The Decline of Livejournal

[krowface]

Once universally praised for founder Brad Fitzpatrick’s open-source platform and commitment to a free userbase—he once vowed that LiveJournal would always have basic (non-paying or ad-supported) accounts—LiveJournal is known these days mostly for being popular in Russia (the Russian name for blogging is “LJ.”) and Singapore, and for housing gossip blog Oh No They Didn’t.

What happened?

source: www.dailydot.com/culture/livejournal-decline-timeline/

Comments

[richaarde.livejournal.com]

It's simple - LJ is good for being long-winded about things to a smaller, closer group of friends.

Most people don't think that way. People tend to have a quick thought, and want to disperse it to everyone they know. FB and Twitter are both better at that.

[ir-g0d355.livejournal.com]

1) LJ makes business and site design changes without notifying or listening to its userbase.

2) When the userbase responds with outrage, LJ fails to acknowledge or respond in a timely manner; when it does respond, it often acts like nothing is wrong or fails to apologize.

Know who else does that? Facebook. They don't ever roll back the changes though. LJ has declined but I don't think this article has captured the reasons. To put it broadly, the internet has evolved since the time of LJ. I don't think LJ did anything wrong. I just think people are relieved that they don't have to say a whole lot anymore to be part of the technoculture. Some of us still do, though. Some of us hold on to a certain sense of nostalgia. The trend though, points to people preferring even twitter to facebook because that's even more of a one line sentence description. Tublr also. People like to avoid wordy dialogue wherever possible. The decline in people's ability to read and write English probably factors in a lot.