A meme I really hate, you guys
May. 3rd, 2009 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eruthros"I don't see any differences between lj and dw! It's just a social pressure thing! That's why everyone is moving!"
I wanted to leave lj, because of things like strikethrough. I wanted to leave lj, because I couldn't stand the ad-culture and what it was doing to the site. I wanted to leave lj, because I don't feel welcome there. But I stayed for ages. I stayed when there was ij, and gj, and journalfen. I stayed when all the options were site clones. I only moved when someone offered me a fandom-welcome, no-ads, fork.
And I thought, oh, well, it'll take a while for me to settle in there. I'll have to get used to the differences in the interface. I'll have to get used to the way the menus have moved. Everything will seem a little wrong, but I'll put up with it for a while, because I really do want to move. So,eruthros, I told myself, be prepared to have it take a little while for dreamwidth to seem like the right place to be.
It took thirty seconds.
Here is the moment at which I fell in love with dreamwidth: three boxes down in the edit-profile page, when I clicked on the gender box, and found not just "unspecified" and "male" and "female," but "rather not say" and "other" and "male" and "female."
And I have been falling in love with dreamwidth ever since. I fell in love with dw over the accessibility concerns that led them to put a description box for every icon, so you can tell screenreader users what they're looking at. I fell in love with dw over the menu placements, which I find so intuitive that it now makes it hard for me to find things on lj, a site I have used for nearly eight years. I fell in love with dw when they made the post and comment lengths longer, because it meant they were thinking about their users and what their users wanted.
This is not a social pressure thing. This is not because my friends are moving -- some of them haven't, or won't, and I will continue to read them on lj. This is because I feel comfortable here. This is because, every time I do something on dreamwidth, I find that it's easy, or inclusive, or accessible. I find that they've thought about how users want to use this space. This is because there is a difference. And I love it.
I wanted to leave lj, because of things like strikethrough. I wanted to leave lj, because I couldn't stand the ad-culture and what it was doing to the site. I wanted to leave lj, because I don't feel welcome there. But I stayed for ages. I stayed when there was ij, and gj, and journalfen. I stayed when all the options were site clones. I only moved when someone offered me a fandom-welcome, no-ads, fork.
And I thought, oh, well, it'll take a while for me to settle in there. I'll have to get used to the differences in the interface. I'll have to get used to the way the menus have moved. Everything will seem a little wrong, but I'll put up with it for a while, because I really do want to move. So,
eruthros, I told myself, be prepared to have it take a little while for dreamwidth to seem like the right place to be.It took thirty seconds.
Here is the moment at which I fell in love with dreamwidth: three boxes down in the edit-profile page, when I clicked on the gender box, and found not just "unspecified" and "male" and "female," but "rather not say" and "other" and "male" and "female."
And I have been falling in love with dreamwidth ever since. I fell in love with dw over the accessibility concerns that led them to put a description box for every icon, so you can tell screenreader users what they're looking at. I fell in love with dw over the menu placements, which I find so intuitive that it now makes it hard for me to find things on lj, a site I have used for nearly eight years. I fell in love with dw when they made the post and comment lengths longer, because it meant they were thinking about their users and what their users wanted.
This is not a social pressure thing. This is not because my friends are moving -- some of them haven't, or won't, and I will continue to read them on lj. This is because I feel comfortable here. This is because, every time I do something on dreamwidth, I find that it's easy, or inclusive, or accessible. I find that they've thought about how users want to use this space. This is because there is a difference. And I love it.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-03 02:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-03 02:30 pm (UTC)I also feel, as a person who did database administration, that for a field used only in the back-end free-text is a horrible, horrible idea. And I do understand that they want to have the field for back-end and statistical reporting reasons, even if it doesn't "do" anything for users.