somniloquence

I don't think it only ever changes for the worst but I think it's at risk of taking a nose-dive into a bad place at the moment, even if it's not already happened.

I wonder though, what you say about designing the tools -- if we were to take the things about Tumblr and Twitter that make them more of a draw than Livejournal, to create something better, what would they be? The speed and the transitoriness of those platforms seem to be the biggest thing but also the thing that doesn't work for fandom. I can't say much about Twitter because I incredibly don't get it and I can't say anything hardly worth bothering with in a sentence, but is it the images and graphic-heaviness on tumblr? If you took those and made it possible to repost images and vids but to have embedded comment threads and real communication for text posts? Made private conversations possible? What could we alter to make it work for us?

(Or is the reason for the mass-migration only and simply because everyone else is on those platforms and the wider audience? Because if that's so, there's probably not a lot to be done even if someone could build a fandom-friendly forum...)

I think that's the transitoriness -- the way things disappear in a blink -- that's taking away from the ability to bond and have meaningful interaction -- and also causing a problem with responsibility for what's said or done in that environment. And those seem built into the tools, I don't know if they can be separated from them; separated from the way most people seem to prefer doing things now. I wonder if there really is a possibility for an upcoming platform that can fix things for all needs, or if it's something to do with that here-and-gone attention span of the wider world, that we'll never get back to the kind of things that worked for fandom being popular again?

Ah, that probably sounds way more insulting than I mean it to. I'm just brainstorming.