Well krrrrrrrap. What to do.....
Aug. 10th, 2015 03:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceagleAs many who will never read this know (they'll never read this because they already left LJ) .... LiveJournal went through a long dis-the-members process years ago, changing things left and right and rapidly, WITHOUT listening to the cries of the dying masses. Many left...
Then things went quiet for a little while, as the dust settled. Then suddenly, and few LJ staffers actually DID start listening again, so the few of us left did have some advocates... and so a much MUCH smaller community remained, but at least we had Functionality and Advocacy again.
And now....
Wow. Now (for a few months at least, maybe about as long as you can easily see they no longer allow comments in the new NEWS threads), LJ has hardened up again, and in the last week or so it seems they have been rolling out View-and-Functionality-Breaking-Code under the auspice of getting it to "look better" on mobile devices.
Well Well, isn't that what they all say.
Whatever happened to coding so that it recognizes your browser and serves a page-set that works accordingly??
I was even able to convince some businesses to do this simple task by showing them how horrible their site looked from browser to browser.
The look itself of Feed vs Friends isn't so bad, but the functionality just so-very-greatly SUCKS. Buttons missing, new useless icons, big playschool circusclown (as others described) links, text stomping on other text, so much Wrong Wrongness.
It's disgusting.
So, what to do...?
What to do -_-
Well, there's DreamWidth... which seemed like a great idea, but they have a hard policy of not letting their Friends Page aggregator reach back further than two weeks. This would not be a problem most of the time, admittedly. But what about those times you are nostalgic and want to read further back?
Oh well.. it's one choice.
Then I see there's another one called InsaneJournal. Great choice with the name, goofballs. Maybe we should all go be Deviant artists too, ah? Srsly... the site looks ok, and a permanent account appears to be only a reasonable $30.
But then the Big Picture...
Any move made, well... would anyone else be there?
Most who I know that have left LJ went to Facebook and/or Tumblr. And Tumblr isn't really very interactive the way most people use it. I've seen some write true journal entries and take comments, but most just post linkoffs (which admittedly are often interesting), and most of the time Tumblr is LJ without Cut Tags. Remember when everyone would get pissed when you didn't use an LJ cut tag and you had more than two images in your posting?
When all is said and done, what really CAN I do? ... I've got a permanent account here, so at the very least I can still peek in and try to scrape some functionality out of it. And maybe LJ will actually fix things. Maybe. :|
I guess I'll keep trying the old peek in and see. At most LJ takes about 5 to 15 minutes anymore, what with the mega-exodus that never really recovered..
And/Or I suppose I can *gulp* force myself to wince and cringe and endure Facebook. We'll see. Gyah it's so horrible. gyah.
*sigh* -_-
====================
EDIT: P.S. I must say I am really thrilled with the vigorous response to this posting. Thanks Everyone!
Then things went quiet for a little while, as the dust settled. Then suddenly, and few LJ staffers actually DID start listening again, so the few of us left did have some advocates... and so a much MUCH smaller community remained, but at least we had Functionality and Advocacy again.
And now....
Wow. Now (for a few months at least, maybe about as long as you can easily see they no longer allow comments in the new NEWS threads), LJ has hardened up again, and in the last week or so it seems they have been rolling out View-and-Functionality-Breaking-Code under the auspice of getting it to "look better" on mobile devices.
Well Well, isn't that what they all say.
Whatever happened to coding so that it recognizes your browser and serves a page-set that works accordingly??
I was even able to convince some businesses to do this simple task by showing them how horrible their site looked from browser to browser.
The look itself of Feed vs Friends isn't so bad, but the functionality just so-very-greatly SUCKS. Buttons missing, new useless icons, big playschool circusclown (as others described) links, text stomping on other text, so much Wrong Wrongness.
It's disgusting.
So, what to do...?
What to do -_-
Well, there's DreamWidth... which seemed like a great idea, but they have a hard policy of not letting their Friends Page aggregator reach back further than two weeks. This would not be a problem most of the time, admittedly. But what about those times you are nostalgic and want to read further back?
Oh well.. it's one choice.
Then I see there's another one called InsaneJournal. Great choice with the name, goofballs. Maybe we should all go be Deviant artists too, ah? Srsly... the site looks ok, and a permanent account appears to be only a reasonable $30.
But then the Big Picture...
Any move made, well... would anyone else be there?
Most who I know that have left LJ went to Facebook and/or Tumblr. And Tumblr isn't really very interactive the way most people use it. I've seen some write true journal entries and take comments, but most just post linkoffs (which admittedly are often interesting), and most of the time Tumblr is LJ without Cut Tags. Remember when everyone would get pissed when you didn't use an LJ cut tag and you had more than two images in your posting?
When all is said and done, what really CAN I do? ... I've got a permanent account here, so at the very least I can still peek in and try to scrape some functionality out of it. And maybe LJ will actually fix things. Maybe. :|
I guess I'll keep trying the old peek in and see. At most LJ takes about 5 to 15 minutes anymore, what with the mega-exodus that never really recovered..
And/Or I suppose I can *gulp* force myself to wince and cringe and endure Facebook. We'll see. Gyah it's so horrible. gyah.
*sigh* -_-
====================
EDIT: P.S. I must say I am really thrilled with the vigorous response to this posting. Thanks Everyone!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-08-10 09:35 pm (UTC)I don't know what's happened to my friends page now. A week or two ago, I noticed the friends page didn't scale on my mobile. Surprise surprise, the feed page did, but that's god awful (and I detest web pages that load content via javascript, almost as much as I hate infinite scroll!)
Then over the weekend, /friends started redirecting to /feed on all devices. Great. They broke /friends, then took it away completely.
But then I did something in settings, I can't remember what, but the forced-feed page now has a fixed width, and all the floaty nonsense has gone away. It's not exactly pretty, but it works. I can't figure out how though, I'm sure there were two tick boxes where now there's just one, and that has no effect.
Not that, at this point, it really matters anymore :( You and one or two other people are the only reason I keep this thing around! I refuse to join the self-publicising machine that is twitter, and ditto + more ill feelings towards Facebook / Google etc.
Honestly, there's only like one person I talk to on Skype anymore and even he feels more distant these days. "Social media" has turned me almost into a e-social pariah, but I actually prefer that to the idea of constantly having to make myself heard above all the noise. That isn't friends, no matter how hard Facebook advertise it to me on TV. It's honestly shocking how many local-ish folk I thought I were friends with in some sense of the word, utterly forget you exist once you fall off the net radar du jour.
No-one does email anymore either.
no subject
Date: 2015-08-11 09:03 am (UTC)You described EXACTLY what I was seeing with the LJ bummers... :/ ... a week or two of broken Friends Page Layout, then maybe a couple days when it seemed fixed, and then NO way to get back... ;P
*hugs*
I did try checking that one remaining box that said "view in my own style on mobile" hoping it would change something here, but it didn't. I'm not trying anything else if I can help it, because I've seen the never-can-go-back effects it can have before.... *shudder*
I know a few other folks who also detest Twitter, and I'm no big fan of the Interface or the Lack of Substantive Content, but there are a few things there that are posted nowhere else, so I try to peek in .. it's infinite scroll and ads and strange awful effects when you click the wrong part of the screen though... you have to hold yourself back from wanting to punch a whole in the screen! :D
I still do email o course but it can take days to get back to it.
As for Skype, it did have a resurgence when MSoft bought it, so everyone was like "come to Skype! come to Skype!" ... but it really is basically the everyone's-idle-thing same as i.m.s, so I hardly ever go there.. AND, in the last few months I guess it's been pissing people off enough that the new happening thing seems to be "Telegram"
I blew it when I first tried it cuz it asked for my phone #, so it went crazy with spam when I first connected... ;P If I try it again, I will not be using my phone # if possible...
But all this is alongside the point.. that yeah, I sure which L.J. would follow the old adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" .. :/