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Top 10 Reasons Why Deadprogrammer Left Livejournal
Mon, 09/27/2004 - 13:04 — deadprogrammer
1) Old entries are hard to get to: "back n entries" works only for a while, after that you need to go day by day. Which makes paging through a blog that is not updated daily a nightmare. 2) Can't run ads. 3) The degenerate "friends" system with it's stupid add/remove politics. It's better to read stuff in an aggregator. 4) Livejournal is widely known for drama and teenage angst. Having a Livejournal blog is similar to having an AOL email - it doesn't matter that the famous hacker JWZ has one. People will still think that you are a loser. 5) No categories. You have to keep a separate journal if you want to give your readers an ability to read only stuff that interests them. I want to write some entries in Russian, but do not want to have a separate journal for that. Also some of my readers might be interested in my photos, but not in what I think about Livejournal. 6) Constant outages, lost posts, slowness and other technical fun. What else can you expect if you share your servers with a million teenagers frantically refreshing their "friends lists". 7) No trackback. 8) Image hosting that is still in beta, but a fully released "phonepost" system that instead of using MP3 format uses OGG. I spent a couple of hours trying to find a player that would actually play these files when I click on them, but for the most part miserably failed. Those are a couple of hours of my life that I'll never get back. I mean, what the hell is wrong? You click on a file, the player opens, but doesn't play anything. You click play button - nothing. You click again.... Arrrgh, it's driving me nuts! 9) No web logs - you have no idea how many people actually read your stuff. The only indicators that you might have are how many "friends" you have and how many comments you get (both of which are poor indicators). Since you can't run JavaScript, you can't have a reliable third party tracker either. I've had a visitor from northropgrumman.com at my new shiny (well, not so shiny yet) MT based site, and I would not have know that if it was still at Livejournal. Hey, Northrop Grumman reader, who are you? 10) If you set an article with a future date in Livejournal, instead of showing up if your readers lists normally, it sometimes disappears. There's a bug there somewhere. Livejournal does have a superior comment system, but since I don't get too many comments it doesn't matter that much. Did you expect the Spanish Inquisition? No? Well, nobody does. But it brings you 11th reason: 11) No integrated search. Running Themes100 Views of the Empire State Building
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Comments
Welcome to the wonderful world of MT. So glad to see you here! Tell me, do you feel more 'serious' with a 'real blog'? I feel like my MT stuff is weightier, more important than the other stuff.
1) Not true. It's a setting you can change in your own journal -- then in going day by day, it will skip the empty days.
2) That's a good thing.
3) No it's not. It also provides feedback that the aggregator doesn't. The name "friends" is perhaps a bad choice, but it doesn't change the fact that the system is good.
4) In my opinion someone is a loser if they care that much about people who think something particular about you just because you have a livejournal account. And how often do you actually interact with such people?
5) Only a handful of people actually bother to set up their readers to deal with categories. The rest will read or not read the whole feed and will be just as annoyed at the material they consider useless.
6) Try using any other service for a year. We'll see what you say then. A friend of mine's blog lost all comments one day. Then he restored it. Then something else went bad. I don't believe any other system is all that much more reliable.
7) Use counters.
8) Ogg is an excellent format, much better compression and quality than MP3, not to mention the lack of patent restrictions. Windows media player plays it without any problems.
9) This one really pisses me off; not just in what you say, but in the whole attitude that you have the right to know exactly who is reading your blog. It's annoying me to no end that, after I post this, you will know exactly where I work. And don't start with the whole "it's technologically feasible..." -- lots of things that are technologically feasible and legal are still not nice in my book. Either you want your readers to read and comment, or you want to strip them of their privacy for your own private amusement that "someone from NG read me -- yahoo!" And no, it's not easy to hide your IP -- the days of free anonymizer proxies are gone. Unless you run your own (and it's an additional layer of slowness, btw), it's not that easy to get rid of that IP tag, especially if you are using a work computer, where you don't even get to set those options.
In fact, I think this upsets me so much that I will refrain from reading this log in the future -- clearly what you value is not that people read you and find your stuff interesting, but that you get to know exactly who reads it.
10) Disapears where? Have you reported it?
11) There are search options, including the integrated ones -- look at the different styles.
Basically, I don't even care all that much which blogging software someone uses, although it's convenient for ME to read your blog in livejournal. But, for the reasons stated above, I find livejournal a far more preferable environment, where I get to preserve at least some anonymity.
I really have a bunch of good posts that I'd rather do than to answer your nitpick, but here I am, answering it.
1) Well, you still can only go one post at a time. And that setting is way hidden away and turned of by default.
2) Ads pay for my hosting fees.
3) You know, after looking at my blogs I realized that about 3/4 of the people who added me to their friends list do not actually read my blog. They just reciprocated for me adding them.
4) In my experience, credibility of online content greatly suffers if the email or url point to a popular, but inferior source. People routinely pay less attention to anything with AOL in the name. I feel that similar thing is true about Livejournal.
5) To paraphrase a name of a famous book - "What do I care what other people do?"
6) It has been a bit less than a year, but I love the way Wordpress works.
7) What trackback has to do with counters?
8) See, I failed again and again to make Ogg work. It took me hours to finally listen to an Ogg file. And then it broke again. All the positive things about it are true, but I really don't care. MP3s tend to work without having to go through that much trouble. See, it's the whole philosophy of "I'll use the format that makes things easier for everyone, except the end user" that annoys me.
9) You are right. Looking at logs falls into a dark-gray area. Theoretically a lot of data can be gleaned from them. Like where you work. Livejournal also has an option of logging IP addresses though. And it seems to be a standard industry practice to analyze log files. I do need to put up a privacy notice.
Funny that you, of all people, should mention this. There's one degree of separation between us, and all the while I would mentally refer to you not as Angerona, goddess of secrecy, but by your last name. It resonates better with your posts :)
And in no way has I ever looked at the logs to gain that information. I did plug your name into Google to see, that just as I suspected your place of employment comes up on the first page of results, complete with your unusual educational path and other information that seems sensitive to me, yet there it is - matter of public record.
Overall, I do care who reads my blog. But I don't use my logs beyond - oh, look, somebody anonimous at the cool company Y or - oh, look famous blogger Z linked to me. I do value anonimity of my readers.
Livejournal has an insidious feature - "friends only posts", and I once exposed some information from one such post in the most inconsiderate manner, not having noticed that the post was "friends only". Since then I try to avoid reading livejournal through livejournal interface. I do not want to know stuff that is not a matter of public record. Well, I do, and I am curious, but I don't want to accidentaly reveal something I shouldn't, so I abstain from "friends only" posts and don't write my own.
10) It's not my job to report bugs.
11) There's no integrated search feature to this day.
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