(no subject)

[ewx]

Livejournal encourages reading too fast.

New postings I do generally pay a reasonable amount of attention to, but when catching up with new comments on an old posting my fingers automatically page down or close as I read the last few words. If I realize I wanted to say something I have to go back and figure out what post it was; if I can remember whose journal the posting was in then I stand a chance.

I read things and realize a moment later I've no idea what I've read, and have to go back and pay attention this time.

I keep misreading things in bizarre ways. "Kidlington" comes out as "Klingon" (...actually that one was unusually persistent). This isn't just livejournal, irc and news have the same effect. This is more an amusement than an annoyance, though possibly not to be writers I insist on announcing my misinterpretations to.

I've long been a quick reader, but I'm starting to think that my own speed is beginning to catch up with me.

Livejournal could be improved; the further back you look the more you have to look at to find the same amount of new material. It doesn't have to be that way; usenet clients usually do a much better job. Livejournal could have, and could still, adopt that model in addition to its existing interface. Browsers could be improved too, albeit only in band-aid sorts of ways; for example 'undo' should be able to re-open tabs you just closed. (This would be great anyway, not just for dealing with broken-by-design user interfaces.) We could invent horrible screen-scraping bodges which figure out what the new comments are, going back as far as necessary, and presenting them in a more useful way.

(But I have enough going on anyway that I don't have time to follow any of these suggestions.)

Comments

[juliet]

for example 'undo' should be able to re-open tabs you just closed.

Opera does this (as long as you haven't done anything else inbetween - it doesn't seem to have a history list of stuff to undo, or if it does it doesn't apply to browser tab closing).

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

THere is a 'most recent coments on your journal' thing. But I tend to use email comment notifications - I can read comments in a mail client, which looks less suspect than a browser, and mark the mail unread if I want to come back to it.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

It's not the comments on my journal that are the problem, it's keeping up with everyone else's that's unnecessarily time-consuming.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

Yup. There is no way for me to know if someone has responded to a comment in another persons journal, especially if the original entry was 2 weeks ago. That is one of my biggest dislikes about LJ.

Now if only they could present LJ via an NNTP server. Each journal would be it's own group, and the threading information could be presented in the References header.

I quite like that idea!

I wonder if there's a hidden XML page somewhere which could produce a thread tree...

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Once you start thinking along those lines you rapidly conclude that it would be better to dispense with the central servers and distribute the articles using NNTP or something similar. The obvious followup is to discard the usenet model of big central servers and instead have everyone running what is essentially a toy NNTP server which automatically exchanges articles with the equivalent of your friends list. Cryptography would be used to ensure confidentiality (where desired) and to prevent forgery; there is a key distribution problem, of course, but there is a pre-existing pile of information about trust relationships to take advantage of.

usenet model of big central servers

[ewx.livejournal.com]

...err, though ones that are "less central" than the LJ model. I rather suspect you know what I mean.

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

Do you have a secret portal into my brain? I was just thinking last night that what I really need is a "mark this post (with this number of comments) as read" button, largely for the reasons you describe.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

This is supposedly the purpose of the nc=xx syntax under Manage Info:

Add &nc=xx to comment URLs
Check this if you want to append the comment count to URLs, which may make your browser display the visited links in a different colour.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

That tells you which postings have had new comments, but doesn't tell you which the new comments are, which is rather an issue when there's lots of them.

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

Yes, but I still have to wade through old entries I have read to find ones that have comments I've not yet seen.

I suppose what I didn't add to my comment above is that in combination with the "mark X with n comments as read" button I would also want the facility to display only "unread" posts (i.e. new posts, or old posts with new comments).

[neilh.livejournal.com]

"Kidlington" comes out as "Klingon" (...actually that one was unusually persistent).

...because that is a word in such common usage these days, must've taken over from 'belgium'...you've also got a dark past involving the outer reaches of Oxford?