I will unabashedly say that the "Livejournal era" was my favorite era of the internet to date.
You can still blog in 2019, obviously, on LJ or elsewhere. But your friends aren't going to read it. That's why LJ worked: it was both a blogging platform and an aggregated feed of your LJ friends' blog posts, and you all had a more or less equal ability to comment and respond to each other. Crucially, LJ had enough marketshare to make it feasible that you might have a reasonable number of friends that used it too -- but it wasn't designed to make it trivial for your coworkers or neighbors to find you on there.
LJ felt like a quiet corner of the internet, shared by myself and a few dozen friends.
Broadly speaking that's obviously kind of what Facebook and other social networks do as well. But they do it an extremely noisy, public, and algorithmically-distorted way that... well, to put it diplomatically, winds up being something quite different. Those platforms have their uses, but if you attempt to use them as a relatively noise-free blogging platform you are really attempting to ice-skate uphill.
Of today's social platforms, Twitter probably comes the closest to providing some of what was cool about LJ.
LJ also had a culture of longer, more introspective posts. Facebook encourages the light, picture-plus-a-quick comment post because they're easy to make. LJ was much more comfortable for deeper engagement.
It's still the way LJ works, if you only look at the Russian corner of the internet. Although it's slowly dying there as well, there's still a critical mass of users keeping it afloat, and the workflow is still as you've described.
I think that's exactly why LJ was replaced by the latter titans of social media. When they say "we never had the clear mental model of what the site was", I hear "we never had a clear plan for how to turn our users into a commodity"
What made the early web the early web was all the surplus value left on the table. A modern LiveJournal would never make the mistake of just building a platform that's useful, with no regard to whether it's sticky, high-engagement, or compatible with microtargeted content marketing. It was better, yes, but less economically efficient.
Weep for all those eyeballs, all that content, just sitting there with no clear mental model of how to use them to provide great brand experiences.
LJ had a much more pleasant culture in terms of interacting with strangers. I'd call that an artifact of the number of weirdos, along with the pre-Eternal September Internet world in general. The text orientation also helped. There were also a lot of highly knowledgeable people: professors and the like.
Eternal September started in 1993, according to wikipedia. It was definitely in common usage by 1995. LiveJournal started in 1999.
I get what you were trying to say, but you used the wrong signpost. The web remained a relatively civil place until the mid-00s; there were trolls and astroturfers, but they were mostly contained. The real culture shift happened with social networks and mobile, in the late ‘00s, when even people who couldn’t operate a desktop started to be online 24/7.
I think most people would just use “the advent of social media” or simply “before/after social media”. It might be cliché, but looking at the dates, that’s when things changed. FB started getting traction outside schools in 2005, Twitter appeared in mid-2006, the iPhone landed in 2007, and by the end of the decade the participants and tone of online conversations had changed irreparably.
LJ had a much more pleasant culture in terms of interacting with strangers.
I agree, and even when strangers were nasty there were less of them. It was manageable. I mean, sure, sometimes there were trolls or whatever. But it wasn't like social media today where there can be absolute deluges of bad-faith interaction.
"it was both a blogging platform and an aggregated feed of your LJ friends' blog posts, and you all had a more or less equal ability to comment and respond to each other. Crucially, LJ had enough marketshare to make it feasible that you might have a reasonable number of friends that used it too -- but it wasn't designed to make it trivial for your coworkers or neighbors to find you on there."
Probably not today, but at one point Tumblr also provided a similar user experience.
That was my impression as well but I could never get anything going on Tumblr.
It seemed essentially worthless to bother posting any original content there because it just got swallowed up in an absolute ocean of reblogs which, of course, was pretty much the entire point of that place.
I'm sure part of this was due to having a smaller circle of friends on Tumblr than I had on LJ, but it was difficult for me to see how anybody could have any sort of "community" experience on Tumblr. It seems some did though!
Even back in the day my friends weren't reading my LJ. I wound up discovering the only people reading mine were a few internet friends, ex-girl friends, and a professor I was working for (which taught me the lesson of never writing something on the internet that I didn't want out as public information).
Yeah it definitely depended on your friends circle.
The vast majority of the people I knew didn't actually use LJ. But, I was a member of a few online communities, and I had plenty of friends (and friends-of-friends) from those places that were also on LJ.
I'm glad most of my IRL (I find myself nostalgic for this outdated term) friends weren't on LJ. I'd have felt much less inclined to be honest and open -- it would have wound up being like FB today, which has a certain practical value (it's a point of contact, a convenient way to plan events, etc) but really doesn't lend itself to introspection or anything.
You can still blog in 2019, obviously, on LJ or elsewhere. But your friends aren't going to read it. That's why LJ worked: it was both a blogging platform and an aggregated feed of your LJ friends' blog posts, and you all had a more or less equal ability to comment and respond to each other. Crucially, LJ had enough marketshare to make it feasible that you might have a reasonable number of friends that used it too -- but it wasn't designed to make it trivial for your coworkers or neighbors to find you on there.
LJ felt like a quiet corner of the internet, shared by myself and a few dozen friends.
Broadly speaking that's obviously kind of what Facebook and other social networks do as well. But they do it an extremely noisy, public, and algorithmically-distorted way that... well, to put it diplomatically, winds up being something quite different. Those platforms have their uses, but if you attempt to use them as a relatively noise-free blogging platform you are really attempting to ice-skate uphill.
Of today's social platforms, Twitter probably comes the closest to providing some of what was cool about LJ.