Where have all the postings gone... long time passing...

[laurion]

So, forgive me if this is a dumb question, but where did everyone go?

A forced change to livejournal (friend's page no longer accepts custom styles) has pushed me to go to each of the friends that I follow and resubscribe to their individual pages.

And I keep seeing a wasteland.  So many last updates that say things like '2010', '2009', '2007'.  Where did everyone go? I see posts from the same dozen people on a regular basis, but there used to be a lot more people out there.

So where did everyone go?

I know about Twitter.  I'm there, but the posts are short and stream by. Don't get me started about Facebook.  The drek drowns out the good stuff all too often. And too much is stuffed onto one page.  Tumblr? Pinterest? Pretty, but mostly empty from what I've seen.

Where do people go to actually.... write? Journal to their social network? Connect?

And I know, for the longest time I've written on my own wordpress blog and crossposted to LJ (and now... FB too.  Not that I go there myself).  So I'm one of those people who is 'not there' in some sense. [EDIT: Hah!  Something since my last posting on 2/21 has broken crossposting!  What the F! Yay!]

I accept that my social life isn't what it was. But looking at the data while redoing the LJ connections... man, it really isn't what it used to be. And a lot of it used to be keeping connected to people on LJ in a way that I just don't feel connected on other network sites.  And these days I'm not feeling connected to many people at all.  So here I send out a post into what seems to be an ever fading arena, knowing that the dozens of people who haven't updated in five years aren't going to see it, just as I don't see anything from them.

Part of me wonders when a social network connection is so underutilized that it should be pruned entirely.  I've readded these dead connections.  IT doesn't cost me much at all.  No posts means nothing shows up in my feeds. No words require me to triage their value and exert neurons to process them. And if someone does come back, the connection is still there.  But perhaps there is an unseen, unknown weight and drag from these old connections.

I feel like I've missed some secret.  That all these connections have been moved somewhere else, and I'm the one who wasn't told about it, or doesn't know how to get to them.  Is there some way to make Facebook functional? Or have people given up on the concept of social networks entirely? Did people move to some site that died or never thrived (xanga, myspace, Google+) and then never have the heart to try again? I know, again, I'm asking this of the wrong audience, because the only audience that will see it is almost definitionally the wrong one.  Am I echolocating across a featureless plain? Only getting back what I already know to be there?

Comments

[jducoeur]

Keep in mind, these sorts of social-network generational transitions aren't new, even if the term "social network" is. The first I went through this was in the mid-90s, when Usenet went through much the same experience. In the late 80s, *every* geek with an Internet connection was active on Usenet; ten years later, it was a ghost world.

My sense is that geekdom has fragmented, especially into two camps that can be roughly described as "FB sucks, but it's where everyone is" and "FB is EvilDieDieDie". A lot of the latter are using G+ and other platforms, and some are still here; the former, by and large (and I do think that even among geeks it's the majority) have given in and are mostly using FB.

As for what they do with in-depth, LJ-style postings -- well, most folks just don't. Really, that sort of writing is a learned behaviour, and many folks were never entirely comfortable with it. The ones who *need* to write are, again, either still here, or have drifted to other blogging platforms. (Of which, heaven knows, there are scads.)

And that cuts to the heart of it: LJ *as a social network* has largely collapsed. It's still a better-than-average blogging platform, which is why I not only still write my own stuff here but host the Querki Dev Blog here. But note that the latter will be moving to Querki itself sometime in the next year -- I fully expect that I'm gradually going to push the system to the point where it is *better* for discussion than LJ. And I cross-post all my LJ posts to FB, to notify people that I've posted.

Basically, LJ stood still. Aside from twiddling at the edges, it hasn't evolved much over the past decade, while the rest of the world has moved on. Facebook got much, much better at being a social network than LJ ever was, and other blogging platforms are beginning to slowly lap it in that regard. And so the community has fragmented.

Frankly, I mourn it mostly because the *correct* replacement hasn't arrived yet. What I want is a properly open social network that isn't owned by anybody -- an Internet to Facebook's Prodigy. And then I want an excellent, open blogging service built on *top* of that. That combination ought to provide the best of both worlds, but somebody has to build it. (Frankly, one of my top motivations to get Very Very Rich from Querki is to be able to do so...)

[laurion]

Oh, absolutely. As someone who still reads a few newsgroups, and logs into an IRC channel or two, and keeps an AIM account active, I'm not unfamiliar with communal drift. It's why I start by asking where people have gone, so I might have chance to follow.

So for now I continue posting to my own hosted WP and cross posted to the major places people may have gone, LJ, FB, Twitter, G+. Not crossposting to LinkedIn though, even if the crossposting tool does offer that as an option.

I've heard that Tumblr is picking up steam as a longform posting site. We'll see. It at least has a good mobile tool.

Oh, and when you move the dev blog into the tool itself, expect me to look into making an RSS feed of that too... I may not know what the 'right' places to post or to network are, but I certainly know the 'right' way for me to receive.

[jducoeur]

Yep -- being able to generate RSS is one of the prerequisites to me moving the dev blog, along with several enhancements to the conversation system. (In particular, moderation.)

Indeed, RSS is going to be one piece of a *major* Querki enhancement called "What's New", probably coming late this year. This will be a mix-in App that allows you to turn *any* Model into an RSS source. The blog use case is the simple one. Much more interesting is, for example, my Recipe Space -- it'll be able to easily generate an RSS feed of new Recipes.

Originally I thought What's New was just RSS, but it turns out to be much bigger than that -- it's basically the same module that will drive, eg, posting to FB, G+, Twitter and other sinks. Basically, it'll be a general notion of "this Model is a source of 'news'", and you can configure where it gets published to. I believe it's going to be crazy-powerful.

And wow, talk about coincidence -- as I previewed this comment, LJ just kicked me over to a new UI. We'll see what *that* is like...