andrewducker

It's a pity Google Plus never took off, as that's a place where you could talk about you're reading/playing/watching/doing, but also do so in longform pieces, and generally have longer blogs/rants about things.

Fair enough. For most of the people I know, who use LJ, and indeed for people I know on FB, it's not taken off. I see little on there, and the great majority of people I know who have an account no longer keep up with it.

Is it really a drop though?

When people click on you through your facebook link it doesn't count in the stats. So, could it simply be that more people are coming to your page through facebook?

Why wouldn't it count in the stats?

Certainly the Google stats count every time a page is viewed - why wouldn't the normal LJ ones?

When you go through facebook it's through a different URL that starts off with facebook.com/

I just went to FB, found the post on my wall that links to here, and clicked it. It took me to a FB redirect page, then passed me on to the URL "http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2843043.html", which is this page.

What page does it give you?

Weird. I just did it twice. the first time it took me to the link you just listed. The second time it took me to the facebook redirect sat there for a bit and then refreshed and took me to the link you just listed.

Yeah, Facebook redirects everything through their own pages, presumably so that they can (a)track your every move and (b)check for malware and warn you. Sometimes the redirect can be slooooow.

Gotcha. Hence my confusion!

And I'm not sure that the LJ stats are that accurate anyway. They are showing me with about 1,200 a day and then a sudden spike up to over 3,000 on Dec. 10 and there is no way that that entry was that interesting - particuarly since as a poll it only got 50 responses.

In my case, it's mostly just that I had to start prioritising other things. Life Happened, basically...

Life has a tendency to do that (hence mass quietness from me for a fair chunk of the year while various stresses reduced my interest in communication. Or much else.)

*nods* I know you understand.

I think one of the downturns is that Life Happens, but it's no longer Life Happening On LiveJournal — I remember five years ago, where there would be great discussions on what we were doing, things would be organised through LJ posts, etc.

Now, those things happen via FB, or other means. Both because those have better tools for doing so, but also because I think many people's real-life-friends-who-are-active-on-LJ pool has significantly dropped.

I look back over my LJ from now 'till when it started, and I note that pre-2009, I announced my birthday plans on here, and had a lot of useful discussion and arrangement about such on there. After that, the amount of response I got here was much lower, and this year I didn't even bother to announce it here.

Part of that is new friends groups, but a lot of it is just people stopping keeping up with LJ.

I wonder how RSS feeds of your LJ or the Dreamwidth side affect the count? [Although I've also seen a steep dropoff in the number of readers on my LJ. I think the world has been taken over by the "TL;DR" crowd.]

I think it is a pity, too - but equally, I know I am spending much less time here.

And most of my posts are photo-posts...

If users read your posts from their Friends page, does that show up in the stats? That is, if they don't actually click through to your blog?

Just a thought.

I think FB has siphoned away a lot of users. Which is a shame, since when I started blogging, LJ was the most "social" blogging platform. Perhaps since FB has become the place to share stuff with, for instance, family, it has become the first stopping point - and a lot of people stop there! I check FB several times a day, but LJ once a day at most - and then most of the posts are links...

It's sad, no-one is posting any more. My friends page shows the last 15 posts; 10 of them are you. Another one is a survey and one is a community. I have about 40 friends on my list, but they've drifted away from livejournal one by one over the last few years. I still like it, I like the creativity it gives you that you don't get with Facebook or Twitter, and I enjoy writing even if there are increasingly few people to read it. If this ship is going down, I'm staying on it dammit!

Well, I will note that I post to LJ on average daily, but then again, my post is a repost from DW, which is a repost from my Wordpress blog, which is where I moved my LJ to after LJ got DDOSed continually at the end of 2011.

Original post on Dreamwidth

I did think of that - but I get about 5% of the traffic over there, so it doesn't account for most of the drop.

really! 95% of the commenters are on LJ then? And not spambots?

98%. In December I had 708 comments on my LJ, versus 15 on DW.

wow! it's all facebook now. And twitter.

I'm hoping more people transition to DW.

And I know some people on Tumblr.

But 700-odd comments in a month isn't bad, I could certainly live with that level of engagement in the long term.

Despite all the tech and entrepreneurship, there are still only 24 hours in a day.
All the available hours are taken. At this point, competition for audience is zero-sum. The burger chains ( a thoroughly saturated market!) can expand to coffees and breakfasts, but "social media" have no more hours to expand their competition into.

Fragmentation. I feel like I need to just pull everything together into one location - fb, lj, g+, misc other sites, etc.

I know one chap who writes a html page, hosts it on his own server, tweets the url and has the tweets auto fed to lj, fb and google+! All kinda semi-automatic.

Well, my LJ posts get automatically get to FB and Twitter. They'd go to G+ as well, if there was an API for that.