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Age poll!

I wasn't planning on reposting this, but looking at the results it was SEVENTY PERCENT people who just follow me on dreamwidth, and I was curious to know if that's a fair representation of the proportion of my readers who engage with my posts, or if reposting would catch a bunch of folk on faster paced sites like tumblr and twitter who missed it the first time.

So if you already did the poll, you're set! And there's even odds you were born in the 1980s ;)

From a twitter conversation with Ravenari/Pia since it seemed relevant to here.

So Pia was complaining about a thing I also find annoying: people saying they want "something like lj" when dreamwidth is right here. But I realised while I was replying to them that what a lot of people actually seem to want is livejournal as they experienced it ten years ago.

The issue isn't just that lj was more active at it's height than dreamwidth is now, though that is absolutely part of it. I mean I have plenty of people to follow on dreamwidth, and get a moderate amount of comments. But it's mostly new friends I made on dreamwidth, and I post the sort of stuff that will get strangers with similar tastes to follow me. Most people on social media are more passive consumers, which makes it harder to make friends, especially since dreamwidth tends to lack the sort of active communities livejournal had where you can just show up and say I LOVE [INTEREST] and find people to squee with.

But the issue is also that dreamwidth can't provide a, say, 35 year old fan in 2018 with the experience of being 25 in 2008, with the friends and emotions they had then. Especially not when those experiences are being overlaid with a rosy glow of nostalgia. Nothing can provide that, which I also think fuels some of the more bitter anti-tumblr rants from older fans (but not all. Tumblr is genuinely pretty awful in a lot of ways) Being an older fan/blogger can be great, but it's not the same as being a young one, especially for people with full time jobs.

There's also the fact that a lot of people who were happy enough with lj back when it was new and shiny have gotten used to the sort of easy image and post creation and sharing offered by tumblr etc, and would now feel frustrated on dreamwidth. Those people will genuinely be happier on something like Imzy or Pillowfort that combines lj-clone features with tumblr-esque image posting and reblogging. Well, if any of those sites...lasted...(MAYBE PILLOWFORT WILL BE THE ONE. YOU NEVER KNOW)

All that said: if you genuinely do just want something like livejournal but without as many Issues, dreamwidth is pretty great!

EDIT: A factor I didn't think of but that a few people have mentioned is how much more fractured social media is now, everyone's stretched thin over multiple sites and so no one site gets the same focus.