An examination of how form affects community formation, contrasting LiveJournal with the Mailman-powered Sarai Reader List (August 2005).

1. What Ails the
Sarai Reader
List?
Learning from
LiveJournal’s success
Kiran Jonnalagadda <jace@seacrow.com>
August 24, 2005, at Sarai-CSDS, Delhi

2. Formerly:
Studying How Form
Affects Online Community
(With insights from coffee shop culture)

3. Contrast in
Participation
My participation in the Reader List and
LiveJournal,* Dec 2004 to August 2005:
Total posters on Reader List:
520
Total posts to Reader List: 1546
Commentators on LiveJournal:
333
Comments received on Reader List: 0
Comments received on LJ: 3076 (0-77)
* LiveJournal’s nature makes it hard to do a one-on-one comparison;
this is an approximation
3

4. Typical
Complaints
Too many posts; hard to keep up
Too many posters; hard to get familiar
Hard to follow individual threads
Flood of posts every 25th
So how does LiveJournal sustain so
much traffic so effortlessly? 1546
overall versus 3076 comments
addressed to a single person!
4

5. The
Sarai Reader List is
crumbling. The list needs to figure
out how to effectively channelise
traffic so readers are not burdened.
Imagine reading a newspaper that prints all the
news in the world in a single narrow, long sheet.

6. Problem 1:
Linearity and Unread Flags are
for Memos, not Communities

7. Threaded
Discussions
Standard feature of
mailing lists
But LiveJournal makes
participating easier
LiveJournal’s user
experience frequently
emphasises restricted
views of a greater
community.
7

8. The Friends Network:
Seamless Subgroups

9. Problem 2:
Identity and
Self-Representation

10. Identity on
LiveJournal
Globally unique id
User profile with contact
and participation details
Reference via <lj user=“”>
User pictures linked to
keywords (emotions)
Choice of picture when
participating anywhere
10

11. Problem 3:
Intimacy and
Possession
The mailing list is not personal space
LiveJournal provides personal journals
Are you addressing one while a
thousand peer at you?
Or are you addressing one while a
thousand go about their own lives?
LiveJournal achieves the latter
11

12. Problem 4:
Archival
Hard to find an old post;
No search
Threading unreliable and
broken across months
LiveJournal: the archive
is the primary interface
LiveJournal also lacking
when searching for posts
12

13. Rescuing the
Reader List
Initial plan: make LiveJournal
installation for the Reader List.
Abandoned for technical difficulties
Blue sky plan: make new system
But who’ll create and maintain it?
Current plan: make better interaction
system on top of existing MailMan list
13