This is a much delayed post, and not a complete one at that. Over the last month I’ve made several observations on how UI affects the LiveJournal community. I’ll expand on each of these over the next few days:

1. The <lj user="somebody"> tag on LiveJournal creates a link to a LiveJournal account by id. Liberal use of this tag converts what would normally be taken for name-dropping into a form of introduction. In addition, since LJ ids have no first or last name, there is only one way to address a person using their LJ id. This creates an egalitarian atmosphere for addressing other users.
2. A LiveJournal post may be edited by its author but by nobody else. Comments may not be edited at all. This encourages a situation where the post becomes an artefact that may be polished but not changed, while comments form throwaway discussion about the post.
3. LiveJournal provides a one-month notice period for deleted accounts to be revived. In practice, however, deleted accounts are rarely purged and may be recovered anytime. This results in cases of an owner deleting their account when they want to temporarily go offline.
4. The <lj-cut> tag breaks a post with a link to where the remaining text can be read. The LJ Friends page—which is the primary way to track other LJ users—honours this tag. Since long uncut posts will require uninterested readers to scroll too much to get past it to the next post, there is a culture of pulling up people who don’t cut their posts, and a counterculture of people refusing to cut their posts just because some readers are fussy.
5. User pictures are critical to community on LiveJournal, significantly more so than on other communities that allow identifying icons. Userpics are used to convey not just identity but also emotion.
6. An old one: replying to a comment on LiveJournal sends an email notice to the writer of the previous comment and the writer of the post. Thanks to this, you see people attempting to reply such that they can talk to two people at once, and sometimes writing the same reply (usually “Thank you”) to several people instead of saying it just once to all. Attempts to reply to all  [with a single comment] sometimes rub off as impersonal.
7. And perhaps the most curious one: as humans, we like ranking systems, especially when we come out top ranked. LiveJournal provides no obvious way to rank yourself against your friends, but users crave ranking anyway and will create pseudo-structures. The most apparent of these is the number of comments a post gets. Some craft posts to attract replies, some goad on discussion within their posts, some get accused of comment whoring. Whichever form it takes, number of comments is a Big Deal on LiveJournal. To a lesser extent, there is also count of the ‘Friend Of’ list. Friend relationships on LiveJournal need not be symmetric, so you see people negotiating adding each other. Nishant Shah of CSCS adds a third observation: people asking for their journals to be rated on two of the major journal review communities, despite (perhaps because of) most journals receiving very critical reviews.

And a couple non-LiveJournal related observations:

1. Discussions revive as they jump between disjointed communities. UI plays a key role in keeping communities disjointed.
2. The concept of “tags” as used at Flickr.com and del.icio.us creates a new form of community participation that is quite unlike other forms.

3. LiveJournal provides a one-month notice period for deleted accounts to be revived. In practice, however, deleted accounts are rarely purged and may be recovered anytime. This results in cases of an owner deleting their account when they want to temporarily go offline.

LiveJournal announced today that they have an account purging system in place finally:

Warning: If you have a deleted LiveJournal account that’s for years been saying, “This will be deleted in 30 days” and you’ve gotten so used to it never deleting that you assumed we never will ..... we will.

Tomorrow we’ll start actually deleting deleted accounts. Warn any friends of yours that have deleted accounts that you think they might still want. (some people delete to hide their journals I hear.....)

Notice the last bit in parenthesis. I have seen this happen. One user (whom I cannot identify until I have obtained his permission) posted this March 1st, 2005:

10:40 am

Starting tomorrow I have to delete my journal for a few weeks.

A company is going to make me an offer for a job I interviewed for a couple of weeks ago and they will be doing an extensive background check on me. This includes retarded things like calling my friends and family to see what kind of person I am. Stupid ass me put [snipped]@gmail.com as my email address on my resume which could potentially lead them to this journal, where they would read a full account of what an immature, perverted, derelict fart-smith I am. Naturally, we can’t have that.

I’ll be back in a few weeks. Later.

-[snipped]

He returned quickly. March 4th, 2005:

5:08 pm

Hey all, I’m back.

Got the new job which is cool, and by cool, I mean totally sweet. We’re open for business, drop me a line.

I have other examples, but sadly none with a quote I can reproduce here. LiveJournal has always maintained that deleted accounts will be purged in 30 days. LiveJournal’s policy was out of sync with reality. Notice how users build their experience around expected behaviour, not stated behaviour, and that the difference between these two is so well established that LiveJournal has to make a warning announcement that expected behaviour will henceforth match stated behaviour.

I’m stepping out on a limb here, talking about things I have no academic familiarity with, so I’d appreciate feedback. This post is mostly conjecture.

1. The <lj user="somebody"> tag on LiveJournal creates a link to a LiveJournal account by id. Liberal use of this tag converts what would normally be taken for name-dropping into a form of introduction. In addition, since LJ ids have no first or last name, there is only one way to address a person using their LJ id. This creates an egalitarian atmosphere for addressing other users.

To begin with, what is name-dropping? Answers.com provides a definition:

“To mention casually the names of illustrious or famous people in order to imply that one is on familiar terms with them, intended as a means of self-promotion.”

In the context of the blog, let us assume that “illustrious or famous people” refers to anyone who appeals to the average blog reader. It can then be said that any reference to another person that carries an air of familiarity with that person can be construed as name-dropping.

Consider an imaginary post:

“Ramesh Ramaswamy says the delta wing design is unstable and unsuitable for a low power unmanned aircraft. I’m not convinced however. I’m building a prototype currently, and it does look as if it’ll fly.”

The words here carry an implication of Ramesh Ramaswamy as a peer, since it’s an unusual event to openly challenge an authority (even if that is the case). Or consider this second example:

“Suresh is cool. He rigged up a barcode reader to his dormitory room lock, so now he can enter by just waving his id card.”

In this case, the blogger’s words imply familiarity with Suresh (since there is no explanation of who he is, and no proper identity either), describe an enviable achievement, and hence subtly imply that the blogger is in the company of very cool people.

Both these are somewhat unusual examples, but fact is, the blogosphere is inundated with posts from people talking about other people. Most of the time, this is about what one person thinks of another person’s post. The bloggers have likely never met each other, but have attained familiarity with reading each others’ posts, have referred to each other before, and are at a level of familiarity now that when referring to the other, they no longer bother to explain who the other is.

At this point a new person reads the post, discovers it is a bunch of people talking about each other, with a collective opinion spread thin across several posts, while at the same time carrying an air of high intellectualism. The new person typically dismisses this as a sham, a mutual back-patting club.

I think LiveJournal (LJ) has accidentally stumbled upon a mechanism to prevent this from happening within that community. Sometime in 2001¹, LiveJournal introduced a custom extension to the HTML formatting that is used in posts. If you insert a tag <lj user="somebody"> in your post, LiveJournal converts this into a link to that user’s journal. This link is stylised with a small leading icon, followed by the account name in bold. Clicking on the account name leads to that user’s journal, while clicking on the icon leads to the user’s profile.

In 2004¹, the tag’s handling was updated so that the icon changes if the account is a community or a syndicated journal, and the account name is displayed struck out if the account has been deleted.

Use of the LJ tag has become deep-rooted² in the LJ community. Almost every reference to another LJ user is done via the tag, not the person’s name. It may have been awkward for some initially, especially when setting aside a simple real name for a complicated username, but the tag offers the clear advantage of unambiguousness. There may be several people named Suresh, but there is only one <lj user="hserus">. You won’t have to explain exactly who you are referring to.

Use of this tag transforms a reference to another person from a case of potential name-dropping to an introduction. What was previously “I know all these cool people (that you don’t have access to)” becomes “here are some cool people that you should get familiar with”.

I believe this is so for specific reasons:

1. Unambiguousness, as explained above.
2. Consistent interface for how to know more about the person. Click on the name to read their journal, or click on the icon to read their profile page, where they may have a biography, and where you can see who of your existing friends also know this person.
3. LJ usernames are a single word. There is no title, first name, or last name basis for addressing. Whether the person is one’s spouse or a high authority, the reference is made in the same manner. This creates an egalitarian atmosphere and reduces implicit messages of familiarity.
4. Because there is a consistent interface, users do not have to explain who the person is or how they are familiar with them. The link to the profile usually provides it, and that they have a LiveJournal account at all is satisfactory explanation for how the user is familiar with them (“I know her because she has a journal and I read it”).
5. Because the tag always provides a link, users grow to expect that they needn’t provide it themselves, and because there’s a link to a profile, they needn’t bother with that either. This is particularly significant when a person is mentioned for the first time, for again after a long period.

To use a familiar analogy, LJ tags are like how when financial publications mention a company name, they follow it with the stock ticker symbol. Just as they expect a curious reader may look up the symbol to find out more before returning to the article, LJ users expect the tag provides adequate introduction to whoever they are talking about.

Thanks to Nakul Shenoy for helping with clarifying why an LJ tag is different from a regular hyperlink.

¹ Date to be verified.

² As observed. I do not have statistics to back this up.

4. The <lj-cut> tag breaks a post with a link to where the remaining text can be read. The LJ Friends page—which is the primary way to track other LJ users—honours this tag. Since long uncut posts will require uninterested readers to scroll too much to get past it to the next post, there is a culture of pulling up people who don’t cut their posts, and a counterculture of people refusing to cut their posts just because some readers are fussy.

The official explanation: http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=75

A humorous take: http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/LJ-cut

Examples from the Bangalore community. Notice the comments demanding the post be cut:
http://www.livejournal.com/community/bangalore/213138.html
http://www.livejournal.com/community/bangalore/198975.html

And from an avowed anti-cut user. Notice how it develops:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/beatzo/75599.html?thread=892239#t892239
http://www.livejournal.com/users/beatzo/76180.html (post and commentary)
http://www.livejournal.com/users/beatzo/76602.html (last-but-for-one paragraph)
http://www.livejournal.com/users/beatzo/84942.html?thread=1088974#t1088974

On 01-May-05, at 9:51 PM, Kiran Jonnalagadda wrote:

5. User pictures are critical to community on LiveJournal, significantly more so than on other communities that allow identifying icons. Userpics are used to convey not just identity but also emotion.

Like several other forums on the net, LiveJournal allows users to upload pictures of themselves. However, LiveJournal is unique in its approach to user pictures (userpics), with some interesting consequences.

To begin with, while most sites require that the picture be of the account owner only, even penalising violations (eg. Orkut), LiveJournal places no such restrictions. Most LJers do not use their own picture (my observation). LiveJournal allows multiple userpics per account—three for free accounts and fifteen for paid. Additional userpics can be purchased for an annual fee.

Userpics can be assigned keywords. When making a post or a comment, the user can select from their defined keywords, and the corresponding picture is shown. If no keyword is selected, the picture marked as default is used. Pictures may be removed or replaced with other pictures bearing the same keywords, and all corresponding uses of the keyword will show the new picture. Most users organise their pictures and keywords to depict emotional states. Here is an example of a well-organised collection:

http://www.livejournal.com/allpics.bml?user=minn

Perhaps because of the large size allowed (100x100 pixels), userpics are very significant on LiveJournal. Pictures tend to be unique, well differentiated from the others. Consider this collage showing the userpics of the friends of a particular user:

http://teemus.mozcal.org/friendsCollage/?username=luv_serendipity
(thanks, teemus!)

Users come to be identified by their pictures, and in conversations involving two or three correspondents, names are entirely ignored. However, while LiveJournal ensures that users may only post with their own accounts (or accounts they have access to), there is nothing stopping one user from using the same picture as another user. The uniqueness of a userpic is only guaranteed by common courtesy. This can have interesting consequences when users intentionally swap pictures. Here is one early experiment with participants swapping both pictures and writing styles:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/khorgath/75988.html

Sadly the effect is not visible now because (a) you need prior familiarity with the userpics, and (b) all these users deleted their adopted pictures when they ran into the picture limit, but didn’t carry forward the picture keywords. I have attempted to recreate the page as it appeared in February 2003, using current pictures where the old ones were not available. Please look at both names and pictures carefully:

http://home.seacrow.com/~jace/sarai/lj/userpic-swap.html

Here is another experiment in which userpics speak louder than words in a conversation (also partially mangled):

http://www.livejournal.com/community/pesit/2016.html?thread=6112#t6112

Online communities looking to understand how they can improve participation levels could do well to follow LiveJournal’s model of userpic as identity. There is a lot more to this than I’ve covered, but due to time constraints, I will break here.