were posting. And really, it’s just not as funny when the mystery around “who IS that guy?” is completely destroyed by the fact that you can see him, you know his full name, and you know he drives a 1997 Honda Civic in the town of Maplewood, NJ.Another perspective regarding comments. You have to be a pretty big fish to attract enough comments that having a comment section is worthwhile. Outsourcing comments to another site like reddit solves a multitude of problems. You don’t have to worry about moderating or correcting all the bullshit yourself; there are plenty of others to help. (To say nothing of treading perilously close to the dreaded censorship line.) One doesn’t necessarily have to participate, though. I may be active on HN (and to a lesser extent, Twitter) but fuck me if I’m going to wade into a thread about one of my own posts.
And big picture, I find the whole blogosphere conversation thing kind of exhausting. Response and counter response. Probably for the best that that model died out.