[Reader-list] User interface on LiveJournal

[Kiran Jonnalagadda]

Hello all,

This is a much delayed post, and not a complete one at that. Over the 
last month I've made several observations on how UI affects the 
LiveJournal community. I'll expand on each of these over the next few 
days:

1. The <lj user="somebody"> tag on LiveJournal creates a link to a 
LiveJournal account by id. Liberal use of this tag converts what would 
normally be taken for name-dropping into a form of introduction. In 
addition, since LJ ids have no first or last name, there is only one 
way to address a person using their LJ id. This creates an egalitarian 
atmosphere for addressing other users.

2. A LiveJournal post may be edited by its author but by nobody else. 
Comments may not be edited at all. This encourages a situation where 
the post becomes an artefact that may be polished but not changed, 
while comments form throwaway discussion about the post.

3. LiveJournal provides a one-month notice period for deleted accounts 
to be revived. In practice, however, deleted accounts are rarely purged 
and may be recovered anytime. This results in cases of an owner 
deleting their account when they want to *temporarily* go offline.

4. The <lj-cut> tag breaks a post with a link to where the remaining 
text can be read. The LJ Friends page -- which is the primary way to 
track other LJ users -- honours this tag. Since long uncut posts will 
require uninterested readers to scroll too much to get past it to the 
next post, there is a culture of pulling up people who don't cut their 
posts, and a counterculture of people refusing to cut their posts just 
because some readers are fussy.

5. User pictures are critical to community on LiveJournal, 
significantly more so than on other communities that allow identifying 
icons. Userpics are used to convey not just identity but also emotion.

6. An old one: replying to a comment on LiveJournal sends an email 
notice to the writer of the previous comment and the writer of the 
post. Thanks to this, you see people attempting to reply such that they 
can talk to two people at once, and sometimes writing the same reply 
(usually "Thank you") to several people instead of saying it just once 
to all. Attempts to reply to all sometimes rub off as impersonal.

7. And perhaps the most curious one: as humans, we like ranking 
systems, especially when we come out top ranked. LiveJournal provides 
no obvious way to rank yourself against your friends, but users crave 
ranking anyway and will create pseudo structures. The most apparent of 
these is the number of comments a post gets. Some craft posts to 
attract replies, some goad on discussion within their posts, some get 
accused of comment whoring. Whichever form it takes, number of comments 
is a Big Deal on LiveJournal. To a lesser extent, there is also count 
of the 'Friend Of' list. Friend relationships on LiveJournal need not 
be symmetric, so you see people negotiating adding each other. Nishant 
Shah of CSCS adds a third observation: people asking for their journals 
to be rated on two of the major journal review communities, despite 
(perhaps because of) most journals receiving very critical reviews.


And a couple non-LiveJournal related observations:

1. Discussions revive as they jump between disjointed communities. UI 
plays a key role in keeping communities disjointed.

2. The concept of "tags" as used at Flickr.com and del.icio.us creates 
a new form of community participation that is quite unlike other forms.

-- 
Kiran Jonnalagadda
http://www.pobox.com/~jace