Social media inward looking wankery

[matgb]

Couldn't resist writing this one up: In post-Soviet Russia, President blogs you. The President of Russia has a Livejournal (blog_medvedev) and updates it (or gets someone to, anyway) fairly regularly.

There's been a bit of talk recently that LJ was doomed to die. Some have even said that Dreamwidth is going to kill it off by fragmenting it. I never thought the latter was even possible, because the whole point of Dreamwidth is to maintain interoperability between the sites. Sure, it's not fully working yet, but it's what, day 5 of open beta? This isn't a Google style web 2.0 perpetual beta, it's a proper full on beta test.

But given that the most important politician in Russia is using LJ to blog, I'd say the site has a future, or at least, SUP has a constant revenue stream. The thing is, the money and interest is coming from Russia, the dev team is now mostly based in Russia, and the Russia model of using LJ just isn't what I want to see emphasised. It's great that it's the biggest blogging site over there by a long way, but it's broadcast model, not conversation model.

Ah well. I'm supposed to be writing up what's wrong with the OpenID implementation on both LJ and DW, but I keep getting distracted.

Short version: On both sites, if you haven't validated your email address you're treated as an anonymous user. Which means that people can give you access to their private posts, but you can't comment there if they've disabled anonymous comments.

Worse, even if you've got a validated email and you've commented there before, if they've disabled anonymous comments you can't log in from the comment form, whereas a user with an account can. That's really bad from an end user perspective.

DW at least has an excuse, 5 days into public beta and still frantically updating the code base. LJ? First site, worldwide, to support OpenID as a provider and for end users. Despite it now being common and the UI being considerably updated, LJ has barely touched what they've done. They don't even provide links to the email validator when you login.

That's pathetic. Hopefully the competitive pressure from DW will push them into making more improvements, like it has done elsewhere. Competition is, after all, a good thing, and LJs been stuck in its own little rut with nowt but a bunch of clones for too long.

Meh, rambling. Time to go do something constructive.

Comments

[foxfirefey]

On both sites, if you haven't validated your email address you're treated as an anonymous user. Which means that people can give you access to their private posts, but you can't comment there if they've disabled anonymous comments.

Worse, even if you've got a validated email and you've commented there before, if they've disabled anonymous comments you can't log in from the comment form, whereas a user with an account can. That's really bad from an end user perspective.

I think one concern here is spam.

It's exceedingly easy to set up an open OpenID server with a mailserver and use it to get validated OpenIDs that could then be used to spam. Whilelisting domains won't work, either--if it wasn't so dreadfully easy to set up zombie LJs this page wouldn't be half spam.

This might be something that gets fixed after we have better spam solutions--we actually have a guy who has contacted us, interested in working on that.

We might need to have a way to validate OpenID users beyond the email. Like first comments go into a queue that's approved by our spam team, or something.

(Regular disclaimer, I'm not official, yada yada.)

[matgb]

I don't think that's actually valid though—for a start, OpenID still get URLs stripped out in the same way as anons, and spammers would need to set up a dedicated LJ/DW platform bot to do it.

Second, friends that use OpenID validation for their open blog comments say it helps cut down on spam (friends on Wordpress mostly).

Pretty sure the OpenID spec allows for transfer of email address with user permission? If LJ/DW could get that sorted out, it'd be a lot easier—and I reckon you could always whitelist/blacklist OpenID providers.

Mean to get something specific written up on this, but caramel_betty has posted on this this morning, with some good solid concerns about the site copy and similar:
http://caramel-betty.livejournal.com/147145.html

Don't know if it's you or rho I should point that towards? I still have Suggestions open to summarise it to, but haven't managed yet.

[rho]

Have had a glance over this, and there seem to be some legitimate concerns there. I'll have a proper look at it tomorrow when I'm actually awake.

[foxfirefey]

Not all spam contains links! Additionally, the OpenID is itself a link. If they put the content they actually want to link to at the address of the OpenID, they'll have achieved increasing their SEO.

Second, friends that use OpenID validation for their open blog comments say it helps cut down on spam (friends on Wordpress mostly).

It does help, yes. But it's not sufficient in and of itself--I think people running individual WordPress blogs have advantages that a big site doesn't, in that they are only valuable targets in aggregate, and most WordPress blogs don't have OpenID built in. If WordPress blogs started to have it, the auto-spam tools like Xrumer would build it in to their system. Spammers wouldn't have to build a dedicated LJ/DW bot--they could autoregister using any number of OpenID services that normal people also use.

Site copy's rho, yes!

[matgb]

If they put the content they actually want to link to at the address of the OpenID, they'll have achieved increasing their SEO

*cough* SEM.

SEO is, if used correctly, referring to internal site jiggery pokery to make it accessible and search engine friendly. SEM is trying to give it a higher PR or specific keyword.

but you're right—if people don't delete dodgy spam comments, and I know it's a bigger issue on dead journals, not yet a problem here.

But also once a spamming OpenID is caught, a site wide removal happens, right?

[fearmeforiampink]

I don't know tha the competition will do very much; essentially it depends on how many people actually ship out to Dreamwidth.

Speaking of doing something constructive; I don't suppose you'd be able to find a video of a decent Lib Dem political speech/something along those lines? Or a audio recording. I have a desire to do some kinetic typography again...

[matgb]

You mean like you did for the Warren Ellis thing? That'd be cool.

I don't off the top of my head, but I know a man who would, I'll mail him later, is your email still firstname@surname.org?

[fearmeforiampink]

Aye.

Either just text, or text alongside the video, if that'd work. Or something else along those lines.

I've been meaning to do more of the kinetic typography stuff for ages, and this strikes me as something interesting and useful.

[fearmeforiampink]

Prodity?

[foxfirefey]

It doesn't have to be competition, hell, it could be cooperation! I would love it if they were able to take some of the patches DW's made, like the one that adds the preview button to QuickReply. They can! It's open source!

I know that as time goes by, that's going to get harder and harder with how much DW is changing the codebase, but right now I sure have a couple wishes for "please take this!"

[matgb]

Oh, agreed, completely—including some of the stuff I mention above about what LJ does more wrong than DW. But competitive cooperation is frquently the best outcome—look at what MS is doing with IE7/8/9—no way they'd be half as good without the impetus from Fx and Opera. And Chrome has pushed Fx into sorting out its JS system, etc.

Sometimes setting up in competition is the best way of sorting out a problem with the original, and giving customers genuine options is good—I really like D&M's model of wanting to stay small but interoperative, that's cool.

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

I can't see LJ cooperating, as a business model based around advertising isn't advanced by encouraging your users to visit the competition. TV stations do not mention the great show that's playing on the other station!

My feeling is they're much more likely to have their lawyers looking into ways to throw a spanner into DW's works than to be thinking of ways to cooperate. There's two different mindsets at work here, and for one, a free service without advertising is anathema.

[charmian]

Hi, randomly wandering in: you may be interested in some of the links I've collected machine-translated from Russian, which seem to show some more stuff about SUP's future Cyrillic-LJ moves.

Hmm... Personally speaking, I do wish that LJ would port over more of these broadcast user tools to the English LJ side, because some of them are useful.

I'm not sure what effect DW will have on LJ. Maybe none. What will be more critical, I think (well, in my underinformed way), is competition with new hybrid-socialnetwork blogging sites, social networking software incorporating blogs (such as Buddypress), and microblogs like Tumblr. These I can see sapping LJ's audience.

[matgb]

I think they have been for years—a lot of my friends that used to use LJ constantly now rarely if ever post, but are on Facebook constantly. Many more of my friends that before a couple years back would've been talked into signing up use FB and a blogging platform instead, etc.

NB; I've no objection to the broadcast model, but it's the concentration on that over the disparate barely crossing over groups model that LJ has in UK/US that bothers me, both need development. I tend to act like a broadcast blog a lot, but my friends don't, and I'm there primarily for friends after all.

[charmian]

IDK, from a certain perspective, maybe it does make sense? If LJ has strong business potential in Russia/Ukraine/etc, but much less in the US, then it makes sense to focus operations and development in that direction, and work on seeking/maintaining growth in that sector. Obviously I wish that LJ did pay more development attention to the US/UK/English-speaking sector (it's a big component in my interest in DW), though.

However, if people are using blogging platforms and FB (and twitter) in combination instead of LJ, it's going to be really hard for LJ to appeal to those folks, because those sites follow different ways of usage which are in some ways antithetical to LJ's.

(Someone I know who studies business and IT described LJ as 'deprecated' because the code is so old; I don't know how accurate that is, but it really does seem as though the industry has little interest in it at all, when you look at the influential social networking/blogging press)