There's value in the exercise

[volterator]

but a problem I have when re-reading this livejournal's older entries is a need to constantly edit them in order that they might make any readable sense. I swear to god that I've been unable to put a working, parse-able sentence together for my entire life, but at least I seem to have developed the ability to edit old ones into working shape by now. I'm glad that this livejournal exists and glad of what I wrote in it when I did keep up with it, and equally glad for the little snippets of interaction it has preserved which I drop on to when re-reading forgotten entries. I liked LiveJournal, and it was a solution to a number of problems that needed solving for me back in 2005 when I started using it. LiveJournal improved my life more than any other website, something which I don't think I can claim for any website at all since. I miss living with an internet on which something like this makes sense, but you can't go back I suppose.

All of which sounds eulogistic, but isn't intended to be; I bought a new computer about 9 months ago and one of the first things I did was make sure my browser was permanently signed in to this site. I still read LiveJournal daily, even if it is mostly syndicated feeds that I read on it these days. Something I can't escape is the feeling that mostly what actually gets written for LiveJournal these days is about LiveJournal and the unlikelihood of still being on it. I have a nostalgic fondness for it and the main thing which that nostalgia is driving is a desire to see a newer social internet take over from this awful, alienating, overly-busy, glib mess that has settled over it. Facebook has a couple more years of relevance left in it, and when it has fucked off, fallen off and myspaced into obscurity the thing that replaces it had better be better, because whatever we're trying to achieve with social networks was more apparent to me ten years ago than it is right now, and in that time I've only gotten more sociable. It really is the social web that has gotten shite. When was the last time you heard someone say that they met someone online from something other than a dating site? I don't think it happens as much, but if it does please tell me how it's done. These days I imagine that more face to face relationships started as a result of LinkedIn than the parts of the web dedicated to recreation. I'm sure it's great to be able to find a swingercize club on Facebook and rock up with your best jig trot the very next day and all but where do you go if you want to just talk to random people about whatever is on their mind? Answers genuinely appreciated because it used to be something that I did on a day-to-day schedule.

Anyhow, hello.

Comments

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

Yup. Agree with all of the above.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Amen!

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

Frankly I'll be expecting you to breakdown and start posting again now. Good to hear from you anyway.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I agree with the general drift of this, but I definitely know people who've met recently on the comments thread of a mutual friend's Facebook post.

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

You're right that you can connect with people in that way, I did recently have a conversation (on a Facebook video of Penn and Teller making fun of anti-vaccination arguments, posted by someone I met through Livejournal,) with two men who insisted that vaccination was a public health menace, that you should accept a mother's word as proof that it was the vaccine that caused her child to show signs of autism, and that believing in scientific consensus was a logical fallacy. Although these are obviously not people I'd want to spend time with it was a livejournal-like interaction. These people weren't random as such, they were just the weird acquaintances of a woman who knows a lot of New Age, paranoid idiots. I get the feeling that if you were to read a random Facebook profile and ask to be friends with the person that almost everyone would dismiss you as spam or a sexpest, whereas other social media allowed that more readily. Maybe it's a lack of Facebook confidence on my part.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I ever made LJ friends from a *random* journal, though - it was more mutual friends, overlap and such, and that does still survive in a sense on Facebook - just attenuated because now there are sadly more normal folk loose online, where before it was more a self-selecting club with a greater chance of shared connections in any given interaction.

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

That's definitely true, I'm selective on Facebook as well, which is why none of my work colleagues get on there. It's mostly people I met through other sites like this one or close friends I've known for decades. I think you've revealed the missing factor there - the signal-to-noise ratio when looking for like-minded people has plunged. Which is troubling because it's not even a problem that can be solved in future by the sort of balkanization by demographics you get on dating sites - I'm not a transgender, Christian, Blakes 7 fan but maybe I would like to speak to one, etc.

I can't recall how I began speaking to most people on Livejournal, often it was replying to a comment on some community post, which I guess counts as overlap. There were definitely people I first met through randomly clicking on things on the front page. You might be the only person whom I started reading because you were commenting on someone's personal journal that I already read, actually.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Ah, OK - I think that's a subtly different experience to a lot of my LJ friends, and yes, probably harder to replicate on FB. Though maybe Twitter? A lot of people still seem to meet from that. I don't understand how, but then that's unsurprising given I basically don't understand Twitter.