![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I think if people really want a historical context for what's happening with social media right now, with Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook et al and these giants' race to the bottom, they need to look back to what happened with LiveJournal.
Like, I wasn't there. I was alive, but I didn't do social media back in LiveJournal's heyday. But I know about it. The historical documentation exists. LiveJournal went live in April 1999. LiveJournal started out open source (Dreamwidth was forked from that code, as well as other sites like DeadJournal and InsaneJournal). Livejournal was bought by Six Apart and then by SUP. Livejournal closed their source code in 2014. LiveJournal never went out of business but it very much went out of style.
Like Tumblr, LiveJournal originally started out with no ads:
Today it is a cesspool of ads that...get this...you can pay to get rid of! Hmmmm, I wonder where all of today's social media sites got this brilliant idea?!
Of course, Livejournal didn't come up with the idea of using ads or subscriptions as funding. That idea is a bit older. Certainly in television, with ad funded public TV channels and subscription-based cable TV channels. Presumably radios also have operated with ad-finding since the early days. So both of these ideas predate the internet itself. But it has quite a history on the internet as well, a history which includes LiveJournal.
Like, I wasn't there. I was alive, but I didn't do social media back in LiveJournal's heyday. But I know about it. The historical documentation exists. LiveJournal went live in April 1999. LiveJournal started out open source (Dreamwidth was forked from that code, as well as other sites like DeadJournal and InsaneJournal). Livejournal was bought by Six Apart and then by SUP. Livejournal closed their source code in 2014. LiveJournal never went out of business but it very much went out of style.
Like Tumblr, LiveJournal originally started out with no ads:
(from https://web.archive.org/web/20010124080700/http://www.livejournal.com/paidaccounts/)
No Banner Ads! --- we all hate banner ads, so LiveJournal is proud to not show any. Even free users don't have banner ads! However, it's the paid users that make this possible. We still need money to run the site. Everybody working on the project is a volunteer, but it still costs money for servers and to have them hooked up to the net.
Today it is a cesspool of ads that...get this...you can pay to get rid of! Hmmmm, I wonder where all of today's social media sites got this brilliant idea?!
Of course, Livejournal didn't come up with the idea of using ads or subscriptions as funding. That idea is a bit older. Certainly in television, with ad funded public TV channels and subscription-based cable TV channels. Presumably radios also have operated with ad-finding since the early days. So both of these ideas predate the internet itself. But it has quite a history on the internet as well, a history which includes LiveJournal.
