no power in the 'verse can stop me

[ursamajor]

In the beginning, you could bookmark things to your web browser, and lo, it was okay. Because even in the early, heady days of the World Wide Web, there were enough websites out there that you couldn't be expected to remember them all.

And then there were search engines, so when your hierarchical bookmark folder system exploded out of sheer unwieldiness, you could just depend on a search engine to find what you were looking for, most of the time.

And then there was the vastly underappreciated Delicious, which let you bookmark things to the cloud, tagged for easy reference and rediscovery, and mostly shared in an awesome and unobtrusive way that meant you could often crowdsource information on a given subject in a way that you can't do with search engines, thanks to all of the metadata appended to Delicious bookmarks.

(And then Yahoo listed Delicious for sunset, AVOX AVOS bought it and eviscerated it, and everyone in my network fled to Pinboard or gave up on social bookmarking. It's still criminal what Yahoo had, and then trashed, in early December 2010. The Library of Congress archives tweets; this crowdsourced database directory of metadata-tagged encyclopedic knowledge deserved the same preservation. Yes, I am still saddened and furious, a year and a half on.)

And all the while, the popularity of various social media streams like Twitter and Facebook kept growing - more places to discover all sorts of useful information. But more often than not, these useful nuggets of information were buried in private or semi-private notes that were difficult if not impossible to bookmark (particularly with Facebook), let alone be able to search for after-the-fact. Neither of these tools come with particularly incisive or inclusive search functions.

Enter Greplin. (Referral link: right now, I have the free account, which lets you unlock a limited number of sources; if you join through me, I get to unlock more sources for free. :) )

Awhile back, in mid-February or so, I had the ambient awareness that we were in the heart of Maine shrimp season up here in New England; given that I follow a couple of hundred local restaurants on Twitter and Facebook, I would have been hard-pressed not to note that every Cambervillain chef and then some were dishing up wild Maine shrimp specials. So when I was at the grocery store and saw that they had wild Maine shrimp on special, you bet I picked up a pound of 'em and headed home to do my research.

Which meant that I typed "Maine shrimp" into Greplin and received the following results, personalized to my various reading lists:

Most notably:
- East by Northeast had a Maine shrimp congee.
- The Blue Room fried up their Maine shrimp with jalapeno butter.

All this was crossing my mind at the same time I'd opened Google Reader (looks like the promise of HiveMined is dead, so GReader is the best alternative for now, even with no sharing) and spotted Jaden Hair's recipe for skirt steak with kimchi butter. Which inspired me to make wild Maine shrimp juk with kimchi butter:

And it was damned good, even though the kimchi butter scared hyounpark at first. (He does not tend to trust me with kimchi anything ever since I brought him home a Lil' Kimchi, aka a grilled cheese, kimchi, and sweet sesame black bean sandwich. PROOF IT EXISTED.)

Moral of the story: GREPLIN IS MY NEW BACKUP BRAIN AND IT CAN BE YOURS, TOO.

*

Tangent: Even if Greplin doesn't do the sharing/crowdsourcing that was the heart of Delicious, given the relevant privacy concerns, I am okay with this. I still miss old Delicious, though, for that reason. Pinboard has been pretty good; it's similar enough to Delicious that my workflow shift was minimal, and it's had the benefit of active development for several years. And Maciej has been incredibly responsive. But it's not quite the same ethos as we'd established on Delicious after five years, and the community fragmented and is just starting to come together and adjust to Pinboard. And Pinboard is still more privacy-oriented at heart rather than crowdsourced-knowledge-oriented.

The situation resonates strongly with me because in the past couple of weeks, I've seen several people post something along the lines of "I miss what LJ used to be." Where all of your friends posted regularly in one spot (and generally trusted that their content was relatively safe, unlike how people post to Facebook today); actual life updates instead of Facebook/Twitter soundbites or nothing at all. Now granted, in the LJ heyday, there was plenty of meme-posting and such, don't get me wrong. And it's not like people on Dreamwidth aren't posting long thinky things or memes or everything in between, because we are.

It's just - it's been almost two years since Dreamwidth came out of closed beta, and despite everyone believing that Internet Time is a seriously-sped-up thing, in terms of sustainable community building, two years is no time at all. I look at the changes in the technical infrastructure and I'm amazed and proud and think Dreamwidth has a long-term future. But the emo I keep seeing is like, "We built this community with our friends on LJ and then people drifted away from it to Twitter and Facebook and Dreamwidth and I Just Want My LJ Community Back and we may have been trying to do this community building elsewhere for a couple of years or else we may have been trying to re-establish it on LJ and WHY DON'T WE HAVE OUR COMMUNITY FEEL BACK YET? and WHY WON'T MY FRIENDS JUST POST WHERE I WANT THEM TO POST?!"

I don't have an easy solution or a quick fix, sadly. And there are definitely some days I wish Dreamwidth was as popular as Tumblr:

And that my friends were still webjournaling at the volume and depth they were a few years ago. They're not; it doesn't mean there aren't awesome new people, new friends that are. I appreciate both progress and nostalgia. I just want it all and I want it now, and so do you.

Comments

[ectothermic]

I am always super interested in new stuff like this to add to my workflow, so thanks for pointing it out. I am going to give it a try and see if it's worthwhile. It's true that as much as I love Pinboard it's not great for digging into a topic and seeing what other people have written about it. As you say, although a lot of people have taken up Pinboard it's not a community endeavour so you don't get as much of that sharing of tags between people and back and forth as you used to.

I've always been the kind of person who is almost too quick to cut off ties and move on in life, so I have zero nostalgia for LJ and Delicious. 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. Of course I'm sympathetic and don't really have a great solution. I'm on absolutely everything except Plurk for a long list of reasons, so there are some people I just don't see any more because they're only on Plurk. But I also only keep up with undergrad friends on facebook, so those who don't go on there often I don't see either.

I have no idea where I'm going with this so I'm going to stop typing now.

[ursamajor]

Oh god, I feel the same (re "I had no idea where I was going with this") typing the last half of the entry - I posted the first half by itself, and then I thought about how aaaaactually, that kind of ties in with all the FEEEEELINGS about wanting the best of both worlds (the progress of the shiny new, the established community of the trusty old) and then I spewed. Heh.

Heck, re Pinboard, I think I need to do some sort of PSA reminder/educational post where I implore everybody to make public their networks of who they follow and to make their bookmarks default/majority public. The people I follow are pretty good about tagging, but not everybody's opened up their network or made themselves findable again, and how I got some of my best info from old Delicious was following complete strangers whose bookmarking interests aligned similarly with mine based on tag search.

And yeah, I maintain presence a lot of places - I still crosspost to LJ because there are a few people there; my Tumblr is mostly Instagram crossposts; I check Twitter quite frequently, and as wary as I am of Facebook I still check it a whole lot because a lot of people I care about don't bother with anything else. I love that there's such a vast ecosystem of things to do out there, but sometimes it's kind of exhausting to keep up with, even with self-declared amnesty and being able to blame missing things on Facebook on them dicking around with their Magickal Algorithm yet again. (I think that's part of why I just haven't bothered with G+; that's one too many "We're going to show you what *we* think you want to see" pseudomathematical mess to keep up with.)

[jddunn13]

It's still criminal what Yahoo had, and then trashed, in early December 2010. The Library of Congress archives tweets; this crowdsourced database directory of metadata-tagged encyclopedic knowledge deserved the same preservation. Yes, I am still saddened and furious, a year and a half on.)

Hear hear! That was a big wakeup call for me on entrusting my core content and workflow to free online services. GReader getting gutted was the other shoe dropping. You just can't count on free services unless they're at or near the core business of a moneymaking company. Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and GDocs are probably safe, Flickr may not be, etc. But, of course, the "core business of a moneymaking company" part also tends to degrade these things as community tools, raises all kinds of privacy and IP concerns, and so on.

I'd like to move more core functions back in-house to my own hosting and then selectively push stuff out to social media for sharing, but the software options aren't great, and my server admin skills and discipline have atrophied over the past few years. I feel kind of stuck at this point.

WHY DON'T WE HAVE OUR COMMUNITY FEEL BACK YET? and WHY WON'T MY FRIENDS JUST POST WHERE I WANT THEM TO POST?!"

I don't have an easy solution or a quick fix, sadly. And there are definitely some days I wish Dreamwidth was as popular as Tumblr:

Yes, this. Tumblr has prety much replaced LJ for me as a friend-based scroll of what people I like and admire are thinking and talking about. But, it's a vastly inferior tool in so many ways, and most especially for community building and conversation. I wish Dreamwidth or something like it had won out, but most of my community ended up on Tumblr, and so there I am, despite all the downsides and frustrations.

I signed up for Dreamwidth, but really only the fannish part of my friendslist moved there, and since I didn't come to LJ through fandom, and have never really been an active participant in that community (though I did much appreciate the exposure to it that the LJ gave me) I never got a foothold in Dreamwidth. If some of the other people would come back, it would be great, but as long as it's primarily a fannish project, it's not going to do it for me. That doesn't mean it won't still be a successful project for the community it was designed to serve, but I think you need cross-pollination, scale, and network effects to build a truly great and sustainable online community/platform. Just not too much, or it gets too big and is unsustainable financially or spins out of control socially. This stuff is really hard, which is probably why all of our favorite things have been so fleeting.

Also, thanks for the Greplin tip. That's something I've had an inkling of the need for for quite some time, but I had no idea it actually existed yet. I probably won't be able to live without it within a month.

[crschmidt.net]

"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*.

[jd]

Plus G+ has the inherent risk factor of fucking up your email and calendar and RSS and any other info you might have stored there...