See, now I'm just annoyed

[conuly]

All through the past twelve days or so, I've been sharing those invite codes I carefully collated, mostly just for the heck of it, not because I really feel that deeply about one site over another, and partly because I was - and still am - upset at the serious lack of communication going on.

Of course, I still read comments and my friends page primarily on LJ for the same reason everybody else does - that's where everybody is. I'm aware that this is a self-fulfillingly vicious circle, but it is what it is. I don't know of any way to syndicate my whole friends list over to DW and be able to read FLocked posts from here, and that's, you know, a bit of a big issue. (Especially since very few of you replied that you have accounts here you actively use.)

And you're never going to convince people to move over to Dreamwidth because nobody's here and you can't import communities in their entirety (probably just as well, do we WANT ONTD?), and so most arguments are "Well, LJ management sucks", to which there's no argument, but seriously?

At any rate, here's the thing. I check my comments through the recent comments page on LJ, and I've, uh, recently started doing that on Dreamwidth as well. And do you know what I noticed? What really irks me? On Dreamwidth, on the recent comments page, if there's a reply to a comment I've made there's a little asterisk to let me know.

You know, it's little things like that. Why don't people say things like "Well, Dreamwidth has a higher character limit for entries and comments" or "Well, Dreamwidth has these nifty cut tags that let you view cuts in the same page you're already on" or "Well, Dreamwidth has enabled you to make a poll that lets people pick, say, three out of five choices"? Why it it just "LJ management sucks", all the time?

Comments

[mc776]

The asterisk irks you?

[conuly]

No, the lack of talking about it irks me.

[conuly]

No, the lack of talking about it irks me.

[mc776]

Understood.

When I first got onto DW I was definitely doing the "holy crap guys check out all the interesting stuff here" spiel. Not a single person switched.

Then I pointed out all the evil shit LJ was doing. I got a few maybes.

What finally got people asking me for invite codes: FaceFail caused me to import my entire journal here and to stop crossposts to LJ, and I made an announcement to that effect.

I think the problem is the same encountered by Bentham here. :/

[pne]

I don't know of any way to syndicate my whole friends list over to DW and be able to read FLocked posts from here

I'm told this has been in the works for quite a while. (As I understand it, one of the things to consider is how to do this without getting banned by LiveJournal for requesting data too often.)

I believe this was one of the things on mark's plate; I'm not sure whether he's still working on it, whether he handed it over to someone else (such as Fu), or whether the project got dropped on the floor.

I think the project had a name something along the lines of "cross-site friends list reading".

[dragonwolf]

I've never reached either site's post character limit, but as far as I know, DW doesn't have a character limit on their comments, which is awesome. I've flubbed a number of comments on LJ because I didn't want to have three comments on the same topic, so I tried to be concise and half my points were lost because of it.

You can actually import communities to an extent. While you can't import the posts (because they're the property of the posters), you can talk to the DW management about a sort of "bulk invite code" that a community can use to transfer everyone over.

And about nifty things, how about more avatar pics on free accounts? Or the general lack of ads, period? Or the ability to create RSS feeds as a free user?

[conuly]

I often hit LJ's character limit on posts, because I post NYTimes articles in full.

[dragonwolf]

So now I'm curious, what is LJ's post limit?

[conuly]

http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=165

[dragonwolf]

Alrighty then.

[conuly]

And it's just shown up on LJ's suggestions.

[siderea]

Why it it just "LJ management sucks", all the time?

Actually, I have an answer to that, but it's a huge big thing fermenting in my head trying to turn into an essay post, and unfortunately way, way, way in the back of the queue behind a lot of other fermenting posts. It has to do with the concept of Quality, as Pirsig discusses in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and how very, very bad we (English speakers? Westerners? Humans? Dunno about the scope of "we") are at talking about Quality. I don't know if it's impoverished vocabulary, cultural blind-spot, intrinsic to the problem, or what, but it plagues, like, all discussions of all software ever. It is actually a huge big industrial problem in all forms of software development (and is the underlying problem which cause to arise the expression "kludge"). We -- the general public, laymen we -- cannot seem to say of one piece of software (such as a social website) is superior to another without having to resort to itemizing specific features as examples.

And that, in turn, is a big problem, because the very best and most important "features" are the best and most important because of how subtle they are; they are there to facilitate "invisibility" of the software, ease of use, handiness and ready flow, and as such background the software qua software, to foreground the user's experience of their task. As Kathy Sierra might put it, using the very best word processor, you wouldn't be conscious of the wonderfulness of the word processor, you would be conscious only of the document you were writing. So the features that do that, by their nature, promote their own invisibility as features. They have anti-salience.

So how would you remember them to tell other people? A typical DW advocate can easily find themselves in one of these two situations:

1)
DW-user: "DW is so much more pleasant to use!"
LJ-user: "Why is that?"
DW-user: "The user interface is just much nicer to use."
LJ-user: "What do you mean? Nicer how?"
DW-user: *tries to think of an example, but can't* "Uh, I can't explain. You should just try it."*

2)
DW-user: "DW is so much more pleasant to use!"
LJ-user: "Why is that?"
DW-user: "The user interface is just much nicer to use. For instance, on Dreamwidth, on the recent comments page, if there's a reply to a comment I've made there's a little asterisk to let me know."
LJ-user: "You want me to leave my friends list for an asterisk?"**
DW-user: "It's not just that. That was just an example. The entire site is like that. All these little things that make stuff more pleasant."
LJ-user: "But I don't need my journaling experience to be more pleasant. LJ is fine for my needs, and what really matters is my flist."

(In (2) the LJ-user is saying "I can't imagine that I would want a more pleasant journalling experience badly enough to risk disrupting my flist relationships.")

[* For the record once, I successfully used this general approach, illustrated with a known-personally-useful metaphor in a discussion of Why Would Anyone Pay For A Mac, and apparently got the person to Switch.]

[** The answer to this question is, "YES! IT'S THE BEST ASTERISK EVER! IT'S A LIFE-CHANGING -- NAY, WORLD-CHANGING -- ASTERISK!"]

[conuly]

That's an interesting comment. I don't know if I can think of a better reply than that, but it's definitely light-shedding.