Platform 9 and 3/4

[steepholm]

It's odd, isn't it? Every time LJ does something stupid (and it does), people talk about how it's the end of the platform, and they're high-tailing it off to Dreamwidth, or wherever. Sometimes they go, sometimes they stay.

By contrast, since I've been on Facebook it's been clusterfuck after clusterfuck. The arrangement of newsfeeds, privacy settings, how adverts are placed, what names people are allowed to use, all these things are regularly interfered with without warning or apparent justification, other than the whim of Zuckerberg. Imagine if LJ decided that pictures of breastfeeding mothers weren't allowed! There'd be more flouncing than in a Victorian haberdasher's. Yet FB gets away with all this and more (as well as being a vastly inferior platform in terms of threading, linking, etc.), without - well, I wouldn't say without a grumble, but certainly without a mass exodus to MySpace. Strange, n'est-ce pas?

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Yes. I wonder how much people want excuses not to engage thoughtfully. FB is such an excuse. The very fact that the newsfeed is "curated" (loathsome word to me) means that it's okay to miss a lot of what your friends post. And they post trivia all the time, since it's so easy. And you can just click like without reading. LJ makes all that harder. And then you can, in good conscience, think about ways that LJ is misbehaving, since it encourages you to think. And then people have a thoughtful excuse to bail out of being thoughtful. At least that's what I sometimes think.

[howlin-wolf-66.livejournal.com]

Pretty good analysis! :-)

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I mean, who reads Terms of Service? Unless you're on LJ, and so read what's there.