Everyone needs to read this.
Very understandable for a millennial and younger audience. I remember multiple apps and web services turn from cheap useful tools into crap. Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, every food delivery app were all great at one point until the late stage capitalism machine hits. They all destroy themselves to hit profitability targets that no company can achieve.
The thing is most would be very profitable companies if the executive wing wasn’t so damn greedy trying to eek out the highest salary and bonus possible so they can have that new shiny gold watch and fancy car to impress their “friends”. It’s human greed, plain and simple, and it’s not limited only to social media companies.
Exactly. People feel the need to get every last cent out of it as fast as possible. Destroying it
That was a great read, I’d never heard of Prodigy, but its sad how since the beginning of the internet, companies have been trying to monetize community and just end up destroying it.
Damn, that was actually really good. I’m not as old as the writer here, but I did experience a lot of what they describe. And it’s almost funny, that they perfectly describe, again, what’s going on with Reddit and us coming here to places like this, even before it happened. Because it has happened before, and it will continue to happen again.
This writing is a little too emotional, but I understand what it is trying to say. I think it is always someone’s emotions that make something newer than it is now.
Yeah I would have loved more concrete examples, but looking at the reaction here I feel like the author is just channeling what a lot of early web users feel nowadays.
This was a fantastic read, thank you for sharing it!
I was never on LiveJournal, but I remember spending a lot of time on all sorts of random websites in the 90s and early 00s. Many hosted on Geocities, or Tripod, often with free forum software of some sort, making hundreds of tiny little communities. And over time, each one disappeared.
The fediverse gives me hope; it definitely has its problems, but fundamentally no single person owns the whole thing. Individual corners may come and go, but the network will remain, and that’s awesome.
Yeah that’s something I’m really excited to see come out of Rexxit is the (hopeful) revival of smaller communities. Or at least larger communities that aren’t owned by one corporation that neds to profit off of said users.
That was a long read but very good. It pretty much encapsulates how I feel about most things right now. Websites, game/movie/TV franchises, public spaces, even nostalgia itself. They all get squeezed dry until everyone hates them and then they are discarded.
I thought this was just going to be ‘The Enshiftification of TikTok’ again but it became so much more (and as an added bonus was made 1 month before that article.)
fuck all these peopleDoctorow links to Valente’s essay in that article! 👍
Oh, you’re right! Forgive me for not bothering to look at every single link though when the first one was a wikipedia article to ‘jedi blue’ haha
Damn, I balked at the length then found myself at the end. Her anger is my spirit animal.
Great article. Damn, I miss the glory days of Livejournal
It really was so valuable in its heyday.
When the Russia thing happened circa 2016, I copied mine to Dreamwidth and while it’s been great it’s also pretty lonely. Basically no one in my circle updates anymore; maybe two or three friends read my stuff.
But I’m never going to stop. My whole adult life is recorded on Dreamwidth; I started my LJ the month I graduated from high school, and 22 years later I’m still blathering, just on DW now with no one to interact with. (The loneliness is mostly a result of me making a decision ~15 years ago to limit my LJ friends list to people I actually knew offline, so at this point the number of people-I-know-offline who have any interest in regularly updating DW can be rounded down to zero.) (But it still bums me out and I dream of a Dreamwidth Renaissance.)
I stopped using LJ long before that, so I didn’t know anything about the Russian stuff until fairly recently. A RL friend told me about Dreamwidth and I immediately moved all my stuff over to there… though it’s private and I have no friends.
So many of my years are recorded in that journal… I would be absolutely destroyed if I lost all of it. I met my husband through LJ. I wrote about losing my mom on LJ. My entries are so so special to me. Even the cringey teenage angst! I go through them every once in a while just to remember how far I’ve come and how much I’ve changed from the person who wrote those entries.
There’s also tools you can use to make local downloads of your LJ posts. I did that with all of mine, so I have them stored away as a series of per-month html files of all my posts.
This is so beautiful and it makes me ache.
I never knew the story behind the downfall of LiveJournal until now. It’s eerie to me how you can draw these direct lines between the continuous cycle in digital spaces and the state of the offline world today.
Great piece!
Thank you so much for linking that, I loved it, and it seems so relevant as we start up in this new oasis!
This is a great article. I’m gently, slowly crawling out of the cave I’ve been hiding in. For a few years now I’ve kept away from all social media. I got freaked by a revelation that all of the techno joy I had growing up for the amazing new tools of the internet, was built on shady foundations. From my cave I have witnessed these horrors. I crave the community, and the connection, though, and so am tentatively taking measured steps. Starting here, maybe mastodon… we’ll see. Hope to see some of you along the way.
Welp, felt that in my bones. Excellent piece, very much enjoyed it. I share the perspective in that I’m only a couple or so years younger.
