GEnie and LiveJournal
Aug. 28th, 2004 02:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
msagaraI've mentioned elsewhere on my user info page that I'm an old GEnie user. I'd now like to explain what that experience meant to me, because it has some bearing on my activities on LJ now.
When I joined GEnie, usenet was thriving with flamewars that made nuclear seem pretty tame in comparison. Compuserve was spelled Compu$erve, and the on-line for pay services were very, very expensive; you got free internet access -- and there was no www -- if you were a university student or professor, or somehow related to someone who was, because they were the backbone of the internet. Everything was done by phone, and everything was done by really slow modems (1200 bps was state of the art).
So everything was done in text.
GEnie was a very primitive bbs. There were no threaded discussions; there were topics. You logged in and you "read all new" and all of the topics you marked could then be read at your leisure. But you had to read all the posts in order to then add a comment at the end. This was frustrating at the start, and much-loved at the end, because it was like a conversation -- you replied, after reading 70 messages, to the things that were important, rather than to every point, and if the conversation did wander, it sort of wandered by group fiat.
GEnie was a shock to me after usenet because it was so polite. People didn't nitpick your typos and spelling, and there was a lot less aggressive territoriality. This was instantly more comfortable to me; I did post some in some of the usenet groups, but I could literally spend hours on each post, combing it for errors over and over again before it went up, to make it as bullet-proof as possible. On GEnie, I assumed that it was simply conversation, without teeth or fangs, and I posted more.
The reason I joined GEnie in the first place was because there were so many authors there. And editors. And an agent or two. I had sold my first novel, but I had no publication credits, and while I understood how the bookstore worked, I really didn't understand publishing all that well. SFWA members got a free-flag, so they could chat in chat rooms without racking up the hourly dollars that would have been prohibitive, and it's from those chats that I learned most of what I knew when my book finally hit shelves.
There were a number of authors whose posts were incredibly helpful to me. Raymond E. Feist wrote pages and pages about various aspects of distribution, but he wasn't the only one. For discussions about writing itself, Alis Rasmussen's group was a literary salon, and there was fun and frivolity in Teresa Edgerton's topic (and if anyone knows where she is, email me; I've totally lost track of her and would love to touch base). The writing community, at least to a newbie, was helpful and friendly, and if much of the time was spent discussing things like feminism, politics, house-buying, an equal amount of time was writing and publishing.
Okay, thank you for bearing with me. I'm getting to the LJ relevant part about now.
LJ in interface is nothing like GEnie, and it's hard to have an ongoing conversation because of the way the comments work -- but it's not impossible; bits and pieces of journals are picked up and discussed by other LJ users, spawning different and equally interesting discussions. In feel, in many ways, this is as similar to GEnie in tone as anything I've seen since. The Journals function in a similar way to GEnie's author topics, because the topic owner usually set the tone.
More, though, it's the people here that remind me of that first experience. Some of them are also old GEnie users, but not all of them; there's an openness and a willingness to talk or ask questions that I really like, and it's that ambience, more than familiar faces, that makes this remind me so much of GEnie. My own topic on GEnie was sadly neglected, because I often felt I had very little to say; I loved to add to other discussions, though, and I had originally intended to do just that with the LJ account, and no more.
But the spouse thought that it might be useful to other people if I rambled a bit about the bookstore in the context of writing and publishing. I'm always happy to think out loud. It's getting me to stop that's the problem <wry g>. I try to keep in mind what I knew then, and how it differs from what I know now, and how I learned things by trial and error. I confess that I still don't think my daily life is all that interesting, so I don't post about that.
But while I start comments, I'm happy -- truly happy -- to see other people post their own experiences and thoughts and questions; I feel less like the journal is "mine" in the authorial sense of the word, and more like it's a living room, or a house, in which people are sitting around and chatting. If you're chatting to each other, it doesn't really bother me, because even then, it's often informative. If you don't post, or don't post often, that's fine too -- some people are naturally more reticent at largish gatherings.
I don't mind if I don't know you; I don't mind if you post without somehow pointing out that I don't know you. There's been no flaming, and I have no sense of cliques or groups with specific slants in anything I've read either here or on my reading list. I know that it's sometimes intimidating to enter a room in which one feels like everyone knows everyone else -- except you <g>. If you've got questions, people who can answer them will probably be happy to, if they have the time, and many of these rambles come directly -- or indirectly -- from questions that other LJ users have asked, either in one of my comment threads or on other journals.
So. Umm. Thank you.
Just wanted to say that.
When I joined GEnie, usenet was thriving with flamewars that made nuclear seem pretty tame in comparison. Compuserve was spelled Compu$erve, and the on-line for pay services were very, very expensive; you got free internet access -- and there was no www -- if you were a university student or professor, or somehow related to someone who was, because they were the backbone of the internet. Everything was done by phone, and everything was done by really slow modems (1200 bps was state of the art).
So everything was done in text.
GEnie was a very primitive bbs. There were no threaded discussions; there were topics. You logged in and you "read all new" and all of the topics you marked could then be read at your leisure. But you had to read all the posts in order to then add a comment at the end. This was frustrating at the start, and much-loved at the end, because it was like a conversation -- you replied, after reading 70 messages, to the things that were important, rather than to every point, and if the conversation did wander, it sort of wandered by group fiat.
GEnie was a shock to me after usenet because it was so polite. People didn't nitpick your typos and spelling, and there was a lot less aggressive territoriality. This was instantly more comfortable to me; I did post some in some of the usenet groups, but I could literally spend hours on each post, combing it for errors over and over again before it went up, to make it as bullet-proof as possible. On GEnie, I assumed that it was simply conversation, without teeth or fangs, and I posted more.
The reason I joined GEnie in the first place was because there were so many authors there. And editors. And an agent or two. I had sold my first novel, but I had no publication credits, and while I understood how the bookstore worked, I really didn't understand publishing all that well. SFWA members got a free-flag, so they could chat in chat rooms without racking up the hourly dollars that would have been prohibitive, and it's from those chats that I learned most of what I knew when my book finally hit shelves.
There were a number of authors whose posts were incredibly helpful to me. Raymond E. Feist wrote pages and pages about various aspects of distribution, but he wasn't the only one. For discussions about writing itself, Alis Rasmussen's group was a literary salon, and there was fun and frivolity in Teresa Edgerton's topic (and if anyone knows where she is, email me; I've totally lost track of her and would love to touch base). The writing community, at least to a newbie, was helpful and friendly, and if much of the time was spent discussing things like feminism, politics, house-buying, an equal amount of time was writing and publishing.
Okay, thank you for bearing with me. I'm getting to the LJ relevant part about now.
LJ in interface is nothing like GEnie, and it's hard to have an ongoing conversation because of the way the comments work -- but it's not impossible; bits and pieces of journals are picked up and discussed by other LJ users, spawning different and equally interesting discussions. In feel, in many ways, this is as similar to GEnie in tone as anything I've seen since. The Journals function in a similar way to GEnie's author topics, because the topic owner usually set the tone.
More, though, it's the people here that remind me of that first experience. Some of them are also old GEnie users, but not all of them; there's an openness and a willingness to talk or ask questions that I really like, and it's that ambience, more than familiar faces, that makes this remind me so much of GEnie. My own topic on GEnie was sadly neglected, because I often felt I had very little to say; I loved to add to other discussions, though, and I had originally intended to do just that with the LJ account, and no more.
But the spouse thought that it might be useful to other people if I rambled a bit about the bookstore in the context of writing and publishing. I'm always happy to think out loud. It's getting me to stop that's the problem <wry g>. I try to keep in mind what I knew then, and how it differs from what I know now, and how I learned things by trial and error. I confess that I still don't think my daily life is all that interesting, so I don't post about that.
But while I start comments, I'm happy -- truly happy -- to see other people post their own experiences and thoughts and questions; I feel less like the journal is "mine" in the authorial sense of the word, and more like it's a living room, or a house, in which people are sitting around and chatting. If you're chatting to each other, it doesn't really bother me, because even then, it's often informative. If you don't post, or don't post often, that's fine too -- some people are naturally more reticent at largish gatherings.
I don't mind if I don't know you; I don't mind if you post without somehow pointing out that I don't know you. There's been no flaming, and I have no sense of cliques or groups with specific slants in anything I've read either here or on my reading list. I know that it's sometimes intimidating to enter a room in which one feels like everyone knows everyone else -- except you <g>. If you've got questions, people who can answer them will probably be happy to, if they have the time, and many of these rambles come directly -- or indirectly -- from questions that other LJ users have asked, either in one of my comment threads or on other journals.
So. Umm. Thank you.
Just wanted to say that.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-08-28 12:02 am (UTC)I find the lack of conversational elements on LJ semi-frustrating. There could, for example, be a lively conversation that starts up with the response to someone else's comments to your entry. I'll never hear of it directly. I've meandered on this enough to dream up some kind of apa-ware interface that would more closely replicate the paper apas that I'm used to. Programming such a thing is beyond me for now, though.
no subject
Date: 2004-08-28 04:06 am (UTC)Nevertheless - it is nice to see people who are close friends I seldom see and people who aren't really close friends yet but whose company I always enjoy, like yourself. And in its own little way I think LJ is one more step to a genuine electronic worldwide small town. (Ok - um - neighborhoods in a really big city?? :)
no subject
Date: 2004-08-28 07:47 am (UTC)I think it was Karen Cooper (who is part of
And you'll forgive me if I don't recognize you by name or the icon. I am glad someone enjoys my company, however. ;)
no subject
Date: 2004-08-28 11:41 am (UTC)Oops, my mistake - I think I might vaguely recognize you but I meant Michelle is someone who isn't exactly a close friend, we hardly see each other, but I've known her for years and I always enjoy her company when I see her. :-)
no subject
Date: 2004-08-28 04:10 am (UTC)Yeah! That's the biggest failing with LJ in my humble opinion - if you want to keep up with a conversation you have to just remember to re-read that person's journal to see if there have been any other interesting posts.
Perhaps even if you could just flag certain posts to alert you of any new comments not just responses to your own posts?? If you could do that you could keep up with the thread better. I also find it frustrating from the perspective of my own journal because sometimes I feel like I had better post a whole new entry rather than make a comment because people won't read it.
Guess we'll just have to keep hoping those type of improvements make it into the next rev. Might even tempt me to become a paid user! :-)
no subject
Date: 2004-08-28 04:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-29 03:45 pm (UTC)It also keeps track of if there are any new comments to posts you've commented on. So you can choose to sub and not comment or comment. Either way, you can track the conversation.
Zhaneel
no subject
Date: 2004-08-28 08:42 am (UTC)There's a way to do that, actually. On the edit your personal info page, there's a setting that adds the number of comments to the URL for comments to a post (this works in your own journal or your
reading-listfriends page). This as the effect that if someone adds a comment, the URL looks unvisited. You have to scroll through all the comments to find the new ones, but it definitely helps.---L.