Something that makes me despair about LiveJournal

[philmophlegm]

Generally I like LiveJournal and wish it was more popular. But there are one or two things that I don't like. One of those seems to be by far the most popular community on LJ - 'ohnotheydidnt .

I don't know if this works for all possible configurations of friends feeds, but on mine, there is a section on the right hand side of the page called LiveJournal Today which shows the most popular posts. Most of them (if not all) on most days will be posts in this community. Have you ever clicked on it?

If you're ever trying to convince a friend to give LJ a go, don't go near this community. It's like the worst kind of sub-tabloid celebrity gossip mixed with twitter/tumblr style extreme SJW political correctness. You rarely see a comment of more than a sentence in length. Most of the commenters seem to be illiterate. And just to top it all off, most of the userpics you'll see are animated gifs with a duration of no more than a second featuring some film star blinking or just moving slightly. No more than a second might be the attention span.

Urrgh.

Comments

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Happily, I have never seen ohnotheydidnt...

[prester-scott.livejournal.com]

Switch to one of the older style formats and you won't have to see that garbage as long as you're logged in.

[jusummerhayes.livejournal.com]

Bang on my friend. It feels like your entering some weird game show where you get rewarded for posting the most ridiculous material you can think off. For me, the best bits of Livejournal are the Friendsfeed, the ease of writing and the integration of social (a rudimentary form of dashboard). I know it will get better but in the meantime it's not the most attractive place to invite new members, particularly when you have platforms like Medium, Tumblr, Wordpress and Ello to compete with.

[matrixmann]

Notably, and shamefully, it seems to be one of the only popular communities which there's regularly written in. This and the Jpop / Kpop groups.

[slobodar.livejournal.com]

At first, I saw ONTD as some sort of guilty pleasure or one of convenient ways to stay in touch with what goes for popular culture these days. However, after a while, it became quite tiresome for most of the reasons mentioned in the original post.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not averse to celebrity gossip. It's not something that interests me especially, but it's useful to know who famous people are so that I can have a view (or have a view on whether I want to have a view). But ONTD is beyond that into something like camp bitchiness.

[tovaglia.livejournal.com]

Agree wholeheartedly! It is truly awful.

[calico-pye.livejournal.com]

Happily, I have managed to get rid of all ONTD pages; any LJs that I can't read (Cyrillic - sorry guys), or stuff that plainly if I DID read, would turn my brain cells into silt.

[purplecat]

I don't see onnotheydidn't, though I believe they are the most active community on LJ by some margin - I seem to recall at one point LJ had to reconfigure its server configurations in order to cope with the load generated by ontd. I get the impression they are actually a bit anomalous, in that you would expect the community to be on one of the more modern fashionable platforms which lean more towards graphics and ephemeral content, but somehow they are here.

I did have a friend who hung out on a sub-community of ontd dedicated to politics, but I got the impression he spent a lot of time there arguing social justice so it may have been relatively little different despite his insistence that it was a much better group.

[ertai.livejournal.com]

Hi, I just added you and totally agree.

I would actually browse their community from time to time if there was an interesting topic. I tried to join ONTD just to argue points which they were very ill-informed on (they didn't accept me). It's probably a good thing since I can't stand that community.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I've added you back!