Social Networking Progress

[enteirah]

In some ways I can't help but think social networking has gone so far back these days in terms of how people interact with one another. In days gone by, you used to have friendly communities like this on LJ where if there was something which created a lot of food for thought or you had a lot of things on your mind you were unsure of the best way forward, you could post it up here, and you'd often get a healthy raft of responses, debate and advice.

Nowadays, people have to rely on posting castrated-to-140-letter comments to the likes of Twitter which most folks don't even read, or posting stuff on Facebook/Tumblr, where the primary responses seem to be lazy-click 'xyz likes this, xyz shared this'.

We have progressed so well!

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Well, there's still plenty of food for thought right here, I'd say. ^_^ Of course, receiving replies can be another kettle of squid..

I'm not sure if Tumblr and Twitter started the trend (not in the sense of "this is the single way in which things are generally progressing", but in the more minor sense of a trend) of minimal effort/involvement, with the former specialising in one-click "replies", the latter quick quips and throwaway miscellania, but they've certainly leveraged that inclination effectively.

I'd cite Usenet as a fair example to back up your assertion. It isn't immediate, as with anything web-based, but being decentralised, there's no single point of failure, no company deciding arbitrarily to swivel their business model around (or go bust), and being fully standards-based, clients are available for just about anything with a keyboard, with whatever features a developer wants to include. Yet, it fell away in popularity quite drastically post-2000.

Myself, I find LJ the best option, with a reasonable (10K? I forget - it's been a while since I exceeded it =:) cap on reply sizes, full threading, bagfuls of icons, arbitrary restrictions on who can view an individual entry, and most importantly, some rather neat folk to natter and argue with. ^_^

(Oh, is that a new bug? Editing a comment - here, to remove a surplus "s" - reverted the icon to my default)

[enteirah]

I suppose there's not many folks left, so as a consequence replies can be very sporadic from readers that are left. Though I am glad at least LJ does still permit the full replies and though they seem to be gradually dipping into the instant gratification style interaction more and more to keep pace with competition, don't look likely to ever ditch that. It's refreshing just being able to type replies with full meaning, without having to constantly find places to trim out a word without too badly butchering them just to fit into a character limit.

Though on the subject of bugs, I do sometimes find journals where the entire comments section wont load and instead a spinning loader just sits on the page. So whilst they may never intentionally remove it, there's a chance LJ will completely break the comments system one of these days!