Late Spring of My Discontent

[akirlu]

No, that's not fair. I'm quite content with late spring. Scotch broom is flowering everywhere, looking rather like forsythia, only more fragrant. My variegated tulips are finally blooming, as is the dogwood around town, and something that has blossoms that look like small, very pink dogwood blossoms, which may well also be dogwood, but then may be something else utterly. I am no botantist.

The long bank of lavender down by the Sciences smells of lavender even now -- it's not my imagination -- even though there are no flowers yet, only the old, dry seed heads from last fall. But lilac and wisteria are doing their best to fill in the possible shades of blooming purple.

Apropos of purple, I was walking back up the hill from MOHAI, fresh from a presentation on records disaster management, when I noticed how many of the flowers around the Engineering buildings were in purples and yellows. "Funny," says I, "Someone has marykaykare's taste in color schemes." Beat. Beat. Oh. UW. Huskies. School friggin' colors. Oh. I am so not plugged into the Dawgs mentality.

But I am feeling a bit grumpy and discontented about LJ. It has been striking me lately that some of my best little bits of business are going into late-thread comments in the LJs of people most of my friends haven't friended. Where my little gems will be lost to posterity and most everyone who knows me. And that this may well also be true of many or most of the comments of people whose writing I enjoy. I really, really miss the one-room transparency of RASFF in the old days, where most of the folks I wanted to chat with were in one place, and everyone had access to all the same conversations, and with a decent newsreader you could track all the posts and comments of the folks you were most interested in reading. Here and now it's hit and miss, and mostly miss, taking part in the conversations of my friends, unless they happen to originate in a place that I go back to and check regularly. I feel boxed in and compartmentalized and excluded by the structure of this place. Foo.

Comments

[eleanor.livejournal.com]

I have felt that way. For myself, when I find that I'm thinking brilliant thoughts in someone else's space, I usually think about it more and write something in my own place. If I don't, I usually figure it's because I got whatever it was out of my system.

But still, I do get it.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but RASFF became unbearable so many long years ago....

I find the problems with threads gone a few tens of posts deep on RASFF exactly like the missed good bits in threads in other people's journals: I don't see them either way.

Seth Breidbart opined recently that LJ is like USENET, except the software is profoundly worse for the purpose. I think it's a completely different thing. I think that the opt-in nature of LJ is a fundamental difference from the opt-out paradigm of newsgroups. Because I wasn't willing to do the work of opting out all the (many!) people who had nothing to say I wanted to hear, I left RASFF fandom a very long time ago. There are just so many hours in the day, after all.

I wonder if LJ is at its best with smaller Friends lists and fewer posts?

K.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, I recognize that RASFF is broken now. This does not stop me from mourning it in the time when it was not broken. LJ just cannot and will not meet the same need for me, for all that I find I like it better as time goes by. The freewheeling, high-speed synergistic silliness of RASFF is gone, probably for good, but it was home, and I miss it.

[ceiliog.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough I've been thinking about my own difficulties with LJ today. Can see the following features :-

1) Unless you follow it 24/7, if you got something to say in a comment somebody has probably said it already.

2) Until you post some comments nobody will know you exist.

3) It is virtually impossible to find somebody unless you know their LJ handle already. Not helped by some people not allowing you to work out their real name from their user info, which is fair enough.

4) If you were to add all the people you might possibly find interesting to your Friends List it would rapidly become too long.

Now, only the last 2 of those are specific to this forum. It seems to me LJ is designed for people with a small circle of friends they know already.

None of this is criticism, just remarks. LJ is definitely a beast of its own.

[numbat.livejournal.com]

I assume by RASFF one-room transparency you mean a vast mass of incoherent email messages expensively clogging up my in-box? At least that's what I experienced when I made the mistake of trying Memoryhole. The format seems designed to maximise white noise to flood out whatever fraction of potentially worthwhile writing is buried under the 'me too' messages and reposted comments. My most positive reaction to the experience was that it was vile.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

No, I don't mean that RASSF was like being on Memoryhole. Unless maybe when one read the newsgroup using the AOL newsreader, which was crap, beginning, middle, and end. First off, being usenet news, RASSF did not come to my mailbox -- a definite plus. More importantly however, the early versions of Netscape had a really nice newsreader, which laid out comment threads in trees of author-subject-header links that you could then click to read individual messages. With a minimum of practice it was very easy to figure out just by tree-shape alone what was an interesting conversation and what was not. And once I had selected folks who were good filters, or reliably interesting in their own right, it was very easy to skip the white noise and get straight to the worthwhile stuff. In this regard, RASSF was always superior to the e-lists.

Bingo.

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

"It seems to me LJ is designed for people with a small circle of friends they know already."

From question #4 of the LiveJournal FAQ (http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=4):

"How did LiveJournal get started?...

LiveJournal.com, a website and online community built around personal journals, was created by young computer science major Brad Fitzpatrick in March 1999. He transformed a database-driven method he'd been using to update his own journal since 1998 into a Web-based application that his friends could also use. It was an immediate success..."

And, if you go to http://www.bradfitz.com/ , you'll see LiveJournal described as Brad's, "accidental success."

So, yeah... LJ was intended to just be this cool thing that Brad and his friends did.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, #2 was certainly true of how I noticed you being on LJ. Actually, though, I find people do discover me, and vice versa, by other means, since people do pop up on my friend-of list out of the blue periodically. What I will do now and then is cruise through the friends lists of people whom I have friends or tastes in common with, and add the ones who seem interesting. Sometimes I add people based on their being in sufficiently many of my friends' friend lists. And so forth. And yes, with rare exception, if you're looking for someone in particular, you have to know their handle first.

On the other hand, if you want to check with me in e-mail, I believe I can tell you who at least some people are, if that would be of interest to you.

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

Too bad they couldn't make a setting in the system along the lines of "friends most recent entries", except it's "my most recent comments in the LJ world" and then anything you post elsewhere will be in the "my most recent comments in LJ" section of your LJ (e.g. a link under your "user info" or "friends"). Then, if I perused it, I could click on your comment and find the original and meet new people, etc.....

A more dynamic and cross relational way of "threading" messages.

Just a thought.

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

And, of course, responding to myself we present the next problem: What if you're a comment whore? :-)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Also, there is no convenient, central place to stand up and shout, "Why won't any of you bastards talk to me?!" :)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

We'll love you anyway, of course.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, that would help. Good idea. Dynamic and cross-relational are crunchy and tasty with salsa.

[daystreet.livejournal.com]

Well said. I miss the glory days of RASSF, to the extent that actually was a part of them (I think I came in relatively late). Of course, half the time I didn't understand the fannish stuff, but it didn't really matter because (a) I picked stuff up, and (b) the point was the people and the conversation and the cracking-wise, anyway.

But, you know, it fell out of balance. For me anyway. And LJ is a completely different sort of balance, not at all the same for the reasons you describe. And having a blog doesn't cut it either.

About the closest match I've encountered are the comment sections of Electrolike and Making Light, but I don't end up reading all the threads and you can't really sort and view by authors across threads (which is pretty much how I liked to read RASFF). The tone of what you encounter is similar, but the encounter itself isn't.

It's possible to build a web app that works like RASFF, and to use it for an invitation only community. I think I might have even tried that once, long ago. But the whole idea of making it "invitation only" throws off the balance in another way. You don't get new people and ideas coming in from left-field and kicking everything in the ass.

In the Real World, of course, you can create a community that polices itself by way of various Real World considerations: physical proximity, or the monetary and/or time requirements (and the willingness to pony up to meet them) of coming together across distances. These are natural filters. On the web, either you welcome everybody -- which throws off the balance, or you close the list -- which throws off the balance. It's not impossible, I don't think, but LJ isn't really the answer. Nor was RASFF, itself.

I guess it's yer living thing type of deal: nothing alive goes on the way it was forever.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I miss Rasseff in the old days. It never had true glory days, but it did have days of being great good fun. I still read it, in the sense that I check what James Nicoll, Karl Johanson, Marilee Layman, and Dorothy Heydt are talking about every few days, but I mark most stuff as "read" without reading it.

I find LiveJournal irritating because of that little room business, and because of the pseudonyms, which I find coy (I know that other people's milage varies). My pseudonym is my name; my little room is empty, since I just use the account for commenting on my friends' journals. Maybe some day I'll use it for my own conversations and just live with that irritation factor, as you do.

There never can be one big conversation with all the cool kids in it, though. All the cool kids don't speak to each other all the time, and if they're all speaking, there's no time to hear what they're all saying. The deterioration and loss of information is good for us, over all.

So what about dancing? What about singing? I guess I'd better go back to that conversation.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Heh. I've got a purple coat with a bright yellow lining which I bought in 1997 because, hey, I like both colors and I was going to Ireland in the fall and I might need a coat. I was on one of the tiny Aran Isles off the west coast of Ireland waiting for a bus when a woman walked up and asked me if I lived in Seattle because of that coat. And very recently for the the first time I saw someone else wearing the same coat, crossing 12th Avenue East here in Seattle.

Note too that there is much green provided with the purple and yellow flowers in my front yard -- all 3 of my favorite colors together and it's not even Mardi Gras.

MKK

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

So what about dancing? What about singing?

Yes! and Yes! Okay, here's my deal: tamiam is my source for info on where for both expeditions. She keeps giving me her card/number and I keep putting it in a Very Safe Place which is neither my phone nor my PalmPilot. And so I keep stalling out on the final step, where I call Tami and get her to tell me where we're going so that I can set a date. When I finally manage to figure out where I put that number, then by Ghu there will be singing, and dancing, and hanging off the rafters for all I know. This. Will. Happen.

[davidlevine]

LJ is not trying to do the job that RASSF did. The problem is that there is as yet no tool that can do what RASSF did, which was to serve as a single forum for all the computer-enabled fans in the world. The number of such fans has grown too large to be managed; RASSF itself became unusable many, many years ago.

LJ is the best replacement I've found so far for RASSF-that-was, after more than ten years away. What LJ-now and RASSF-then have in common is a population of reasonable size (no more than one order of magnitude bigger than the monkeyshpere). If LJ had RASSF's population it would be as unusable, and I suspect that time is coming, and when it does I will leave LJ as I left RASSF, reluctantly and with great sadness.

But... given that LJ is a different tool, it demands a different interaction style. One that seems to work is, as eleanor suggested, posting a new article to your own LJ that riffs off of ideas in other LJs. This is harder than either posting a news article or posting an LJ comment, but it lets you selectively include text (by copy and paste, not automatically, which encourages thoughtful inclusion rather than the dreaded point-by-point replies) and link directly to the entries that prompted your thought (unlike RASSF's "as someone said somewhere upthread" or having to quote the whole damn thing). It's less spontaneous, but rewards the thoughtful. In some ways it's more like the network of zines and LoCs that existed before Usenet than it is like Usenet.

Which reminds me of an idea I had some time ago and haven't yet posted anywhere: every fan on LJ is a faned, and your FList is your perzine. It includes articles from those you have invited to contribute, but you publish whatever they send (similar to some paper zines, actually) and in the order they send it. It also includes LoCs. Other people can read your zine if they wish, but most people are too busy pubbing their own zines...

all-comment entry?

[(Anonymous)]

I enjoy the posts that Vicki Rosensweig does from time to time, where she quotes comments that she's made on other journals, with a bit of the context and linkage back.

That doesn't solve all of your problems, but it would put your best little bits of business where your friends could see them.

Anita Rowland (http://www.anitarowland.com/)

[spacecrab.livejournal.com]

LJ actually has a population that's many times larger than the number of active participants in latter-day rasff. You don't see them, because of LJ's "opt-in" (rather than of "opt-out") subscription mechanism, mentioned above.

The flavor of electronic (as well as paper and audio) communication venues is influenced, to a certain extent, by the physical structure of the venue: threaded vs. non-threaded, moderated vs. non-moderated, edited vs. aggregated.

Setting physical format aside, for a minute, I think a good case might be made for rasff being enjoyable, at its best, because it was populated by smart participants with broader interests and wider backgrounds of knowledge on display than you might find in fannish e-lists (or fanzine letter columns). I think rasff and Livejournal have that in common. "Hardcore" science fiction fans are just one demographic in the population.

FWIW, the online forum that I regret not having, anymore, is the GEnie Science Fiction Roundtable.

The attraction, for me, of the GEnie SFRT was the binding glue of its pre-constructed forums and topics: specifically created by science fiction fans for science fiction fans. The spinoffs of the SFRT (SFFnet and Dueling Modems) attempted to maintain this structure, but they never developed the centrality that SFRT had as *the* place for science fiction fans to go to write to other science fiction fans.

You might argue that all of these venues (including fanzine letter columns) recruit their participants from anyone who's interested in "messaging" other people on a regular basis. But, for me, there's always been a certain amount of attraction in venues that deliberately recruit from a population who identify with science fiction as a shared political experience.

In the last five or six years, the Web has given birth to a large community of bloggers who subsume the passion for science fiction as a political channel into a larger political experience. (I hope the term "futurist political experience" can be understood, here, in a broader sense than "Michelism" (http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/000398.html#1742)).

The Web has also spawned a bunch of other journaling communities where the "futurist political experience" is not the primary binding glue. Livejournal is one of them. I think many more of the members who are into s-f in these communities see it as a form of entertainment, not a political experience.

It's difficult to make statements about Livejournal, as a whole, because it's vastly bigger than any of us really sees. When we make statements about the flavor of Livejournal, we're mostly making statements about what we read in a much smaller network of interlocking friends lists.

Some LJers have addressed the "lack of centrality" issue by posting their comments to other people in their own journals. One of the most interesting LJ experiments I've seen is Patrick's friends list (http://www.livejournal.com/users/pnh/friends), which is very fanzine-like in its combination of personal pages, community subscriptions, and RSS feeds.

When you start talking about differences between rasff, LJ, and fannish mailing lists, I think relevant factors include the recruitment population and the "mission statement," as well as the physical format of the venue.

It's also true that rasff was an atypical Usenet forum, in its best days, because of the internal message and topic moderation practiced by the most active participants. I know there are other Usenet forums that manage this without officially being moderated, but they're the exceptions, rather than the rule. I don't know which came first: the flight of the active rasffans who practiced this principle, or the inundation of the group by too many people to deal with. But I do think one element of LJ's appeal is the ease with which unwanted noise can be filtered out.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I miss the free-wheeling nature of Rassff, but I don't see LJ the same way as I saw usenet.

I, almost never, felt the urge to start a thread in a usenet group, and for somereason the occasions I did try to start one, they were stillborn.

I get much the same here (I make up about 25 percent of the comments to my LJ, and with the catalyst for all of those being things I wrote in the first place, well it all about me).

I do wonder what my friends are writing, and wish I knew a way to hunt some of them down (I know that you, for example, are probably planting splendid bon mots here and there, and I've no way to know). I'd certainly like to see what someone I think might be worth reading has said, by way of comment, as that will probably tell me more about them then what they write in their journal (e.g. kate_schaefer) and that is hit and miss.

So, the object is different, even if some of the effects are the same.

TK

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

(Here via friend of friend.) It could return if people came back to in en masse, kinda like a Take Back the Newsgroup march.

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

Very cool, thanks!

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

RASSF itself became unusable many, many years ago.

My mileage varies on "many, many". You had already long since found RASSF unmanageable at the time that I would have said it was in its heyday, for me. I did actually use to read the group back in 1988 or so, before it was first broken up into a small galaxy of related groups, and frankly, it wasn't as interesting or fun back then. For me, anyhow.

And yes, Ellie's idea would help get my stuff more visible to people who happen to read me, but that actually isn't the core of my complaint. I wouldn't get what I want unless the folks on my friends list did it too, and the folks on their friends' lists showed up on mine when they were being interesting and pertinent. And even so, it wouldn't really be a collective conversation in the same way. Yes, LJ is a different tool. I fully recognize that. I'm not saying it was ever intended *for* the same thing as RASSF-that-was, but that it's the closest thing I have any more, and at times this closest-thing-available is deeply unsatisfying for scratching an itch that I have. It's like wanting Princess torte and being given Linzer instead. Perfectly lovely for its aspirations, perhaps, but really not an adequate substitute.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Welcome, friend of a friend. You may be right that it would be possible to get back a new incarnation of what was lost, if enough people agreed to go back together. I don't know how much of an organizational task that would be, though. Big, I suspect. Bigger than I can take on right now, probably, but if you build it, I will come.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, I like the idea of a "subscribe to thread" option. I think I may also try to do more of what supergee does, i.e. post pointers within LJ when I think other folks should go join a conversation.

But no, it wasn't so many years ago. More like four, for me. But different folks hit the wall with RASFF at rather different times. I believe David dropped away before I ever really re-discovered RASFF, circa 1995. I believe K. was hitting the end of her rope roughly as I was arriving. Kate is right that you can't have one big conversation with all the cool kids; you never could. But for a while there, the mix was really good for me, and it introduced me to a whole bunch of people I really felt like I belonged to, all at once. It was a bit like being a neofan all over again, and I'm still reaping the benefits.

Part of what I mourn for is the unknown me out there who missed the window. I have RASFF-that-was and all the things I got out of it, and I think each of us that misses it actually carries a slightly different RASFF-that-was in their heart. But there's someone else out there who has all unknowing been looking for that place all their life, and it's not there anymore. That's just ineffably sad to me. Yes, I am pathetically maudlin sometimes. Sosumi.

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

Forward, mes amis! Tear down the Bastille!

It's tempting. It'd be worth it just to pull down that tin-plated statue of P*** M*C****** in the town square.

Well, there's no question that that effort would be better led by someone who has more of a fannish posse. But we could start talking it up Right Here.

Anyone else interested in reclaiming the homelands?

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

We could indeed start talking it up right here, and that much effort, I can make. See also my most recent new post.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

For some reason, I haven't yet given up on RASFF, but I don't read much of it.

I'm tempted to post about ridiculous movie geography in my LJ, though.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

Anything like this? Do you mean like this but for other people, so I could see yours or somebody else's?
http://www.livejournal.com/tools/recent_comments.bml

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Wow. I didn't know about that. That thing is cool. So yes, like that only so I could see your ten most recent comments or somebody else's. In fact, ideally what I would like is something that concatenated all of the most recent x-many comments of everyone on my Friends list (or possibly a separately filtered list) into a single, back-scrollable page with links to the context they came from. I want a "Recent Comments by Friends" page, really. That would make me a pretty happy camper, LJ-context-wise.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

You're a hero of the war for sticking it out. But who knows, the cavalry may be coming...

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

If you look around the right parts of the support and enhancement communities I think you'll find plans for "subscribing" to threads have been around for a long time, but never seem to make any progress. The people here for the pretty keep being vocal and getting more icons or new layouts implemented to keep them happy.

The thing that bugs me is that if you run a community you don't get all comments to the community sent to you. How are you meant to moderate something if you don't see the new content unless it's on the front few pages?

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

I can be part of the advance guard!

[jerrykaufman.livejournal.com]

Totally cool, all right. But what I want --

I want a way of telling the software: give me all my Friends' posts for X date. So I don't have to bring up my Friends page and go back - back -back for days' and days' worth of posts until I get back to last Tuesday, or whenever, which was probably the last time I looked.

[jerrykaufman.livejournal.com]

I've looked at the calendar and realized that this Saturday is not Vanguard. So I'm free for anything on the 30th. If you want to go singing, and we can find a k bar with no smoking, I'm sure I can cajole Suzle into going. If it's dancing, then I think it'll just be me. (If we do dinner first, then count Suzle in for that.)

[carbonel]

I still read RASFF. All of it, pretty much. I don't know if it's undergoing a renaissance or if I just have a higher tolerance level, but I've been enjoying it lately.