I’m literally so bored at work today, that - based purely on having spent the last hour reading the LJ entries of a couple friends of mine - I’m considering signing up with LJ. I can’t even manage to update my REAL website more than once a month.
Anything I should know? Good or bad experiences?
You’re required to update every day, every week, or every year. It’s no big deal, and it’s free, unless you need 78 icons.
Even if you have no interest in writing your own entries, it’s useful to have an account so you can comment in other peoples’ under your own name.
It’s been great for me, because I have a bunch of friends I don’t get to see in person very often, either from the SDMB or people who left for school, or whatever, yet I can talk to them every day on LJ.
I’ve enjoyed my LJ. No bad experiences, even.
I use it for my occaisional rants about my life, and stuff in general. Of course, if I’d known of the SDMB then I doubt I’d have signed up for it.
:smack:
You’re not required to update…
Thoughts? I spend far too much time there. 
I’ve had no problems with it. I find it a good way to help me keep in contact with friends.
Think of it as MPSIMS but more readily controlled since I don’t have to scroll past ten QuickSilver OPs a day if I don’t want to. It’s what you make it and, in my experience, LJ’s been much more interesting than the SDMB for months now – CS possibly excepted – because of that.
I like it. It’s free, so why not just set one up and see how it goes?
I see.
Well, I do like filling out long checklists of my interests…
Don’t knock the interests thing. When you enter interests, they become links to users and communities with similar interests. Through the communities (especially) you can make “friends” and the whole blogging thing becomes exponentially more interesting.
And even if you want to, you don’t have to do it.
It always confuses me when people seem to think that joining LJ is like joining the National Guard. It’s a free registration to a lighthearted website that requires absolutely no time or effort whatsoever, just like the Friendster account you probably forgot you had. It’s no big deal.
I was serious.
Actually, I’ve signed up now, and I was disappointed with the way in which it had me enter interests.
Everybody’s been positive, so I’ll say a few negative things.
To me at least it’s got a very gossipy sort of feel to it. I don’t particularly like it myself, I use my sign-on only to answer my friends’ entries and that mostly only one friend. A lot of people have said good things about it, but to me it really comes down to just being a journal, a sort of online blog where you can go on and on and on about your personal life. That’s all well and dandy but I’m *surprised * at how much personal info people post. I know that you can make it so only certain people see it, but it still bothers me.
Lots of people have said good things, and they’re all true! I don’t deny them. I just wanted to give another side.
Well, that’s because the people you read are gossipy. There are 2,597,769 active accounts on LJ. That’s a lot of people, who all have different styles. To say that LJ is gossipy based on your friends list is like saying SDMB is dead because you only read CoCC.
Some do, yes, and some are mini-GDs, and some are photo blogs, and some are extensions of other online communities, and some are live updates from a disaster area, and most are a combination of all, some, or none of the above.
Yes, I realize I’m being a bit snippy here, and I do apologize, but it bugs me when people paint LJ and its users with a broad brush, when it is merely a blank slate which the user can fill with whatever they want, for better or worse.
I don’t have a friends list.
Actually, you’re being a bit defensive, and I knew someone would! The OP asked for opinions on LJ, and I saw that everyone was giving super-positive opinions! I have more of a negative feel towards LJ, so what did it hurt to give my honest opinons.
And your defense falls down here…that was a pretty generic TMI thread, as in people just stated one thing they’d done. On LJ I’ve seen people state their financial details, their loans/debts/creditors, how much they owe, how much they get paid - stuff I would never dream of sharing.
Highly recommended. I honestly believe it is the best “social network” type website on the internet. The use of friends lists and communities, and the many different styles of posting (everything from well-researched political posts to rants about work to pictures of pets to coordination for social events) provide an incredible tool for communicating with people all over the world. The structure of the site, it’s commenting system, all work together incredibly well.
This I don’t really understand. Why not?
Mostly because I made the ID in such a way as to be completely anonymous, and if I went around putting my friends on there then, well, I wouldn’t be anoymous would I? As far as I know, only two people know who is behind my ID over there.
Also partly because I haven’t played around with my own site enough to bother.
As for why I was being anonymous? Various reasons.
All I’m saying is that you create your own experience on LJ by choosing who and what you read, and who and what you ignore. It’s not as absoultely simple as that, but that’s true of any group of people.