As insomnia likes to point out, LiveJournal is shrinking. Many blame SixApart and SUP for this decline, and it true that the actions of those corporations have contributed to the slow bleed of users. However, I believe the root cause is much deeper.

The tone of the LiveJournal community has changed. It has become more vicious, more snark-centric, more hateful and cliquish. There has always been drama on LiveJournal, but it has not always been like it is now. Often now one misspoken word in a community or the mention of a viewpoint out of the mainstream will be taken out of context and a flood of mean-spirited attacks will flood the comments of a post from users mobbing in from any one of the countless snark communities that have cropped up.

I've been on LiveJournal almost 7 years at this point, and this increasing ugliness has me more concerned for LiveJournal than anything SixApart did or SUP is doing. Neither SixApart nor SUP are LiveJournal, LiveJournal is the community that inhabits this virtual place and that community is decaying. I'm sure I'm far from the only long-time user who is disenchanted by the current LiveJournal environment and I don't see what the motivation would be for many new users to become part of it.

I have not been involved in any drama around here recently, so this post hasn't been triggered by a specific event. The problem is that LiveJournal doesn't seem like a community anymore, at least not a communities that I want to consider myself part of. I don't intend on leaving completely, but I've been spending a lot less time here. I've got other things to do.