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Livejournal collapsing (and other Internet woes)

Started by 23 Daves, January 06, 2009, 02:15:23 PM

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23 Daves

The future for blogging website Livejournal looks particularly bleak at the moment:

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5124184/the-russian-bear-slashes-a-social-network

As sad as I am about this, I can't say I'm amazed.  I used to blog on LJ for a bit, but ceased last year, largely because the userbase began to consist more and more of inarticulate teenagers who the company were clearly trying to target themselves towards, and as a result of a lot of the more interesting bloggers on the service (many of whom are also on CaB) became alienated and upped sticks.  The trouble is, they timed their promotional shift badly - kids with nothing to say for themselves can now do one sentence user updates on Facebook and have the time of their lives.  I'm sure blogging hardly seems necessary for them anymore, as it lacks the functionality of other social networking options.

All this begs the question of what other websites are going to bite the dust in these hard economic times.  So many sites trying to turn a profit seem to be built on quicksand, and I for one will be interested to see what other social networking and blogging sites follow suit (although Hi5 has to be bloody high on the list).

Additionally, YouTube appears to be going to shit at the moment thanks to corporate lawyers.  Speaking from the perspective of a user who has updated a great deal of content over the years, I'm having videos removed at the rate of nearly two or three a day at the moment - including things which would be hard to track down elsewhere like Saint Etienne's original video for "Only Love Can Break Your Heart".  A large portion of active account holders are now moving over to other sites, which makes me wonder if YouTube really has a future or if someone else will steal its thunder until the lawyers move in (again).  I suppose this depends upon how much content the record companies are willing to officially upload themselves to replace what they've removed. 

How much do we think the landscape of the Internet is likely to change in 2009?

Viero_Berlotti

I've got to agree that the internet has largely been ruined by a combination of ignorant cunts with nothing interesting to say, money grubbing con-merchants, shyster lawyers and eBay. It can only get worse as the 'monetization' continues. I think the end of the 1990's and the early 2000's will be viewed as a bit of a golden age for the internet.

SOTS

Livejournal is going to go? I thought that even if people weren't using it for blogging, they participated in comms and such? I'll be sad to see it go. It can be useful.

purlieu

I'm always amazed sites like Bebo, Friendster and Faceparty are still going, to be honest.  Who the hell uses them?
LJ potentially disappearing - it's a shame, such a popular site in the past, although I can't say I've used it myself in two or three years now.

Suttonpubcrawl

Quote from: Viero_Berlotti on January 06, 2009, 02:29:09 PMI've got to agree that the internet has largely been ruined by a combination of ignorant cunts with nothing interesting to say, money grubbing con-merchants, shyster lawyers and eBay.

What exactly is your problem with ebay?

Uncle TechTip

Automatic sniping? Misleading product descriptions? Hard-to-get consumer goods at inflated prices (or gig tickets)? Risible refund policy? Conflict of interest with their 'preferred' (ie only) payment method, which they happen to own? No transparency?

What exactly is there to like?

George Oscar Bluth II

Bebo's huge among kids. My youngest brother (13) and all his friends are on it. They think Facebook's astonishingly uncool.

But yeah, YouTube's really being destroyed by copyright claims. Did you know there's no Olympic stuff on there? Or at least, not much anyway, it's all been removed by lawyers. What's the point in that exactly? Last time I checked, they didn't sell DVDs or anything. Seems pretty counterproductive.

Viero_Berlotti

Quote from: Suttonpubcrawl on January 06, 2009, 02:58:03 PM
What exactly is your problem with ebay?

I had a run in with their 'trust and safety' team. They basically put us out of business two weeks before Christmas, all because we had a logo that they deemed to be too big on a link on one of our listing templates. A listing template that we had used without any problems for 18 months previously.

They could have been amicable and sorted it out with us, but instead some android cunt behind a desk in eBay's secret underground bunker just cut us off.

Anyway we went over to Amazon in the end, who were brilliant with us. It was a lot of hard work setting it all up on the last minute but it paid off and we did more through Amazon than we would have done through eBay. So it's eBay's loss really, they don't seem to be able differentiate between scammers illegally manipulating the eBay system and honest sellers that have difficulty keeping up with eBay's ever changing rules and regulations.

EDIT: And from a customers point of view everything UTT said.

SOTS

Quote from: George Oscar Bluth II on January 06, 2009, 03:14:23 PM
But yeah, YouTube's really being destroyed by copyright claims. Did you know there's no Olympic stuff on there? Or at least, not much anyway, it's all been removed by lawyers. What's the point in that exactly? Last time I checked, they didn't sell DVDs or anything. Seems pretty counterproductive.

Indeed. When will some people realise that YouTube really is a promotional tool? There is absolutely no point in deleting anything that isn't available commercially. And even if it is, it should be widely commercially available before they bother deleting. Anything else is counter-productive.

If something isn't available commercially, it gives them a chance to see it. If it is but is hard to track down, people can gain some exposure to stuff they never would've seen before and hunt it down. Bloody legal idiots.

I quite like twitter, it's good for people who hate the idea of the facebook (observing the goings on of bastards from your past) but good for those who are keen to offer witty status updates, and those of us who are far too lazy to blog in great detail.


purlieu

Quote from: George Oscar Bluth II on January 06, 2009, 03:14:23 PM
Bebo's huge among kids. My youngest brother (13) and all his friends are on it. They think Facebook's astonishingly uncool.
Facebook is uncool, I've just never actually met anyone who has/had a Bebo.  It's always been even less cool than Facebook.

SOTS

Quote from: purlieu on January 06, 2009, 03:50:46 PM
Facebook is uncool, I've just never actually met anyone who has/had a Bebo.  It's always been even less cool than Facebook.

That's because I find it's mostly used by younger teenagers. A lot of my friends use it as well. but it's ability to make usually clever and articulate people sound like utter mongheads via bad grammar and piles of unintelligible crap all over the pages makes me dislike it. Why do people type on computers in txtspeak? Surely it's actually trickier than typing actual words?

23 Daves

Quote from: SOTS on January 06, 2009, 03:26:06 PM
Indeed. When will some people realise that YouTube really is a promotional tool? There is absolutely no point in deleting anything that isn't available commercially. And even if it is, it should be widely commercially available before they bother deleting. Anything else is counter-productive.

This sounds a bit simplistic and probably like the rantings of Rik the People's Poet, but I've found in my offline dealings with them (on matters that don't involve copyright violation) that the majority of corporate lawyers really don't give a shit about how much profit their company is making and what works for them or doesn't, they just want to justify their own positions.  If a problem could be sorted out in five minutes but can in any way be spun out to last for five painstaking, teeth-gritting weeks, they'll find a way of achieving that.  They also either don't have the imagination to be progressive, or just plain don't want to think about new ways of doing things.  I realise some lawyers post on CaB, and I apologise for any I've offended, but... there are some lawyers who really should be in the dole queue in the recession, but inevitably won't be because they're geniuses at wrapping everything up in legalese and giving executives the impression the company will collapse without them.  They are scum.

Some record companies have been forward thinking enough to approach YouTube users and use their videos as advertising space to click through to MP3 sites, rather than penalising them.  They still appear to be in the minority, though. 

In terms of Livejournal, I was discussing this with another user earlier today, and we agreed that its user interface is the best of any blogging site we'd experienced.  Blogspot, for example, is really messy - you have to navigate through about three different menus just to edit or modify an existing post, and it also frequently loses posts or forgets you're logged in, only to suddenly remember again for no apparent reason.  It has the feel of something which you would have used in the early days of the net, but is still really popular for some reason.  Of course, people who read blogs but don't blog themselves don't really care about the technical details much. 

I'm talking about it in the past tense here purely because it seems as if it's had its chips, but maybe somebody will buy it out and deal with the issues... although I can't imagine who.

Pedro_Bear

Quote from: 23 Daves on January 06, 2009, 02:15:23 PM
As sad as I am about this...

Oh, you're funny, I raffed. Funniest OP on the front page today.

Less open access = less gawkers = less attention = less interest all round

The widespread introduction of privacy tools has deflated the whole experience of watching people squabble. To not use them detracts from the supa serizness of your retorts, and even dipshit attention-seekers now know it's not a good idea to invite the internet into their personal lives without a filtering system. Digital sanity has never been so widespread. It's almost time to retire as a troll. Almost.

Quotethe user base began to consist more and more of inarticulate teenagers



Their "contributions" are no moar or less valuable to the whole LJ "experience". It's all driven by the self-same self-absorption.

Quotethe more interesting bloggers on the service (many of whom are also on CaB)

You're hilarious, you know that?

23 Daves

Thanks Pedro.  I was waiting for somebody to pick the first post to pieces with sarcastic refences to 'sad' (even deleting the reference I made to it myself before I clicked on 'post' because I thought we'd all be above that) and veiled retorts about how pathetic blogging is, etc.

You make a good point about open access, but I don't think that's the reason LJ failed.  I would say that numerous investors had expectations of it as a business model which were never realistic, and they also alienated their existing user base in various ways which are too dull to go into in more depth, but are very well documented elsewhere.  In a nutshell, they made the classic mistake of alienating their existing customers in the quest for (non-existent) new ones.   

Pedro_Bear

I can assure you that (a) we are not above that (b) LJ financial problems were caused to are massive extent by the sudden total lack of interest to the casual browser when we couldn't raff at the drama any more. The now locked-down, invite only LJ communities of pedophiles and bores just didn't get the page hits needed to keep the adverts ticking over, and with camwhores now stripping on the dozen or so newly dedicated sites for them, what's left? (c) the Russians simply couldn't compete with MySpazz in the demographic data-mining stakes. Nothing can.

Still... there will always be Scarecrowmaiden to remember it all by.
craAAAACKKKKKKKKKKKKKYYYYYYYYYYYYYYyyy

glitch

Isn't the main problem with LJ that they kicked out all the shitty fandom crap? I remember this caused "the great LiveJournal exodus" or some other overdramatic shit. This, coupled with the fact they were giving their software away, meant that all the crappy fandom communities of 10-16 year old girls just moved to rivals like deadjournal.

Pedro - many, many communities are still open on the LJ clones. I may have a link or two you might find interesting...

Pylon Man

Can I just say I hate ebay too. I once sold a laptop on there and they banned me because they decided just on that, that I was untrustworthy and didn't really give an answer as to why I had been banned and no amount of emails would reveal as to why they had. They have a reputation for that, banning people on a whim without any comeback (same as PayPal, which is the same company obviously). There desperately needs to be a real competitor to ebay.

Ambient Sheep

#18
Quote from: George Oscar Bluth II on January 06, 2009, 03:14:23 PMBebo's huge among kids. My youngest brother (13) and all his friends are on it. They think Facebook's astonishingly uncool.

Seconded.  Our eldest and all her friends have been on Bebo for the last eighteen months at least.  When they all started getting seriously online in the last year of junior school, they flirted with Myspace & Piczo for a short while, and an occasional older sister might have a Myspace account as well, but Bebo is absolutely where it's at.  An evening on the computer for her and her mates involves running a copy of MSN Messenger and a browser with their Bebo page loaded, and that's what they do.  She has hundreds of contacts on it, and nobody she knows uses Facebook.

And to be honest, from what I've seen of Bebo, I'm not surprised.  It's pretty good for its target market - like Myspace but with a friendlier user interface.  It also seems to understand what "privacy" means, unlike some such sites.  If it weren't for the fact it's mainly full of teenagers, I'd be tempted to get a page on it myself.

Interesting fact, given the way this thread started: Bebo is an acronym that stands for Blog Early Blog Often...


EDIT: going back to Purlieu's original comment:

Quote from: purlieu on January 06, 2009, 02:50:52 PMI'm always amazed sites like Bebo, Friendster and Faceparty are still going, to be honest.  Who the hell uses them?

Friendster I can agree with, haven't heard of it in years.  And I would have said the same for Faceparty, until last summer when one of MissInformed's relatives ended up meeting some incredibly dodgy tart (and I use that term advisedly) from the Merseyside area on it.  We ended up taking our first look at it in years, and it seems to have turned into a completely sleazy fuck-fest meet-up site for the barely literate, like an unholy cross between Facebook and Punternet.  Don't all rush at once.

Pedro_Bear

Says you, we're the bestest thing ever.



And the bestest thing about bebo is all the dipshits topping themselves instead of logging off or creating new accounts. And this app, obviously.

Quote from: glitch on January 07, 2009, 03:44:57 PM
Isn't the main problem with LJ that they kicked out all the shitty fandom crap?

Oh glitch, I remember that. That was called The Great Strike Through at the time. Some sneaky anti-cp group got tired of being ignored by LJAbuse and went to the advertisers with screencaps of their clickies next to badly written Harry P3d0 r4pe pr0n and diaper babyfur pictures, and LJ shat brix and deleted everything in minutes without any warning.

don't click the link, fools

And we all know what's worse than a big fat PMS yaoi blogger: a pissed off big fat PMS yaoi blogger, spouting shit about freedom of speech.

They whinged and they whined all over the place, and of course, their temp sites were thrown up so fast they forgot to defend them properly, and so ebaums just... descended on them like this HUEG cloud of starving vampire bats, and we ate them alive. It was very beautiful.

That was the era of the 50+ troll group raids, and we've never had so much fun since. So... hmmm... I think I would be very interested in a little reccy around the new sites, we might stir up a bit of a renaissance. Do PM me when you get a chance, and we'll pick out a few potentials. No rush, I'm still torturing a half dozen or so S CLUB 7 types elsewhere.
[close]

And, like, 23Daze, I'm not entirely against blogging or whatever, it's just that LJ was the worst offender of the web for so very many things that kill the digital atmosphere stone cold dead. I mean, LJ was the thing that sparked ED in the beginning, nightmare.


As you all were with yet another miserabilst thread. I don't know, ca/b/, it's so stimulating to log on here to find most of the front page clogged up with gloomin 'n' doomin about nothing, it inspires me to kick off again. I get all... itchy itchy ITCHY. I just want to see you smile again, hmm? I just want you to know that I don't care about the scars. So... I stick a razor in my mouth and do this...

...to myself. And you know what? You can't stand the sight of me! You leave. Now I see the funny side. Now I'm always smiling!

chand

Quote from: glitch on January 07, 2009, 03:44:57 PM
Isn't the main problem with LJ that they kicked out all the shitty fandom crap? I remember this caused "the great LiveJournal exodus" or some other overdramatic shit. This, coupled with the fact they were giving their software away, meant that all the crappy fandom communities of 10-16 year old girls just moved to rivals like deadjournal.

I started out on deadjournal, and then all my friends moved over to livejournal so I moved there. In the end I gave up trying to find one place where I could post my irregular rants, so now I paste them on LJ, DJ, myspace and facebook.

Haven't read my livejournal friends page in a while though, primarily because there's one perfectly nice girl who started making these terrible posts; she went through a stage of posting just blurry cityscapes shot on a shitty camera, with two lines of quasi-profound crap underneath, and when she wasn't doing that she was talking about people I didn't know in incredibly vague terms using only a single capital letter to represent their names. Sometimes she was even vaguer than that; you know those Facebook status updates where people pointedly write some cryptic shit that's clearly directed at one person they hope is reading and is utterly meaningless to bystanders? That, but for several paragraphs.

Suttonpubcrawl

Quote from: chand on January 07, 2009, 10:42:49 PMyou know those Facebook status updates where people pointedly write some cryptic shit that's clearly directed at one person they hope is reading and is utterly meaningless to bystanders?

I do know those, but what I like even better is the verbwhores equivalent. I remember there was a thread for writing what people really mean which was full of them. The idea was that you'd write something people often say which often means something else, for example people often say "it'll just take a couple of minutes" when they actually mean "it could take anything up to an hour". However the thread would frequently get posts along the lines of "I care about you a lot" means "I don't care about you at all and I'm going to fuck all your friends and then lie to you about it because I'M A STUPID BITCH WHO SHOULD BE KILLED AAARGHRGfkdfhsdfhjsalfkjsadf". It was hilarious reading those.

What was that thread called?

Still Not George

Quote from: Suttonpubcrawl on January 07, 2009, 10:48:40 PM
I do know those, but what I like even better is the verbwhores equivalent. I remember there was a thread for writing what people really mean which was full of them. The idea was that you'd write something people often say which often means something else, for example people often say "it'll just take a couple of minutes" when they actually mean "it could take anything up to an hour". However the thread would frequently get posts along the lines of "I care about you a lot" means "I don't care about you at all and I'm going to fuck all your friends and then lie to you about it because I'M A STUPID BITCH WHO SHOULD BE KILLED AAARGHRGfkdfhsdfhjsalfkjsadf". It was hilarious reading those.
That was an awesome thread, that. Trying to work out what spawned some of those messages...


eluc55

Okay, here's a question:

Today, I discovered that the audio to Radioface (that online show i made a while back) has been removed by Youtube due to a copyright issue on a song i used - specifically, The Turtles "Happy Together". The show remains intact, but the audio for the entire 10 minute "part one" segement, not just the 2 minute section using the song - has been removed (I appreciate they cant remove the audio to isolated scenes).

What I'm asking is this: How did they know I had used the song at least 5 minutes into the show? Does Youtube go through every video and identify songs that have been identified as "not for use", or has a lawyer done much the same thing; sieved through videos in search of stuff they can get removed? The sequence has been watched by 2,000 people, so has one of them forwarded the info onto someone else? I'm just curious as to which particular branch of the cunt tree has been that unreservedly petty, tbh, and whether this is standard procedure.   

samadriel

Quote from: SOTS on January 06, 2009, 03:56:35 PM
it's ability to make usually clever and articulate people sound like utter mongheads via bad grammar
Chortle.

A lot of the problem with the Youtube-hounding is that corporations aren't merely contrarians who're 'in the mood' to go stamping on our cultural landscape (although they may as well be, god knows I'm not known to apologise for them); they're obligated to guard trademarked material this way.  If infringement is going on and there's enough suspicion that the owner knew about it and let the infringement slide, they can lose the power to protect that trademark in any possible future case which might actually be a big deal.  Basically, once a site's reached the prominence of something like Youtube, they can no longer claim that "we didn't know this one Youtube video-blogger was using the Superman theme", 'cos everyone knows what Facebook is, the videos are publically available, and "it just went under our radar" becomes an invalid excuse.  It sucks, but that's the deal.



chand

I didn't hear, I saw, and what I saw appeared to make no sense, since you changed my post for something which in no way represents what I actually wrote or meant, and then posted an irrelevant picture. Is this the standard of subversion on the internet now? 2/10