Proposing a "Read and enjoyed; thanks." response to grease the wheels of Livejournal.

[agoodwinsmith]

Here is a comment that I just made somewhere else, which I think is such a good idea that I think you should know about it too.

"The other part of Livejournal is that, to reward the poster for posting something interesting, one can't just go *LIKE* with a single click. And usenet etiquette, which mostly pertains here, says that it is gauche to post just a smirkee or a me too. But sometimes one doesn't have anything useful to contribute other than "how very interesting" so one does nothing and the Livejournal poster feels that they are just shouting into an empty echo-ey tunnel - and they stop posting.

So maybe, while we are all getting back up to speed with Livejournal use, it will be okay to simply post this reply:

Read and enjoyed; thanks."

Comments

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Please not on a whole line by itself, which fills up a whole screen with such non-content. No fun paging down and down with maybe one content-ful comment per screen, lost in the ganzfield.

[agoodwinsmith.livejournal.com]

Um ... what?

[(Anonymous)]

/ houseboat here /

On some other social media, where " + Like " appears, each one is on a separate line, so a whole screen of comments can consist of a long column of " + likes " without any commenter actually saying anything. This means that to find a comment with real content, you have to page down through several screens of nothing but " + likes ".

So if there are going to be "likes" then it's better to have them all in one paragraph headed "Liked by" and then the names, which takes only a couple of lines of the screen, and real comments can be seen uninterrupted below.

[agoodwinsmith.livejournal.com]

See, this is an example of why I think a response like "Read & enjoyed; thanks" would be useful. I don't have time during the week to create thoughtful responses. But I do enjoy the things I read during the week. *Aaaaand* I'm not going back to previously read stuff for thoughtful comment because on the weekend there is a flurry of new things to read.

So, like I did with this comment, it just sits here until I get time to unscreen it, as well as respond.

For a lot of the high-volume posters, this is not a problem - they get reaffirmation every day on every post because a lot of people with time are reading them and say something cogent at the time. For many of us low-volume posters, we post seldom, so not many people are reading us and we rarely get any response, cogent or otherwise. It feels a bit lonely. It feels like one should give it up.

But I like reading the posts of my low-volume posters as much as the high-volume posters, and so I want to indicate that I have read them and appreciated what they wrote - but we are back to my weekday constraint of no time for cogent replies.

And - people have been moaning that LiveJournal is fading into the mists as people abandon it for more responsive platforms. Well, then, let's bloody well get more responsive here, shall we, eh?

And really, if one is reading Livejournal, then extra comments (no matter the size) shouldn't take up more room, since the reader must request to see the comments - the posts scroll by with the comments tucked away.

Also, I doubt many of us are going to post "Read & enjoyed; thanks" on a high-volume poster's posts. We might; it could happen - and then LiveJournal will have more activity and be less moribund.

[pperiwinkle.livejournal.com]

As I said else web, I like this idea.

[ruthi.livejournal.com]

I like this idea.

[sammason.livejournal.com]

Me too ;-)

[agoodwinsmith.livejournal.com]

:)