LJ is shrinking

[lederhosen]

Via sclerotic_rings: by all available measures, LJ's active membership has been shrinking since April 2005; for instance, the 'updated in last 30 days' count is down to about 1 million now, from a peak of 1.5 million two years ago.

It doesn't look to me like this is the result of any one incident; the downwards trend is fairly gradual without any big bumps (though if you look closely at the 'last 7 days' data, you can see a power outage in November '06). It might well be that you'd see the same trend at other blog sites, for all I know, but whatever the cause it can't be making 6A very happy.

Comments

[panacea1.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm still here because I'm too lazy to go find something else to do and encourage all my friends to do it, too. That and I really don't care one way or the other about Harry Potter slashfic, or boobies in icons, or whatever the dustup is this time.

If 6A aren't happy with the decline, they should figure out how they're managing to piss their customers off, and quit doing it. That's just normal business sense.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

It's not necessarily even a matter of 6A pissing off their customers; it may just be that blogging has fallen out of fashion (which would probably be a better answer from 6A's point of view, since it means the unfashionable ones would stay rather than shifting to another blog provider).

[panacea1.livejournal.com]

In that vein it may also be a reiteration of the text-only to text-plus to everything-but-text contiuum that should be v. familiar to anyone who remembers USENET.

LJ (and other blog/journal sites) started as text, they remain primarily text (voice posts and photo scrapbooks and video imbedding notwithstanding) or at least text-based. MySpace and FaceBook, as far as I can tell, are places for semi-literate cretins to post TXT-SPK captions on photos they took with their cell phones. (I may be mistaken, I don't frequent either establishment as my first impressions were sufficiently... unimpressed.)

[tenner.livejournal.com]

I've never had a MySpace account, so I can't really comment on this, but I've gotten the same impression.

The blogging features of MySpace are poor at best. MySpace is a convenient way to produce a circa-1997 website: pictures of your dog and your friends, horrid backgrounds, no attractive web design, and no actual content. There are "forums" of a sort, but MySpace doesn't encourage sites with any structure or coherence.

That's probably why it became popular: in LJ-land you have to be literate and smart enough to put together a coherent paragraph. MySpace is more like sitting around in the mall; other people stop by, say hi, and comment on who you're with.

I don't think LJ is going anywhere in the long-term, unless it's eventually superseded by a service that's primarily text-based. I don't know about everyone else, but the text is really why I'm here.

[notasquirrel.livejournal.com]

o, i donte kno. *hard stare* ite seemz liake evreebudee ann ther dogg ar postinge theez daze.

[dogorcuton.livejournal.com]

HAY!! WASSUP?!??

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

it may just be that blogging has fallen out of fashion

I think you've hit the baby on the head. Blogging is no longer *teh* thing to do and so a lot of the hangers-on have lost interest or are jumping ship for the next big thing (which is still a moving target). People who really got into blogging or are the more professional/contentful bloggers are still around and will be for quite some time yet until something comes along to kill blogs.

[mr-figgy.livejournal.com]

Dem did do a poll asking others whether it was time to jump the LJ ship or not, but one poll from one person is not necessarily indicative of a larger trend. :) I'm likely to stay on for personal blogging, even if I create a more professional looking blog for serious journalistic purposes.

[ambitious-wench.livejournal.com]

Man, I just barely get here, and everybody's leaving?

Sh*t.

[panacea1.livejournal.com]

Not everybody, just the ones who haven't got anything to write.