“Whatever happened to Livejournal, anyway?” asks Caitlin Dewey of the Washington Post, who says that the only people who use LiveJournal these days are Russians and George R.R. Martin.
She made the comment after George R.R. Martin “belatedly joined Twitter” (@GRRMspeaking) on June 9 and initially used it to promote his LiveJournal —
I don’t tweet all that much, please check out my live journal page. 😉 #myfirstTweet
— George RR Martin (@GRRMspeaking) June 9, 2014
Dewey continues:
Livejournal, you’ll recall, was a popular blogging platform of the early-to-mid aughts, particularly beloved by teenage emos looking to spill their souls out to a sympathetic Web. At its peak, the platform had more than 2.5 million active accounts. But its peak was almost 10 years ago, in early 2005 — and since then, most of the English-speaking world, with the apparent exception of GRRM, forgot that it was there.
She reports an array of interesting statistics about LiveJournal, and explains why LJ is still beloved in Russia.
And, let it be said — in fandom too!
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster for the story.]
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I don’t understand why WordPress and Blogspot are so popular.
I like livejournal better than facebook (the other social medium I have a lot of experience with) because it’s better for writing longer pieces. You can put in several links without one being heavily favored. People can reply to a particular comment, so you don’t have several conversations going on atop one another. The reading list order is stable, so going back to find something you saw yesterday is an actual possibility. The format is just generally better. LJ is gradually sinking, so now I also put a note on facebook directing people to a longer LJ entry, but I’ll probably stay with LJ until someone comes up with something better, or they turn out the lights.