Comments on: Freedom to be obnoxious?

By: Andrew Ducker

Andrew Ducker — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:23:07 +0000

It is somewhat isolated, I agree – but there are a fair number of bloggers who use it.

If you look at http://jwz.livejournal.com (for instance) what you have is clearly a blog.

It’s sad that it’s ceased growing though. Too many owners that haven’t known what to do with it. Although getting The Independent to use it as their commenting solution was a stroke of genius.

By: Mathias Klang

Mathias Klang — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:39:27 +0000

But what’s the point of commenting if there is no chance that Fry will see the results. I am disillusioned and may turn off the internet altogether.

By: Andres

Andres — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:50:05 +0000

openID has been enabled, and I’ve added threaded discussion, thanks for the suggestions Andrew.

By: Andres

Andres — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:05:23 +0000

Hi Andrew,

LiveJournal is a different thing altogether, it is more like a forum than a blog. LJ works best as a community, it is practically built with forum-like characteristics, such as threading and identities. While it has a large user base, it IS a closed community. My impression is that LJ is not growing. Although it has been around for 10 years, it only has 1 million active users (users who have been active last month):
http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml

I have never been tempted to join LJ because while I think that it is a great community, my aspiration is for a wider audience, even if this detracts from participation.

Good idea about OpenID, will look for a plugin.

By: Andrew Ducker

Andrew Ducker — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:55:22 +0000

Here, on the other hand, nobody can respond directly to my comment (all comments are to the post), anyone can be as anonymous as they like (you don’t even have OpenID set up) and there’s no way to tell if you’ve responded to my comment, so I have to bookmark this page and return to it at some point in the future to check. That’s hardly encouraging people to leave comments :->

By: Andrew Ducker

Andrew Ducker — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:53:26 +0000

One of the reasons I like Livejournal is the sense of community it fosters, and that people _do_ comment and have conversations in the comments.

I believe that this comes from:
1) People having usernames, so you can learn to recognise who you’re talking to.
2) Strong tools for posters to control who can post on their journal.
3) Threaded comments, so that many conversations can take place without getting in each other’s way.
and 4) email notifications when someone responds to your comment.

all combine to cause a thriving comment culture. I tend to think that any post that doesn’t have comments on it has failed in some way.