"It's maybe kind of like being nostalgic for high school. You were all trapped in this horrible situation together and that's a powerful force in developing community."
This has always been pretty much my thought on the matter. Being nostalgic for LiveJournal is just like being nostalgic for high school. You remember the good times (but not the bad), you had a lot of social connections (because at that age, *everyone* has a lot of social connections), etc.
This is substantiated by the average age of LiveJournal users during the time period -- late teens and early 20s, when we were all in high school and college.
The problem with LiveJournal is less one of LiveJournal, and more one of *growing up*. The problem isn't that LiveJournal went away -- though I'll admit that some people might have changed their behavior because of that -- it's because we grew up and got jobs, at least, as a group as a whole. (The median age of LiveJournal users went up by about 6 months every year I was on the service and they still published stats -- though younger people were still joining, there was definitely a specific age bias towards being on LJ.)
It's a shame that as we grow up, we lose connections with people we cared about in the past. I think the reason that this is less obvious now than it was a decade ago is that Facebook -- and all of the other social networks to a lesser extent -- keep pushing that information back in front of us. We don't forget about people, drift away, and move on: as long as we had their email, or we shared a social group, we will always find them on Facebook, or they will find us, and we'll still stay connected in various ways. Whereas before, you might only hear from most of these people at your high school reunion, now, you constantly know what crop they're looking for in Farmville.
I'm not going to say that this is necessarily the entire situation -- certainly, LJ's changes accelerated people running away from it -- but I know that for me personally, the thing is that I value my privacy more now than I did a decade ago. I'm wantonly open with most of my life -- but I've become mature enough and sure enough in my thoughts that I no longer want to open every thought I have up to another 150 people to tell me what's wrong with it or second guess me; I no longer want to engage in the active debate about what I'm doing with my life, and some of the other people that I know well enough feel the same way, though I bet they wouldn't articulate it that way.
I think that's actually a big reason why a lot of people made parts of their journal history private, or deleted their entire journals entirely. From a more adult point of view, the things we shared on LiveJournal aren't things that we would share today; they weren't things that we could stand behind a decade later and say "Yeah, posting that on the internet to my closest 200 friends was a great idea, and I'd do it again today."
Anyway, I mostly just wanted to say that I think you're right: LJ was what it was because of who we were at the time. And a big part of why it went away is because *we grew up*. It's not the only part, and it certainly happened faster for other reasons, but no massive changes have taken place to the infrastructure since 2007ish -- nothing much more drastic, in reality, than occurred prior to that. Complain all you want about management not caring, management *never* cared :) What changed, more than anything else, is *us*.
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syntheid
no subject
Date: 2012-04-18 11:19 (UTC)This has always been pretty much my thought on the matter. Being nostalgic for LiveJournal is just like being nostalgic for high school. You remember the good times (but not the bad), you had a lot of social connections (because at that age, *everyone* has a lot of social connections), etc.
This is substantiated by the average age of LiveJournal users during the time period -- late teens and early 20s, when we were all in high school and college.
The problem with LiveJournal is less one of LiveJournal, and more one of *growing up*. The problem isn't that LiveJournal went away -- though I'll admit that some people might have changed their behavior because of that -- it's because we grew up and got jobs, at least, as a group as a whole. (The median age of LiveJournal users went up by about 6 months every year I was on the service and they still published stats -- though younger people were still joining, there was definitely a specific age bias towards being on LJ.)
It's a shame that as we grow up, we lose connections with people we cared about in the past. I think the reason that this is less obvious now than it was a decade ago is that Facebook -- and all of the other social networks to a lesser extent -- keep pushing that information back in front of us. We don't forget about people, drift away, and move on: as long as we had their email, or we shared a social group, we will always find them on Facebook, or they will find us, and we'll still stay connected in various ways. Whereas before, you might only hear from most of these people at your high school reunion, now, you constantly know what crop they're looking for in Farmville.
I'm not going to say that this is necessarily the entire situation -- certainly, LJ's changes accelerated people running away from it -- but I know that for me personally, the thing is that I value my privacy more now than I did a decade ago. I'm wantonly open with most of my life -- but I've become mature enough and sure enough in my thoughts that I no longer want to open every thought I have up to another 150 people to tell me what's wrong with it or second guess me; I no longer want to engage in the active debate about what I'm doing with my life, and some of the other people that I know well enough feel the same way, though I bet they wouldn't articulate it that way.
I think that's actually a big reason why a lot of people made parts of their journal history private, or deleted their entire journals entirely. From a more adult point of view, the things we shared on LiveJournal aren't things that we would share today; they weren't things that we could stand behind a decade later and say "Yeah, posting that on the internet to my closest 200 friends was a great idea, and I'd do it again today."
Anyway, I mostly just wanted to say that I think you're right: LJ was what it was because of who we were at the time. And a big part of why it went away is because *we grew up*. It's not the only part, and it certainly happened faster for other reasons, but no massive changes have taken place to the infrastructure since 2007ish -- nothing much more drastic, in reality, than occurred prior to that. Complain all you want about management not caring, management *never* cared :) What changed, more than anything else, is *us*.