problems with the existing paradigms, unsorted

[piranha]

i think the journal/blog paradigm is fine for daily life reportage, but it stinks for carrying on conversations. it feels mostly like i am alone, speaking to the winds. and while that's fine for part of how i am, it's completely useless for interacting with other people. i don't actually need to speak to the winds; i am happy doing it in my own head. writing here has always been for others -- though not as a performance, but just to keep in touch.

a blog's paradigm is primarily insular. other people might come across you, but aside from those who already know you it's all very random, and most don't stay. you might get a drive-by comment, but they're hard to keep track of for the visitors, and conversations rarely persist past a couple days. on LJ you can at least keep track of some of your comments, if only a small percentage, and the subscription mechanism is better than nothing, but messy.

now, one can make a blog into something more like a community, but it takes either a very energetic person, or a small team, and it helps if you are famous in your circles (cf. making light). and still, the time-driven content presentation results in "out of sight, out of mind". also, most blogs have flat commenting. don't even get me started. LJ's thread handling is cumbersome, but at least it exists. i hate flat comments with a passion. also, no killfiles in blogs.

i just got an email in response to a post i made on usenet in 1998. somebody searched google groups for a specific subject. LJ's search capabilities suck. and ljseek only covers unrestricted public posts. i used to grump at dejanews, now i think google groups is a mint because of its easy search across a long-term archive. i could always search usenet on my own server. search is good.

usenet. so much fun in large part because the spaces it creates are open. everyone can come in and write. without "community membership" hurdles to pass first (for unmoderated groups, which most of my faves have been). decentralized; you can pull down what you want and only what you want, anywhere, anytime, and read it in your favourite newsreader. or you can read it through the web. no central server that can go down and deprive you of your communications medium. but the topic space has always restrained me, and there is no way to officially create a no-topic space on usenet. i am not much for staying on topic (the peanut gallery guffaws). i am interested in so many things. and while i can subscribe to groups on all those things on usenet, i never keep up with them because it's too cumbersome. and i don't develop community with groups where i rarely post. and usenet is still a text-only medium -- which is great when i want to yadda on, but these days i also like to look at pictures. cat macros, you know? :) but usenet is also ephemeral, if not as much as LJ (and much less so since deja). which is possibly good for some free-wheeling conversation; i remember long arguments when deja came around about how it would affect people posting what they really thought.

web forums. all the problems of usenet with fewer positives, and little extra to make up for it. centralized -- if the site goes down, there goes your forum. too much clicky-clicky to see any actual text; with sup-par sequencing abilities. but easier presentation of graphics, and these days graphics matter to me. a bit more static than blogs, but still time-driven. decent search capabilities, though it depends on the software.

email lists have uses for announcements and short-term coordination of people. i am subscribed to a couple of yahoo groups (which i use solely through email) for announcements, but beyond that i don't want any truck with lists anymore.

Comments

[1ginko.livejournal.com]

Have you seen KMD's comments in the sniggler group? DejaVu re: usenet and LJ.

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

If I rank the media strictly on how much I like the interface, it goes Usenet, Listservs, LJ, and non-LJ blogs. If I rank them on how well I think they encourage the kind of social interaction I prefer, it goes Usenet, LJ/listservs (a tie), non-LJ blogs. I won't be leaving Usenet until I'm the one who has to turn the lights off.

Unfortunately, tons of the people I like reading (*doesn't name names or anything*) have all but left Usenet. I will tolerate non-LJ blogs, but they're going to be essentially like bookmarked websites in my brainspace until they evolve to handle comment notification and threading. Without that, they're useless for conversation, for me, anyway.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

*nod* Very much my experience, too. I use LJ primarily as a virtual substitute for the paper journals I've kept most of my life; that it has an audience of sorts is usually nice, but sometimes counter to the purpose (chronicalling my own life, moods, etc.) It can feel a little like performance art, which is ... weird.

I still post to exactly two Usenet groups, and in one of them I've managed to be present enough, consistently enough, that it does feel like community/conversation, but if I let it slide for as much as a week, I begin to lose that feeling.

The bottom line, for me, is that no on-line forum comes close to matching the community I feel with people I interact with every day. The 'Net is good for many things - better, for some of them, than face-to-face interaction - but I still need meatspace for building an ongoing sense of community and commonality.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Rasfc is my conversation place, or Making Light when I have the energy for it. LJ is my thinking out loud place, and also the place for keeping track.

I'd like an intersection, but I can't figure out what it would look like.

One thing LJ does for me, which may or may not be as much of an advantage as I think it is, is keep me from discussing so many "dangerous" things in rasfc. Notice I no longer subscribe to any of the newsgroups where people consider those things to be anywhere near on-topic. And in rasfc, I've carefully killfiled the people who are dangerous for me to talk to, including at least one person who might be an interesting conversationalist if he wasn't obsessive about redbaiting me. Yes, I'm a coward, but really, if I'm going to be redbaited, I want it to be because I did something worthwhile, and not just because I let an unguarded comment go by in a conversation.

Anyway, I love usenet, and I agree with you about its virtues, in spite of the annoying presence of people who like to accuse me of complicity in mass murder whenever I express an opinion about traffic management or water policy (I am not kidding, and I am not exaggerating).

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I really like that on LJ we each have our own topic-free space. I think it encourages self-confidence in making any kind of post we want. If 6A weren't being awful, I'd be happy with this. Not sure what to do about my permaccount -- stay and suck bandwidth, the way I have a duty to pick and eat Himalayan blackberries?

If I'm making improvements, though? Yes please Usenet-style threading with new posts marked and jumpable-to! It boggles my mind that people manage to (1) keep up with Making Light at all and (2) have conversations despite the total lack of threading there. Web forums too. Is it really that hard to code some kind of threading?

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Mm, yeah. I should figure out my own preferences because they've kinda changed. Only -- if this was USENET I'd write them here, but the desire for conversation is a bit at odds with the LJ convention of not writing about me in someone else's space...

Yes, I think the open-ness to new people is a key advantage to USENET. Having moved almost all of my narrative about my life and thoughts to filtered LJ for another reason, I miss meeting new people.

You haven't mentioned Facebook [ducks, runs.] I'd love to read your analysis of those social phenomena.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I think LJ's threaded comments on a single page are the best on-line venue for not-quite-realtime conversation I've ever used, for immediately active topics. The problem is that once the original post is more than a day or two old it's fallen off of people's friends page and they stop following the thread. The new notification features help, but they're far from what I want. To use them myself, I have to go way out of my way to turn on notification and then turn off email notification -- I do *not* want to add LJ comments to my email stream. The message center works well for me. But what I really want is to be able to beef up my friends page with the functionality of PLATO's notesfile sequencer (if any post on my friends page has a response I haven't read, it gets a distinctive highlight/icon) and the functionality of a killfile, so I can hit one button on the latest dumb-ass quiz and when I refresh my friends page I don't see that post (even if it gets new responses). If LJ provided this (and everyone used it), conversations would be able to stay active for weeks without everyone involved having to specificially decide the thread was worth marking.

Driveby comment

[liv]

I saw this when I was travelling, and want to discuss it in detail when I have more time, but just to pass on a link before I forget: siderea is discussing this intelligently, and from a technically knowledgeable point of view. Other people who have done some work on combining the social advantages of LJ with the technical advantages of Usenet are ewx and pw201, though they haven't visited the topic very recently.