[capableweb]

Did you forget about cool and snappy Blogger (before it turned ugly and slow)? Or cool and snappy tumblr (before it turned ugly and slow)? Or even cool and snappy LiveJournal (before it turned ugly and slow)?

It's like the difficult part is not to initially build a cool and snappy web service, but manage to remain cool and snappy over a long period of time, when money seems to want you to build something not-cool and not-snappy.

Something Medium failed at. Yes, they managed to solve the easy part (start out cool and snappy) but they failed at the hard and valuable part (remain cool and snappy).

[Mezzie]

I'm still sad at LJ's downfall. I've been reminiscing since I got an email two days ago about my LJ's 19th birthday.

There are several aspects of that site in its heyday that I've yet to find really replicated elsewhere, particularly for longer text discussions.

[notRobot]

Unfortunately I was not able to use LJ during its heyday, would you mind elaborating a bit on the features you miss?

[Mezzie]

Most of the things I miss revolve around the community features and how good LJ was for MEDIUM-SIZED conversations: You weren't stuck in your immediate circle but neither were you just shouting into the terrifying public void like you are on, for example, Instagram or Twitter.

There was very, very fine level of access control over who could see what which meant you could require CONTEXT to be a part of a group. In addition, tagging support was robust and NOT just a mixture of hashtags. So you could do things like, in a politics group, click 'Elections: 2004' and see, in chronological order, every post related to that topic in the group. This made actual search possible and cut down on reposts/recycled content, because things weren't just lost the minute they fell off the front page, etc.

[notRobot]

This is very interesting, thank you!

[wyclif]

I agree with Mezzie about the good things about LJ, but one thing I think he/she is wrong about is that Twitter is "shouting into a void." In fact, even though your tweets may be set to public and any user can read them, your followers are your "circle" and most interactions come from there, not from random people.

[Mezzie]

The difference is that the access controls were built in to LJ and they're an afterthought on Twitter. The ability to finely control VIEWERSHIP (multiple different friends groups, for example) dampened a lot of things being shared without context.

Then again, screenshot culture wasn't really a big thing, yet. I don't think we could replicate some of what made LJ work anymore. It's sad.