Enough with "social networking"

[sniffnoy]

Edited next day: Various slight additions.

I am tired of hearing about "social networking" sites. The category makes no sense to me.

Take a look at LiveJournal (or DreamWidth, or equivalent). Nobody calls it a "social networking" site because it's not much used anymore outside of Russia (how the hell did that happen, anyway?[0]), but they would if it were started today. What is it, actually? Well, it's a blogging site; a blogging network. You can follow[3] other LJers, and you can even restrict your posts to only be viewable by certain groups of them if you like. (Oh, hey, you know what that sounds a lot like? Google+. Except LJ is better at comments because it actually has threaded comments instead of linear comments. More on that in a moment.) And it even makes things more social-networky by using the term "friend" instead of "follow" or "subscribe". (Terminology and appearance seem to count as much as anything for what gets labeled a "social networking" site.) It also has "communities", which I don't use, but seem relevant to the discussion. And let's not forget that for a time joining required an invite!

(And let's not forget that while I speak of LJ, there were other such sites at the time besides its clones -- remember Xanga? They'd call that a "social networking" site today too; it leaned even more in that direction than LJ, IIRC, though it used the term "subscribe". And even before LJ there was OpenDiary, though I'm just reading that off WP and don't know how exactly it worked.)

OK. So LJ's a blogging network. What's Twitter? To use their own terms, a microblogging network. Right, I mean let's talk about what these sites actually *do*. What was MySpace? Well I avoided it, but as I understand it, it was a network of easy-to-setup-and-make personal home pages, with some blogging/commenting features, with "friending" controlling access rather than being following (though I guess it must have been subscription too with the blogging parts of the site). What's Facebook? I don't know, it's a goddamned mess[4]. What's Google+? It's LJ but with linear comments and a "real name" policy in imitation of Facebook.

(Why is Google+'s real name policy controversial while Facebook's isn't? I can't help but think that it might be because while they can call it a "social networking" site, going by what it actually does, it's a blogging site, and that's what people are using it as, since they aren't using LJ/DW/etc anymore. Or perhaps it's because while it seems to be intended for most people (like Facebook), it seems in practice it's been taken up by internet people, and internet people want pseudonyms. By the way, despite its claim to be an imitator of Facebook, it actually leaves out what I think is Facebook's most important feature -- the ability to post on someone else's wall, i.e., to make a post which is explicitly directed to someone else but which everyone can see. It also just doesn't resemble Facebook very much.)

I don't know about most of these other "social networking" sites that WP lists but some of them sound essentially like networks of message boards or discussion sites. (And some of them are pretty dubious. Tumblr? YouTube?)

There. With the exception of Facebook, which is its own crazy beast and hardly even resembles its older incarnations, these are what these sites actually do. Now can we stick to talking about that?

-Harry

[0]Well, now there are ads, so that's a pretty good reason to use DW instead these days. (I always forget what it looks like to the non-registered.) But I'm pretty sure the ads didn't happen until later.
[3]Equivalently: "subscribe to". I'll use these terms interchangeably.
[4]Here is what I use Facebook for: Reading other people's posts/discussions; using it as a directory of personal info / contact info, both to read others' and to list my own, while controlling who can see it[5]; and posting on other people's walls (more on this in a moment). Posting on my own I only do rarely, when I want to direct something to more than one person, or when I'm making a general announcement that I want as many people as possible to see. Otherwise I save it for Twitter or here. (By the way, you know why originally signed up for Facebook? To poke people. I am entirely serious. In particular, I thought it would be funny to poke jonpin.)
[5]This is important -- I have various public profiles on the web, anyone can find how to contact me by email or AIM or XMPP, but only if you're a friend on Facebook will you be able to find e.g. my phone number. I suppose Google+ probably does this too, which I suppose makes it a bit more Facebook-like, but it seems so few people list *any* contact info on Facebook these days. Damned annoying.

Comments

[pklemica]

A few years back, a Russian company (I believe it was called Six Apart?) bought LiveJournal. Bit by bit, most of their offices moved to Russia, and I imagine a lot more Russian-based ads for LJ started running on other sites. Along with that, around that time a lot of people panicked that the sale would mean a major change in privacy policy, user abilities, licensing/ownership of content posted, or even large scale deletions - a lot of American users jumped ship around that time, or in the massive outages that occurred in the following months. That is how it became primarily a Russian site, I think!

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Well, Six Apart isn't Russian; looking it up, they sold LJ to SUP (which is Russian) in 2007. But I think you have it backwards -- why a Russian company? Because if you're talking about "serious" blogging, LiveJournal had *already* been primarily a Russian site for a long time.

The real question, IMO, is not how LJ ended up "dead" (these things tend to happen) but how nothing similar rose in its place. Well, OK, that's easy -- nothing suitable and well-known was around at the time. Nowadays people seem to agree that that Dreamwidth is the proper successor, but what was it back then, GreatestJournal? But back then it wasn't like *everybody's* jumping ship, and when that happens, or there's no one successor, the loss of having everyone on one network kind of kills the whole thing. And barring disaster it remains hard to lure those people to a new one which is better because hey, they already have one, and, y'know, network effects.

But eventually it must happen that it becomes consensus that the site is "dead" and people don't make accounts there or at its imitators, which leaves room for someone new to step in and get the newcomers. Right? So rather to me the question is why has it taken so *long* for something similar to step in now and see serious uptake. (Well, to the extent that G+ has seen serious uptake.) And then they don't even do threaded comments! :P

[jonpin.livejournal.com]

1) I don't know how, when, or why, but yes LJ is dead. Every month I get 1-2 spam comments from the tumbleweeds.
2) I think Google+'s real name policy is "controversial" if it is (I haven't signed up 'cause I don't care) for a couple reasons:
[a] Facebook's is not enforced*
[b] If Google's is enforced, it is so with the sledgehammer that is all of your Google accounts.
3) While I can't say I remember your reason for joining Facebook, that sounds quite believable. Upon gmail-searching, all evidence I can see is a post from just after PROMYS where you suggest a poke-war**
4) I can believe Tumblr. It's basically a blogging community for the people younger than us. It seems like half of the current BCA population has one, and at its heart is blogging/journaling with an incredibly awkward commenting system.
5) it seems so few people list *any* contact info on Facebook these days. Damned annoying. A lot of people don't quite get that there's a gap between "my phone number isn't posted" and "EVERYONE CAN FIND MY PHONE NUMBER".

* Somewhat related, I am highly annoyed by the way Facebook name changes are not acknowledged in any way, such that someone who changes their name and profile pic (to something that's not a face) is not recognizable as the same person anymore (i.e. you don't get a "Molly K----" has changed her name to "Miri R----" on your news feed; just everything she's ever done is now attributed to the new name).
** Also I reread some other parts of your 2005 archive, and I do not recall ever before hearing the Andrew HONEY IN MY MOTHERFUCKING NOSE! story. I can practically hear Mr. Sayres roll his eyes.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

2) I think Google+'s real name policy is "controversial" if it is (I haven't signed up 'cause I don't care) for a couple reasons:
[a] Facebook's is not enforced*
[b] If Google's is enforced, it is so with the sledgehammer that is all of your Google accounts.

Good points. I'm not on Google+ either, but I read HN so it keeps coming up.

3) While I can't say I remember your reason for joining Facebook, that sounds quite believable.

Well, I wouldn't have stated it! :D

4) I can believe Tumblr. It's basically a blogging community for the people younger than us. It seems like half of the current BCA population has one, and at its heart is blogging/journaling with an incredibly awkward commenting system.

I guess that's so.

A lot of people don't quite get that there's a gap between "my phone number isn't posted" and "EVERYONE CAN FIND MY PHONE NUMBER".

By "a gap" do you mean "options that exist in that gap"?

Somewhat related, I am highly annoyed by the way Facebook name changes are not acknowledged in any way, such that someone who changes their name and profile pic (to something that's not a face) is not recognizable as the same person anymore (i.e. you don't get a "Molly K----" has changed her name to "Miri R----" on your news feed; just everything she's ever done is now attributed to the new name).

Agreed!

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Although, hold on, it must be enforced to some extent. Like people do use name-like things, rather than handles. I guess it matters what you pseudonymity for -- do you just want people to not be able to identify you with an RL person, or you actually want to be recognized as such-and-such person on the internet? I guess if you only want the former it's fine, but it's still a problem for the latter. Though I guess most of the whole row about this has been about the former. And I guess you can just list your handle in your profile and let it come up in search.

[jonpin.livejournal.com]

Well one of my friends on Facebook is a person who goes by the username "Bukharin" on the website Fark. And his name on Facebook is "Bukharin on Fark", and has been as long as I've been friends with him. So unless Facebook seriously thinks this guy's middle name is "on", they're not enforcing any "You must use a real name" rules. Now, that is different from a rule that you can't impersonate someone else.

And yes, that's what I mean by "a gap". That one is not required to pick one or the other.

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

All the term "social networking" means to me is: there exist people who use a website to communicate with each other, and content on the website is curated by the site's users and intended for other users to consume. In that sense, all of the sites you listed count as "social networking" in my mind; yes, that includes Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube and LJ, despite the latter's popularity predating the term.

Also, I hate to say it, but yes, I do consider LJ all but dead these days. It wasn't killed by its competitors; it was killed by bad management. The ads are really annoying (as opposed to present but unintrusive), and the server shouldn't 500 when I click on your entries' Read Comments links (like it just did, repeatedly). LJ is still widely used in the fanfic writing space, since nothing else well-known has quite the right format for it, but many of the people involved in that have paid accounts and don't notice the ads.

Worth noting: I don't use Facebook for anything other than a contact list. If I didn't use an Android phone, I wouldn't use it at all; Android makes contact info sync far too convenient for me to dispense with it. I'm perplexed sometimes when people put their phone numbers on Facebook and are then surprised when, y'know, I have their number.

What I like about Google+ is it's designed for fine-grained privacy settings down to the lowest levels. Facebook and LJ both have their lists, but they're both unintuitive messes, and Facebook has shown a disconcerting willingness to mislead its users and change the defaults under them. Google+ is designed to allow you to limit everything by so-called "Circles", which encourages you to actually think about who will see things before you post. This is a good thing for everyone--the content in my Google+ "stream" is universally of far higher quality than the content of my Facebook "feed".

Y'know, LJ is still open source. Because of that it's always had clones like GreatestJournal, uJournal, DeadJournal et al. I wonder if that code could be used to supplant it with something better?

(Side note: I actually hadn't known about DreamWidth, but now that I look at it, it looks like a better place for fandom stuff than LJ.)

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

...huh. I assumed they must have done a bit more than that... I remember them cracking down on accounts for fictional characters years ago. Though they never got my "Beastman" account, perhaps because he's a bit too obscure. :P I guess at some point they stopped caring...

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

All the term "social networking" means to me is: there exist people who use a website to communicate with each other, and content on the website is curated by the site's users and intended for other users to consume. In that sense, all of the sites you listed count as "social networking" in my mind; yes, that includes Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube and LJ, despite the latter's popularity predating the term.

But by that standard, wouldn't any message board be a "social networking" site?

Also, I hate to say it, but yes, I do consider LJ all but dead these days. It wasn't killed by its competitors; it was killed by bad management. The ads are really annoying (as opposed to present but unintrusive), and the server shouldn't 500 when I click on your entries' Read Comments links (like it just did, repeatedly). LJ is still widely used in the fanfic writing space, since nothing else well-known has quite the right format for it, but many of the people involved in that have paid accounts and don't notice the ads.

I'm wondering about the chronology, though. I was under the impression the ads didn't come till later?

What I like about Google+ is it's designed for fine-grained privacy settings down to the lowest levels. Facebook and LJ both have their lists, but they're both unintuitive messes, and Facebook has shown a disconcerting willingness to mislead its users and change the defaults under them. Google+ is designed to allow you to limit everything by so-called "Circles", which encourages you to actually think about who will see things before you post. This is a good thing for everyone--the content in my Google+ "stream" is universally of far higher quality than the content of my Facebook "feed".

LJ's groups seem pretty straightforward to me. Do they actually differ from circles much at all? (Facebook's lists/groups seem to be obviously quite different.)

(Side note: I actually hadn't known about DreamWidth, but now that I look at it, it looks like a better place for fandom stuff than LJ.)

I think Dreamwidth is generally considered the proper successor these days, for what little that's worth. :) Looking it up it seems it was made by some of the people who worked on LJ itself. And they finally got rid of the stupid "friend" terminology, instead having entirely separate subscription and access lists... meanwhile GreatestJournal is apparently truly dead, like, not in existence anymore.