mokie: Firefies swirl beneath a tree on a moonlit night (happy)
mokie ([personal profile] mokie) wrote in [personal profile] uwaaaah 2011-12-30 09:13 pm (UTC)

When you have an acient service which is full of advertising and there are no popular users who can keep the rest of the audience on the site, because they have long since gone to standalone, and the only remaining users are those who are part of communities, which stay there. (T/N: ...this sentence doesn't really make sense in Russian either.)

It's three interrelated ideas squished oddly together.

First, to American viewers, LJ as a service is outdated, especially compared to new social media standards like Facebook and Twitter, but especially to easy and intuitive options like Tumblr. It's just not as attractive to new users these days.

Third, we don't generally use it as a blog in the now standard sense of a semi-journalistic site of organized essays, or the 'cult of personality' sense of a popular individual's public platform; that's more common to LJ's one-time competitor, Blogger. To Americans, LJ is a semi-private diary site, which is less popular these days than open, public, shout it to the crowds microblogging sites like FB, Twitter and G+.

Second, because of the way we use LJ as a sort of gated neighborhood for our private thoughts, there are few Big Names to draw attention and users to the site.

For these three reasons, LJ hasn't really taken off well on this side of the world in recent years.

Thanks for the translation! It's interesting to see the explanation for how different regions use the site very differently, and it makes some sense of previous changes, which benefit more journals used as a public platform rather than a personal diary.

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