On Aug 8, 2008, at 12:52 PM, rachel wrote:
While I understand the draw of having a fandom/RP/fic-friendly
journal space, I will be disappointed if DW ends up as a fandom/RP/
fic-specific journal space. That's not what I'm here for.
It's not what we're here for either, don't worry!
DW is very fandom-friendly (kinda has to be, seeing as how half of Yr
Frndly Staff, namely myself, is very active in fandom) and I know a
lot of people who are on this list are fannishly active too, since a
lot of people found the project through me discussing it in my
fannish journal. But we're absolutely not fandom-specific. We are for
anyone and everyone who wants to create things and share those things
with others (or experience the things other people are sharing), no
matter what those things are: art, fiction, nonfiction, photography,
anything at all. Even if you're "just" creating a record of your life
and your innermost thoughts and "only" sharing it with a few trusted
people, we want to make you comfortable and welcome, and we want to
give you tools and features that will work with what you're here for
and what you get out of the site. No matter what that might be.
I think this is worth reiterating, because a lot of people who are
bringing their experiences and their wants/wishes to the project (and
to the mailing list!) are looking at things from a fannish eye.
'Fandom' (by which I mean LJ-based Western-media creative-centric
fandom, but that's getting into some specifics that people probably
don't care about) is really good at adapting tools and features that
aren't intended to serve the social and creative norms that they've
built, but a lot of times those adaptations aren't perfect, and I
think a lot of people are really excited about the DW project because
to them it's a chance to get rid of or add things to LJ that have
been annoying them for a while.
We're really interested in hearing all of those ideas and all of that
excitement, because, well, let's face it: our whole motivation with
DW is to get rid of or add things to the LJ codebase that have been
annoying *us* for a while, or to do the things that we always wanted
to do to achieve what we view as lost potential. But we also
recognize that there are a multitude of subcultures on LJ itself (I
made a list; just the ones that I could think of off the top of my
head was something like 30+ items), and each of those subcultures is
going to have adapted the tools and features offered in ways that
serve their own usage.
Part of what we're doing with DW is ideological. Part of the reason
why various decisions made by the people who are running LJ over the
past few years have gone down poorly is that the userbase gets the
impression (which is not entirely true, but it's the impression
that's conveyed) that those decision-makers don't understand that LJ
isn't *a* culture, it's *many* cultures, and that both feature design
decisions and development priority lists don't take that into
account; both the list and the priority of goals, and the way in
which those goals are implemented, feel a lot to people like they're
addressing a single use case and usage model, rather than the
incredible diversity of how people are using the service.
That's dangerous for any service. Having a sense of self-identity is
really important -- the whole "know your market and stick to it"
thing -- but it's just as dangerous to ignore the "long tail" of
people who only vaguely fit that model.
DW isn't a fandom-centric service. Or rather, our motivation for
creating it isn't fandom-specific; we certainly do hope members of
fandom will find a home with us, but we also hope that members of
many other subcultures will find a home with us, and we don't think
that any particular subculture is more or less valuable than any
other. And we want to make sure that we design things and prioritize
things to address what all of those subcultures want. Or, rather, we
want to make sure that what we design and prioritize will be flexible
and adaptable, so members of all those overlapping subcultures can
interact with the site in a way that will benefit them. It's the
difference between making a change 'for' a particular subculture, and
making a change in such a way that members of most-if-not-all
subcultures will find it valuable and useful.
It's the major reason why our use-case design personas are function-
based, and not subculture-based. Knowing how all of those subcultures
use the site is very important, to minimize the chances of making a
change that will 'break' a specific usage that's evolved, but
designing for a subculture-based usage pattern rather than for a
function-based usage pattern results in just as much of a perception-
of-monoculture as what we're trying to move away from, and we don't
want to do that.
--D
--
Denise Paolucci
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dreamwidth Studios: Open Source, open expression, open operations.
Coming Summer 2008!
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