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“It’s not the end of the world, but I can see it from here.”
-- Patent Ochsner
LJ started it's major overhaul last week, and, to say the least, the new design was not received with a lot of fanfare. At the center of the storm is the removal of subject-headings for comments. I seldom use them myself, but I liked having the option, and the new move seemed more like a downgrade rather than an upgrade to me. As I read more on the controversy, I got the sinister impression that this big change is about the Russian owners deciding to make LiveJournal more theirs. They paid for the website and own it, so why shouldn't they play with it as they please, instead of letting it continue to bear so much of its original American heritage? I was starting to think it may be time to move my main blog, after all.
However, reading more on the matter, I realize that my paranoiac streak was showing. Denise at Dreamwidth gives us some good discussion about what is going on. I suppose one shouldn't be surprised that LJ is just doing what it can to survive in the new social media environment, trying to attract new users.
_ _ _
Seriously, I think the major source of the problem here is that LJ is going in a very specific direction and use case with this redesign, whereas previously it was very wide-open. People got used to the wide open and resent it going away. If people came upon a site that looked like the LJ redesign with no history of what it used to look like there wouldn't be a problem: the new comments redesign looks like it was aimed to be as simple and visual as possible, which is probably done to make things easy for new users.... But longtime users are only seeing the loss of functionality, not the actual design, and they're scared the direction the design shows the site is going in is not a direction they're interested in at all.
[Denise then goes on to argue that the redesign is probably not an attempt to mimic Facebook.]
Amusingly enough, when I was still working for LJ, it was always "LJ is trying to be MySpace!" *G*
I don't think LJ is trying to be "like Facebook" at all. (At most, they're looking at Tumblr.) The thing is, long-style updates are very far over on the chart of "how much user engagement it takes to involve them" -- I can't find the chart I'm thinking of to show you, but basically, the more effort it takes from someone to start participating on the site, the less likely they are to come back. (The Forrester engagement ladder is not what I am thinking of, but it is close.) LJ (and other blogging platforms) are very high on the "how much effort and engagement it takes", and that's why blogging-only platforms are generally stagnant in growth but platforms that enable more micro-updates (Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk, Google+, and yes, even Facebook) are more successful: they make it easier for people to participate.
(It's called the Law of Participation Inequality and it's something that every site frets about.)
So, since it's long since been shown that one of the major, if not the major, draws and unique features of LJ (in terms of one of the major attractors of both users and readers to the site) is communities, and one of the major things to do with communities is to comment in them, I'm about 85% sure that this update was intended to simplify the commenting process in order to make it more alluring for people who are in that 90% in the Law of Participation Inequality, the people for whom "make a journal update" or "make a community post" is way, way too far over on the engagement chart, but "make a comment" wouldn't be.
People see "oh my God, Facebook!", but it's really nothing like Facebook at all. Facebook is just the leader of the low-engagement social media services right now, so anything that improves low-engagement interaction is going to read to the audience as Facebooky. It really, really, really isn't, though! The changes LJ is making are quite definitely on the track to enable and streamline low-engagement interaction, but they're nothing like Facebook.
...Sorry, you probably didn't want an impromptu lecture on social media theory! But it annoys me whenever people immediately jump to accusing a site of wanting to be like another site whenever they make a change, because the changes are often nothing like that other site, it's just that both sites (and, pretty much, every web 2.0 site out there) are using the same social media theory underpinnings to guide their product development.
[She goes on to give us more general discussion, including some interesting notes about LJ's history, as she used to work at LJ.]
aving subject lines on comments is actually fairly unusual if you look across various platforms, and the reason for that is, everything you can take out of the process reduces the chance people will look at it, say "eh, too complicated" and wander off. (It's known as 'decision fatigue': if you offer people too many things they have to do/add/choose/decide between, they're statistically more likely to say "fuck it" and do nothing. It ties in with low-engagement vs high-engagement.) Somebody in charge of the design most likely decided that comment subjects weren't in use often enough to justify the added "cost" to user engagement -- not that they weren't used at all, just that they weren't used enough in the target demographic/audience/use case to justify the penalty to user engagement. The threading changes, almost certainly the same thing: the whole "use direct comment link to re-parent the thread" is not very well known at all outside the circles of people who use it all the time, and the changes do make it easier to walk up the comment tree and see things above the comment you're replying to without reloading the page.
Mind you, this is all speculation from my knowledge of the industry; I don't know what the decisionmaking process is over on LJ. But I get so :( when I see people railing about them being incompetent. They really, really aren't. They may have made some bad decisions here and there, everybody does from time to time (we've had some scorchers) and I don't think anybody would dispute that, but they're not stupid or incompetent; they're just designing for a different use case, and making decisions about tradeoffs.
And there are a lot of different use cases for LJ. Historically speaking, LJ was designed to be very flexible and the userbase responded by using it very flexibly, and because of the network effect everybody only sees their own use case and that of their friends/communities -- and they think everyone uses LJ like that, and don't realize that if they went out about any more than 2 degrees of separation they'd find how people were using LJ unrecognizeable. In 2006 I sat down to make a list of all the different use cases for LJ, and I came up with over two dozen before I threw up my hands and gave up. From a site owner/decisionmaker standpoint, that's very cool in that it proves your product is adaptable and it's awesome to see people using it in awesome ways, but it really ties your hands in how you can adapt and improve the product, because everything you do is going to break something for someone and you have to make tough choices about where you're going to draw the line and say "this use of our site is very nifty, but we can't design with it in mind".
Which, for a large site like LJ that has to not only make payroll but also recoup initial investments and answer to venture capitalists and outside investors, is going to be in a much different place than a smaller site that's entirely user-supported like DW. We have a huge advantage (from one point of view, mind you, although it obviously happens to be the point of view we espouse) in that we don't have to justify ourselves to outside forces like that. It means we don't have the financial resources LJ has, nor the usage -- because, again, sites that concentrate on the high engagement end of things are always going to be smaller and grow less quickly -- but it also means that we don't have to court the high usage and high metrics that outside investors and advertisers want to see, and therefore we can have a little bit more wiggle room in how we design. (Obviously we want to be easy to use, and we have a lot of usability projects in progress because of it; we've also been talking about lots of ways to improve our low-engagement "routes in" without compromising the existing high-engagement offerings or affecting the site culture too badly. And of course it would be nice to have ten times the budget we have! But as long as we're achieving a certain number of paid accounts, we can keep operating, and we are hitting that number.)
It's all a tradeoff: if we wanted to have the resources to become a superstar in the Web 2.0 world, we'd need to put a lot more attention into attracting low-engagement use, and we'd probably have to go for outside investments in order to have the resources to support things. Which is all well and good for many startups! It's just not what we want for Dreamwidth, which was always envisioned as being the neighborhood corner store and not the Wal-Mart superstore. I mean, I totally wouldn't turn up my nose at that ten times our budget, but I wouldn't want it to come at the expense of what makes DW special.
-- Denise at Dreamwidth
_ _ _
So, I am left feeling more assured about LJ's future, and that it is not just going to become a Russian toy with Americans being made to look in from the outside. Though, I do miss the old days, back before Brad even started accepting advertising dollars, when LJ was part of the Wild West that was the Internet at the turn of the century, as free as you can be. Now, we are well on the way to being part of corporatized culture. It probably won't be long before I have to do away with my "Mr. Saturday Night" posts, as I am just too un-Disney, too much of an outlaw.
-- Patent Ochsner
LJ started it's major overhaul last week, and, to say the least, the new design was not received with a lot of fanfare. At the center of the storm is the removal of subject-headings for comments. I seldom use them myself, but I liked having the option, and the new move seemed more like a downgrade rather than an upgrade to me. As I read more on the controversy, I got the sinister impression that this big change is about the Russian owners deciding to make LiveJournal more theirs. They paid for the website and own it, so why shouldn't they play with it as they please, instead of letting it continue to bear so much of its original American heritage? I was starting to think it may be time to move my main blog, after all.
However, reading more on the matter, I realize that my paranoiac streak was showing. Denise at Dreamwidth gives us some good discussion about what is going on. I suppose one shouldn't be surprised that LJ is just doing what it can to survive in the new social media environment, trying to attract new users.
_ _ _
Seriously, I think the major source of the problem here is that LJ is going in a very specific direction and use case with this redesign, whereas previously it was very wide-open. People got used to the wide open and resent it going away. If people came upon a site that looked like the LJ redesign with no history of what it used to look like there wouldn't be a problem: the new comments redesign looks like it was aimed to be as simple and visual as possible, which is probably done to make things easy for new users.... But longtime users are only seeing the loss of functionality, not the actual design, and they're scared the direction the design shows the site is going in is not a direction they're interested in at all.
[Denise then goes on to argue that the redesign is probably not an attempt to mimic Facebook.]
Amusingly enough, when I was still working for LJ, it was always "LJ is trying to be MySpace!" *G*
I don't think LJ is trying to be "like Facebook" at all. (At most, they're looking at Tumblr.) The thing is, long-style updates are very far over on the chart of "how much user engagement it takes to involve them" -- I can't find the chart I'm thinking of to show you, but basically, the more effort it takes from someone to start participating on the site, the less likely they are to come back. (The Forrester engagement ladder is not what I am thinking of, but it is close.) LJ (and other blogging platforms) are very high on the "how much effort and engagement it takes", and that's why blogging-only platforms are generally stagnant in growth but platforms that enable more micro-updates (Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk, Google+, and yes, even Facebook) are more successful: they make it easier for people to participate.
(It's called the Law of Participation Inequality and it's something that every site frets about.)
So, since it's long since been shown that one of the major, if not the major, draws and unique features of LJ (in terms of one of the major attractors of both users and readers to the site) is communities, and one of the major things to do with communities is to comment in them, I'm about 85% sure that this update was intended to simplify the commenting process in order to make it more alluring for people who are in that 90% in the Law of Participation Inequality, the people for whom "make a journal update" or "make a community post" is way, way too far over on the engagement chart, but "make a comment" wouldn't be.
People see "oh my God, Facebook!", but it's really nothing like Facebook at all. Facebook is just the leader of the low-engagement social media services right now, so anything that improves low-engagement interaction is going to read to the audience as Facebooky. It really, really, really isn't, though! The changes LJ is making are quite definitely on the track to enable and streamline low-engagement interaction, but they're nothing like Facebook.
...Sorry, you probably didn't want an impromptu lecture on social media theory! But it annoys me whenever people immediately jump to accusing a site of wanting to be like another site whenever they make a change, because the changes are often nothing like that other site, it's just that both sites (and, pretty much, every web 2.0 site out there) are using the same social media theory underpinnings to guide their product development.
[She goes on to give us more general discussion, including some interesting notes about LJ's history, as she used to work at LJ.]
aving subject lines on comments is actually fairly unusual if you look across various platforms, and the reason for that is, everything you can take out of the process reduces the chance people will look at it, say "eh, too complicated" and wander off. (It's known as 'decision fatigue': if you offer people too many things they have to do/add/choose/decide between, they're statistically more likely to say "fuck it" and do nothing. It ties in with low-engagement vs high-engagement.) Somebody in charge of the design most likely decided that comment subjects weren't in use often enough to justify the added "cost" to user engagement -- not that they weren't used at all, just that they weren't used enough in the target demographic/audience/use case to justify the penalty to user engagement. The threading changes, almost certainly the same thing: the whole "use direct comment link to re-parent the thread" is not very well known at all outside the circles of people who use it all the time, and the changes do make it easier to walk up the comment tree and see things above the comment you're replying to without reloading the page.
Mind you, this is all speculation from my knowledge of the industry; I don't know what the decisionmaking process is over on LJ. But I get so :( when I see people railing about them being incompetent. They really, really aren't. They may have made some bad decisions here and there, everybody does from time to time (we've had some scorchers) and I don't think anybody would dispute that, but they're not stupid or incompetent; they're just designing for a different use case, and making decisions about tradeoffs.
And there are a lot of different use cases for LJ. Historically speaking, LJ was designed to be very flexible and the userbase responded by using it very flexibly, and because of the network effect everybody only sees their own use case and that of their friends/communities -- and they think everyone uses LJ like that, and don't realize that if they went out about any more than 2 degrees of separation they'd find how people were using LJ unrecognizeable. In 2006 I sat down to make a list of all the different use cases for LJ, and I came up with over two dozen before I threw up my hands and gave up. From a site owner/decisionmaker standpoint, that's very cool in that it proves your product is adaptable and it's awesome to see people using it in awesome ways, but it really ties your hands in how you can adapt and improve the product, because everything you do is going to break something for someone and you have to make tough choices about where you're going to draw the line and say "this use of our site is very nifty, but we can't design with it in mind".
Which, for a large site like LJ that has to not only make payroll but also recoup initial investments and answer to venture capitalists and outside investors, is going to be in a much different place than a smaller site that's entirely user-supported like DW. We have a huge advantage (from one point of view, mind you, although it obviously happens to be the point of view we espouse) in that we don't have to justify ourselves to outside forces like that. It means we don't have the financial resources LJ has, nor the usage -- because, again, sites that concentrate on the high engagement end of things are always going to be smaller and grow less quickly -- but it also means that we don't have to court the high usage and high metrics that outside investors and advertisers want to see, and therefore we can have a little bit more wiggle room in how we design. (Obviously we want to be easy to use, and we have a lot of usability projects in progress because of it; we've also been talking about lots of ways to improve our low-engagement "routes in" without compromising the existing high-engagement offerings or affecting the site culture too badly. And of course it would be nice to have ten times the budget we have! But as long as we're achieving a certain number of paid accounts, we can keep operating, and we are hitting that number.)
It's all a tradeoff: if we wanted to have the resources to become a superstar in the Web 2.0 world, we'd need to put a lot more attention into attracting low-engagement use, and we'd probably have to go for outside investments in order to have the resources to support things. Which is all well and good for many startups! It's just not what we want for Dreamwidth, which was always envisioned as being the neighborhood corner store and not the Wal-Mart superstore. I mean, I totally wouldn't turn up my nose at that ten times our budget, but I wouldn't want it to come at the expense of what makes DW special.
-- Denise at Dreamwidth
_ _ _
So, I am left feeling more assured about LJ's future, and that it is not just going to become a Russian toy with Americans being made to look in from the outside. Though, I do miss the old days, back before Brad even started accepting advertising dollars, when LJ was part of the Wild West that was the Internet at the turn of the century, as free as you can be. Now, we are well on the way to being part of corporatized culture. It probably won't be long before I have to do away with my "Mr. Saturday Night" posts, as I am just too un-Disney, too much of an outlaw.
