The death of LJ?

[alexpgp]

Looking at my friends list, it would appear there are two LiveJournals out there. There is what I think of as the bolshevik contingent (the word meaning, simply, a member of the majority, and although it came to denote a very specific majority in the last century, I try the word out from time to time to "degrease" it, as it were, but I digress...). The bolsheviks might not be happy with the occasional down time LJ experiences, but they otherwise seem happy enough campers

Then there is the menshevik contingent, which has become rather agitated of late about what it views as daft and incompetent behavior on the part of LiveJournal/SixApart management, having to do with the deletion of some number of accounts because of alleged violated the Terms of Service, and with how they were deleted, and with what's happened since (botched damage control, Brad's departure from Six Apart, etc.), and as I've only followed the brouhaha with half an ear, I'll conclude by saying the mensheviks are, as opposed to the bolsheviks, not happy campers.

One thing of interest that has emerged from the discussion is a diagram showing membership accounts and various levels of activity among those accounts.
Back in mid-2000, when I joined LiveJournal, the number of members doesn't even show on the scale. The millionth account looks like it was created in late Q1 of 2003, at which time most accounts had at least one entry in them. Membership has taken off since the end of the invite-only period, but a greater portion of new accounts now never update their accounts (as compared to those early days), and after peaking in Q1 of 2005, the "active accounts" appear to be dwindling.

Does this shrinkage herald the end of LJ?

I'm not so sure. People are still joining, to see what the site is all about, and the ratio of people who never post a thing is about the same now as when SixApart bought LJ, which is pretty good considering how many popular sites such as MySpace and Facebook have cropped up in the interim. The drop in the number of active accounts could spell trouble, but as LJer pyrop points out, "there are other aspects of LJ that ought to be analyzed before we can say, full-out, that LJ is shrinking."

One thing is for sure, it will do me no good to worry about this, or to agitate about it. I sincerely hope LJ continues on for many moons, but if a quarter century on the 'net has taught me anything, it's that nothing lasts forever in cyberspace.

Time to hit the sack.

Cheers...

Comments

[n5iln.livejournal.com]

I'm not so sure it has anything to do with LJ per se...my gut feeling is that the "blogging" bubble has popped, and people are starting to lose interest in that particular form of self-expression in favor of the simpler and currently-popular format provided by such systems as MySpace or Xanga.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

I agree. FWIW, and without trying to sound judgmental, I think blogging - or doing anything - on a regular basis takes a certain inner discipline, and blogging in addition requires you to have something to say past stringing a bunch of epithets together about how something or someone sucks, or how cool it would be to (fill in the blank), or whatever. And as you montion, venues other than LJ may have more attractive formats.

Having said that, it's not as if I don't back up my LJ entries on a regular basis. :^)

Cheers...

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I started my LJ in 2001, just because it was convenient -- I'm a life-long journal-keeper, started when I was 12, thought it might be an interesting experiment to keep one online and didn't want to have to program an HTML template. For the first two years I was blissfully unaware of LJ's "community" aspect (friends lists!)

I think journals are substantiatively different from blogs -- in real life, I'm a current events junkie but rarely write about current events here. And I'm totally uninterested in other people's interpretation of current events, preferring my own. Their lives, though. Their lives fascinate me.

LJ's not a particularly good template for a blog. Linking is clunky. And while my kids are on Myspace & Facebook, I don't actually understand the appeal of those sites. What are they? Billboards? I confess to not understanding at all the business model behind any of these sites -- how do they make revenue?

[ex-greymaide85.livejournal.com]

Your soviet era metaphor amuses me.

That said, I think a lot of people are using LJ as a news aggregator and a way to keep up with their friends. They don't necessarily post anything, they just read what other people post. The way LJ has set up it's friends function requires an account to view protected entries, which means there are a lot of lurkers. I have several of these on my friends list.

I have a myspace account for the same reason. I can't stand myspace, and I never use it, but I do keep up with my friends who do.

So I don't think the increasing number of unused accounts means anything.