Follow Us on Tumblr

troperville

tools

toys

SubpagesMain

main index

Narrative

Genre

Media

Topical Tropes

Other Categories

TV Tropes Org
random
LiveJournal
LiveJournal: We know drama.

LiveJournal is an online journal hosting site. LJ's English-language content tends to be more diary-like than other blogging sites, and as such it has a (not totally unwarranted) reputation for being frequented by whiny teenagers. Its format is user-friendly and highly customizable, offering multiple user pics, mood settings, and journal layouts. Because of its more personal approach to blogging, LJ attracts a lot of teenage girls. It also attracts a lot of drama. The two are possibly related.

The site is also greatly used by fanfiction writers, possibly due to the comments section, which makes each entry something like a miniature forum. As such, LJ is home to many communities, which discuss everything from knitting to politics. Mainly, though, it's fanfiction. A lot of fanfiction. LiveJournal seems to specialize in writing communities, of which it has hundreds, most of them fanfiction. Roleplaying communities are also popular, all of them basically fanfiction.

LJ's popularity has dwindled in recent years, with the advent of first MySpace, then Facebook, and then Tumblr, which attracted a lot of the slash fangirls who previously used Livejournal. It also garnered a reputation for banning journals because of "objectionable content" (particularly Strikethrough '07) which violates the Terms of Service; this is called TOS'ing. LiveJournal has TOS'd some of its most popular journals, like Fandom_Wank and scans_daily. They're real TOSsers.

LJ's journal system is open source, so a lot of clones have sprung up over the years, and (in some cases) subsequently perished; survivors include InsaneJournal, DeadJournal, JournalFen and Dreamwidth. Since its founding, JournalFen has been a haven for Fandom_Wank, which exists largely to point out LiveJournal drama. Scans_daily has moved to InsaneJournal and has also moved to Dreamwidth.

LJ is also, for unclear reasons, the most popular host for Russian-language bloggers, to the point where the Russian term for blogging is derived from the Russian name of LiveJournal. A Russian company now owns the site, a number of high-profile Russian politicians maintain LJs, Russian authors used LJ to publish excerpts or teasers for their new books, and it's even been theorized that the DDoS attacks on the site in April 2011 were caused by the Russian government in order to silence a critical blogger. The Russian content on LJ is a lot more like the rest of the English language blogosphere, and rarely interacts with the English-speaking side of LJ.

See also: Livejournal Roleplay

BloggerBlogMySpace
Little Green FootballsOther SitesLordkat

random
5798
3