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

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

I suppose because they're used differently? I'm not leaving LJ and as you say it's a far superior platform; I loathe Facebook but I'm not leaving that either since it's the only practical way to keep in touch with two continents' worth of friends and relations.

I think it might be because Facebook was never going to be anything but evil, whereas so many LJers still remember when it was Brad and the servers in his basement, and still feel betrayed that it isn't that anymore? I don't know.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, that may well be true. I arrived in 2006, which I gather was just after its heyday, so maybe I feel less nostalgic about it.