rone | the problem with orkut...

... is that, since it's named after the guy who created it, you can't mock it without it sounding like you're mocking the guy. It's a bit of a conundrum (i will be sure to hereafter refer to him as Orkut and to it as orkut). Right now, it's down while he fiddles about (it is, after all, a beta service). See what Warren Ellis has to say about it. See what boutell has to say about it. What do i have to say about it? Well, its "new toy" feel is slowly fading, but perhaps the current downtime will result in new features that will reinvigorate my interest. I don't really have a need for it, but it is interesting and cool to see the networks form. I did shun Friendster because it was obviously a gimmicky site and i felt its stigma outweighed LJ's; i expect that orkut will get there, too.

Current Music: Gordian Knot - Redemption's Way

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From:

dreamcarnival.livejournal.com

does LJ have a stigma?

I mentioned to you privately what I didn't care for about friendster but I haven't seen much to complain about re: LJ. In friendster, i was in a network that didn't talk much; i was friends with one person and her friends' set; it seemed a meat market; and I couldn't really talk about anything or blog. Being able to blog is what i like about LJ, as it's slowly beginning to restore bits of my sense of self via enabling me to talk about life in a protected area without having my comments or writing style torn to pieces and twisted by jerks.

I could only cite my interests in a list in friendster, not blog (i don't think). I'm sure some people made Friendster work well for them but it did nothing for me in that brief time i tried it out. The friend who invited me is someone i talk to in email constantly so we didn't need that to communicate anyway. Orkut may be fine. If it doesn't work out for me, it will have been nice to play with a while anyway.

From:

ronebofh.livejournal.com

Oh, yes, LJ has a stigma (http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=1920). It kept me away for about a year, maybe a year and a half. I'm not saying LJ isn't useful or cool (if it weren't, i wouldn't be around), but it sure doesn't seem so to the casual observer. Then again, as a curmudgeonly Usenet old-timer (and the real old-timers scoff loudly when i say that), i don't like these fancy-schmancy portal-like sites.

I had my comments and writing style torn to pieces, twisted and publicly mocked during my early years of Usenet (and, quite often, deservedly so). Getting through that helped shape a public persona that was eventually and partially integrated into my regular personality. It is an odd process of caring what people have to say to a point where, if something you do needs fixing, you fix it, while at the same time not letting what they have to say affect you emotionally except on a fleeting basis.

From:

dreamcarnival.livejournal.com

Ah, no, the sort of comments made about me were very personal and destructive, not constructive criticism, and were done to deliberately interfere with my socializing with other people, not improve my posts; the guise of correction was no doubt present but it was crap. These were not the random Usenet attacks by people who have never chatted with you in AIM etc.; those are easy to forget about and brush off. This was stuff done by people I'd spent quality chat time with, not strangers on usenet, who manipulate social networks to hurt people.

I used to do Usenet too starting around 1994 and that was not a set of people i ever talked to privately in email. Email interaction came from dealing with message boards starting back around 1994 too, and I didn't really experience this hatemongering crap till 2002. I'm talking about a peculiarity I ran across among a very, very small number of atypical people on message boards who use the internet to affect who a person can socialize with -- very mean-spirited, abusive, insulting private and public messages twisting simple comments manipulatively to affect my image so I couldn't chat with their set of friends. (I even was flat out told by one of them I was a "scapegoat" and to just try to not react.) This was not a situation where something I "did" could be "fixed" by me because I tried pleasing these people, which was actually the first mistake, just being in the wrong place and not getting away from an unhealthy setting. It's more a situation where someone with a personal agenda has it in for you and never lets up and drags all their pals into it till you can't function among them, but it's only happened in one small situation my whole life and hopefully i will be able to avoid situations like that. Knowing which places are unhealthy for me to be and avoiding them will help in the future. There are actually just sick, childish, competitive, territorial situations out there on the internet but they're hard to picture and I'm sure you'll be fortunate and never encounter such insanity. Nothing I could have "fixed" short of totally losing my identity and doing whatever they told me to do would have solved this, and even that would have been mocked. And I don't want a public persona any more after that experience. I have no sense of self left from that. I know who I used to be and how people see me in person but on the internet the closest I have left to having any sort of identity and self esteem is my rambling in my live journal about my life, which never gets into any of that complaining about internet folks...

as for LJ's stigma, i've seen the funny "boring blog" posts before; i just don't think about it. There's a "world's most boring blog" that's pretty funny.

From:

ronebofh.livejournal.com

It's not the "boring" stuff, mostly, but people who resist typing in anything vaguely approaching English, in form or structure. Then there's the heinous colors, fonts, pictures... it's like these people thought that the layout of Wired Magazine was offensively bland. And, at the top of the list, are the typical teenaged girls who are obsessed with death, boys, or both. It's not their fault that they're teenagers, of course, but that's what has become LJ's calling card.

I suffered a bit of character assassination, including people forging posts in my name, but it doesn't seem that it was as bad as what you went through.

From:

dreamcarnival.livejournal.com

I'm sure things will be better for me in the future as I learn from experience.

RE: your usenet experience - I do remember seeing rude posts on Usenet as an observer. I didn't get involved in that. I guess you had to get a pretty tough hide to survive there and keep a steady persona. I am sure I wouldn't have been able to do that long, plus I don't like the permanent public archiving. I recall seeing astrologers bickering and insulting each other in one usenet place. I don't read stuff like that any more.

I did see what you and cdk meant about LJ after rereading that Something Awful site. I had no idea people had opinions about LJ though.

From:

wisn.livejournal.com

LJ's stigma comes from two invalid assumptions:

1) Everything on the web is intended for everybody.
2) Everything on the web is either entertaining or informative.

Add the corollary 'everything I see is addressed to me,' and you have the makings of most of Something Awful's material.

From:

opadit.livejournal.com

Oh, yes, LJ has a stigma.

I went through every last one of the somethingawful pages to see if my own lj was used as an example.

From:

kodi

LJ has a stigma, and it deserves it.* LJ is a tool, and lots of really boring, stupid people who shouldn't be trusted with a box of crayons, let alone a stylesheet, use it. Lots of other really boring, stupid people use that as an excuse to condemn everything on LJ.

* - That's the link to a random LJ, in case that's not apparent. I should confess that since I put that link in my 'open every morning at work' bookmark folder months ago, I have enjoyed exactly two of the LJs that I came across through it. And one of those two is in a language I do not understand.