No, they are not trying to do the Right Thing; they clearly do not know what the Right Thing is. LJ is a classic example of mission/feature creep; so good at what it did as a basic function that people try to use it as something quite different without even knowing that that's what they are doing.
It started out as a blog system. The basic model of blog systems is that the journallist publishes content and everyone who is interested pulls it. Feedback comments get added as a nicety. Then folks want to comment on comments. Suddenly it's a messaging system that was never designed to be one.
Given the me-to-the-world model of content, groups and security were more designed around helping people find more content they were interested in as opposed to preventing them from seeing content that's out there.
This system was not designed with the idea of privacy, its goal is the opposite: tell the whole world something.
I'm fine with blogs as such, but when they do a sh*tty job of pretending to be messaging systems and most of my friends insist on using them as such, it kinda bugs me. No structure tags in the content, so that given an LJ page, you cannot reliably determine the author or subject programmatically, no message-id's, most posts without subjects or summaries, no comments in the rss feed, no way to read comments via the API unless you have posting privs to the journal, no references or crossposting, no backups, no way to reference other LJ sites (ie, no lj://site/user/post kind of system), rendering controls structured around colors instead of content (I can make posts any color I want, but can't read them in forward time order). No decent editing of comments; how do I set a margin and fill this paragraph?
If the authors had known what they were doing, the whole thing would have an actual messaging system backend (imap, nntp, etc). Instead of using already debugged and very fast infrastructure with APIs and ACLs already done, the LJ folks have spent huge amounts of time inventing an inferior wheel. They could have gotton further with less sweat by making a pretty style rendering layer and web gui on top of an exisiting messaging technology, but since they didn't quite realize that that was where they were headed when they started, they've ended up with a handcrafted perl and sql pile of kludges and a userbase so large making any changes is a bitch.
LJ is obviously very good at certain things, or they wouldn't have, what, over a million users, but if anyone was to start over today, the guts would look a whole lot different.
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Date: 2003-12-27 03:08 pm (UTC)do not know what the Right Thing is. LJ is a classic example
of mission/feature creep; so good at what it did as a basic
function that people try to use it as something quite different
without even knowing that that's what they are doing.
It started out as a blog system. The basic model of blog systems is that
the journallist publishes content and everyone who is interested pulls it.
Feedback comments get added as a nicety.
Then folks want to comment on comments.
Suddenly it's a messaging system that was never designed to be one.
Given the me-to-the-world model of content, groups and security were more
designed around helping people find more content they were interested in
as opposed to preventing them from seeing content that's out there.
This system was not designed with the idea of privacy, its goal is the opposite:
tell the whole world something.
I'm fine with blogs as such, but when they do a sh*tty job of pretending to be
messaging systems and most of my friends insist on using them as such, it kinda
bugs me. No structure tags in the content, so that given an LJ page, you cannot reliably
determine the author or subject programmatically, no message-id's, most posts without subjects or summaries, no comments in the rss feed, no way to read comments via the API unless you have posting privs to the journal, no references or crossposting, no backups, no way to reference other LJ sites (ie, no lj://site/user/post kind of system), rendering controls structured around colors instead of content (I can make posts any color I want, but can't read them in forward time order). No decent editing of comments; how do I set a margin and fill this paragraph?
If the authors had known what they were doing, the whole thing would have an actual
messaging system backend (imap, nntp, etc). Instead of using already debugged and
very fast infrastructure with APIs and ACLs already done, the LJ folks have spent
huge amounts of time inventing an inferior wheel. They could have gotton further
with less sweat by making a pretty style rendering layer and web gui on top of an
exisiting messaging technology, but since they didn't quite realize that that was
where they were headed when they started, they've ended up with a handcrafted perl and
sql pile of kludges and a userbase so large making any changes is a bitch.
LJ is obviously very good at certain things, or they wouldn't have, what, over a million
users, but if anyone was to start over today, the guts would look a whole lot different.