(no subject)

[heidi]

So I'm looking over a few LJ-modded journals and communities to see if LJ is ever going to lift the 750-friends limit (yes, that's the reason I haven't friended back a bunch of the people who've friended me in the last week) and I read this:

Activity and raw number of postings, in the last 30 days, 7 days, and 24 hours, has gone down over the last year. That's a very interesting result, and a little worrying to the powers that be, I'd think.

So what's going on? Maybe...

1) We're seeing less LJ use. Maybe everyone's heading over to MySpace so they can put ten thousand little icons and widgets and little midi songs in every post, and never use capitals ever again, ever. There are a lot more companies out there offering similar services to LJ than there were six years ago, and blogging has changed over that time. This is the most likely option.

2) We're seeing a change in LJ use. More people are reading, but less people are posting. We're seeing more people using LJ on a regular basis to read their friends lists, but they're posting less. So we're seeing it change to more of a broadcast medium, than the chat medium it once was. It would be interesting to look at thing like raw K of text posted over time. However, this is only possible if "active" doesn't involve counting "readng friends lists without commenting", or "reading friends lists without commenting or without even being logged in."

So given all the discussion about whether the HP fandom is dying - maybe it's not fandom? Maybe it's an impact of reduced LJ usage? I can safely say that the fic submission rate on FA hasn't dropped, and there's forums for fandom now that didn't exist 15, 18 months ago, and there are wikis and stuff - is it just another sea change in fandom discussion location? Or a further bifurcation of discussion location/opportunities?