[Reader-list] What ails the Sarai Reader List?
Kiran Jonnalagadda
jace at pobox.com
Sat Aug 27 11:58:37 IST 2005
Dear Punam,
Thanks for writing back. Since some people commented my presentation
appeared like a sales pitch for LiveJournal and that I was
overemphasising form over other contributing factors, I'd like to
clarify a few things:
The LiveJournal statistics page [1] gives us some interesting
information:
1. Of those users who declared their gender, 67.4% are female, with a
peak age of 17 years.
2. Of those who declared their country, the US ranks first with
3,818,375 journals. I summed up the distribution-by-country from the
directory [2], and the rest of the world has 1,233,298 journals. The
US outnumbers the rest of the world 3:1.
From this I suppose I can claim that the stereotypical LiveJournal
user is an American female teenager. To put it in the uncharitable
words of some others, hysterical teenage girls whining about their
little worlds. (Unfortunately, I can't find the source of these
sentiments, having seen them too often to bother keeping track.)
[1] http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml
[2] http://www.livejournal.com/directory.bml
And yet, of my 300-odd LiveJournal correspondents in the indicated
period, none of them fit this profile. My correspondents are
predominantly Indian. In several years using LiveJournal, I've rarely
encountered the stereotype. There is something deeper to LiveJournal
than is apparent to the outsider. To dismiss LiveJournal as merely a
blogging service provider with a better commenting system is to see
all forest, no trees.
I came to realise that LiveJournal with it's 8 million users works
like one single large community where every user gets to see only the
parts they want to see. It's much like living in a city of 8 million
where you're not required to be familiar with everyone else, except
there is no limitation of geography online. Just as a larger city
battles crowding with better infrastructure, LiveJournal manages
great volumes of traffic without completely crowding out the mind.
LiveJournal has it's limitations, some of them serious, but what I'm
interested in are the parts that are well done.
This is where I think there are lessons to be learnt and applied to
the Reader List to help manage it's growing traffic. This isn't a
problem unique here -- it affects any email-based list.
Let's look at the types of traffic this list has. Off the top of my
head:
Announcements, Independent Fellows postings, General discussions, and
responses to all these.
The independent fellows cover a large breadth of topics that not
everyone is interested in. An individual already facing email
overload may choose to follow only topics that are of particular
interest to him or her. In this case, there is no option to ignore
the rest. Even if you figure out who's discussing interesting topics
and take to ignoring the rest, there is still effort involved in
reading the names and deleting the unwanted posts. Sure, you could
set email filters to discard all posts from certain individuals, but
then you also miss their responses to topics of interest.
On the other hand, if the list is split into several on the basis of
topics, membership is also fragmented. List boundaries are "hard"
boundaries. If you're not on a list, it's hard to check on that
list's postings even occasionally. If you didn't receive a posting
via email, you can't respond to it without breaking threading (both
in the mail client and web archive), making it hard for others to
follow your response.
The interesting thing about LiveJournal is how it manages to define
soft boundaries between its millions of sub-communities. Let me try
to explain:
At the core of it, LiveJournal provides personal journals. Every user
on LJ has a journal that they may or may not choose to update. This
journal has a hard boundary. It contains your posts and nothing else.
Either people see your journal, or they don't see it.
At the second level, LJ provides an aggregator (called the Friends
list). You select other accounts that you're interested in, and the
latest updates from all are shown in a single page. LJ now resembles
an RSS aggregator or the linearity of the email client, except there
are no unread flags. There's no count of messages left to be read,
just the length of the scrollbar. This level also has the problem
that you will not see postings from people you didn't choose to read
-- there's no way to discover a newcomer.
At the third level, LJ provides shared journals, called communities.
For the sake of avoiding confusion, I'll refer to these as shared
journals. The crucial thing about shared journals is, if you add one
to your Friends list, you no longer control who posts to your Friends
page (which in some sense is the community you defined for yourself).
This has two effects: you discover new people via shared journals,
and shared journals evolve policing systems to determine who or what
topic is allowed there. Unlike the Friends list (where you silently
add or remove people), shared journal policing tends to be a public
spectacle, with moderators with approve, delete and ban powers who
have trouble participating fairly in a heated discussion, and
(sometimes) social processes for appointing moderators.
Finally, at the fourth level, LJ allows threaded commenting on a
post. Who comments? The intersection of people who have something to
say and who saw the post. The latter is determined by the community
of people who chose to read this person or shared journal, the
"Friend Of" list. This too is a place to meet new people, more
prominently than at the third level. This is also where
representation of identity via the user picture becomes important.
You may not track a particular person, but you may see them often
because they comment in a journal you read. The picture serves as an
important visual identity (as I've explained in another post, most
people notice pictures, not user ids). People tend to use pictures to
signify emotion, but this is not system enforced. This is a tendency
of users and indicative of the atmosphere they've come to expect.
Notice that we now have two areas with hard boundaries, the personal
journal and the shared journal, and two with soft boundaries, the
Friends list and the Friend Of list. The latter two are private to
each user. They're soft because their contents, shared journals and
comments, keep leading to new areas beyond their boundaries. You
don't have to explore, but if you must, exploration is effortless.
(I must credit here Nishant Shah at CSCS in Bangalore whose thesis is
that the independence of sub-groups is important to the health of the
larger group. He made me aware of the parallel between his research
and my observations of LiveJournal.)
So how can this help the Reader List? Migrating everyone to
LiveJournal doesn't make sense. Communities rarely survive such
transplantation, and there is no guarantee that the LiveJournal
experience is suitable for the sort of discussion the Reader List
aims to foster.
What I think is necessary is to understand the abstracts that drive
the LiveJournal experience and look at how they may be adapted to the
Reader List. I'm not sure how this may be achieved, since the
limitations of email are hard to transgress. This is what I'm
currently engaged in understanding.
Kiran
On 25-Aug-05, at 1:11 AM, punam zutshi wrote:
> Greetings!
>
> I think the archival problem is an important one to highlight.The
> Search feature for locating authors and keywords in subject headings
> would be a real boon.
>
> I am not so sure that the question of identity ( supported with
> photos) bothers me. Call me old fashioned I also baulk at the listing
> of emotions and other such gambits.That's great for blogspots but a
> reader list?????
>
> What is the problem with a thousand peering while one responds? Yes,
> one selects the option of a direct response to a list mailer in any
> case.
>
> A quick glance at the slides of your presentation tell me that the
> form is important most certainly, but is it also the case that there
> genuinely is a lack of comprehension or interest in some rather than
> other mails? I respond to this mail of yours as it seems to do with
> Our List, but I was too mystified by your earlier postings!
>
> Is the list crumbling because people would rather lurk than respond
> or post? Is there a profile of Live Journal Readership as compared to
> the Sarai List?
>
> Yes, but your presentation achieves something very interesting : I am
> sure a lot of us will want to figure out a little more about what
> Live Journal is like!!
>
> Punam
>
> On 8/24/05, Kiran Jonnalagadda <jace at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> The Independent Fellows are at Sarai in Delhi for the workshop. I
>> made my presentation today on how form shapes online community. For
>> the sake of illustration, I picked a familiar community, the reader
>> list itself.
>>
>> From empirical evidence, I was aware that several readers have
>> trouble keeping up with the volume of the list. I made a contrast
>> with LiveJournal, another community system which manages to scale to
>> a far higher volume of traffic before it becomes a burden, looking
>> for things they do that the reader list could do with.
>>
>> Due to time constraints, I could not go into as much detail as I'd
>> have liked to. Here are my slides: http://jace.seacrow.com/misc/
>> sarai-
>> rl-lj
>>
>> This has been a great opportunity and I thank everyone who was
>> involved, especially those present today. This was the best response
>> I've had to a presentation yet.
>>
>> I will continue exploring how form shapes community and post to the
>> list as appropriate.
>>
>> --
>> Kiran Jonnalagadda
>> http://www.pobox.com/~jace
>>
>>
>> _________________________________________
>> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
>> Critiques & Collaborations
>> To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with
>> subscribe in the subject header.
>> List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
>>
>>
>
>
--
Kiran Jonnalagadda
http://www.pobox.com/~jace
More information about the reader-list
mailing list