Could LiveJournal have been a contender?

This Ars Technica article looks at the promise--sadly unfulfilled--of pioneering blogging platform Livejournal. It really could have been a contender. I was on it from 2002; it had, in embryonic form, a lot of the elements common to the most popular social media around now. Poor management just did the site in as a potential mass audience on Facebook scale, George R.R. Martin's departure simply underlining this.

Was there a chance, do you think, of LiveJournal capitalizing on its potential? What would the resulting Internet look like, then, with anonymity being actively supported, for instance?
 
What I get from the article is not just that LJ was done in by poor management, but also just that LJ's design was too broad to go up against the "next generation" (so to speak) of social media that took exactly one idea and ran with it. Like, Facebook went for the internet diary approach, and supplemented that with other tools to find and communicate with your friends; Tumblr's better handling of images and huge emphasis on sharing (reblogging, etc) made it a natural hub for fandom; and even Twitter, with its "shout out your immediate thoughts to the internet", reflects an idea from the early LJ days. Survival is always going to be a tough proposition when it's getting assailed on all sides.

For LJ to survive, I think it would need to really figure out what kind of site it wanted to be, and position itself as that. If it wants to be an internet diary I think it could have great success there— emphasize its privacy features (and how it doesn't comb and sell user data to advertisers), and it could really take off after one of the many Facebook controversies. Or maybe it wants to be a site for creative types and fans, which it could do by introducing things like image uploads or tag search before tumblr can come along. A third option might be to really double down on the "social blogging" idea and beat sites like Medium to the punch.
 
I always felt it fell between too many stools. It was sort-of a blogging platform, but with more personality than Wordpress or Blogger - at the same time it wasn't really a social network, it had an author-and-readers model akin to modern-day Youtube Vloggers but of course there was no ad revenue so there was no incentive to create something other people might like. It was predominantly text-based, but it wasn't a forum.

It didn't prioritise relationships and although the design was far more structured than MySpace it didn't have the air of seriousness than Facebook had at least initially; your mum was never likely to use Livejournal. "But my mum did use Livejournal", yes, but not seven hundred million mums, they didn't use Livejournal. Your mum isn't representative of humanity as a whole.

And unlike e.g. The Huffington Post, which isn't all that different, it didn't have an editorial aspect or a large cadre of famous people using it. As with DeviantART and tonnes of long-time internet forums (the Straight Dope, Ilxor etc) it'll probably bump along forevermore because hosting costs are low without ever becoming a mainstream phenomenon.

I have to say that I never had a Livejournal account, and despite being active on the internet from 1995 onwards it never stood out. I don't recall any massive scandals involving it or any killer content that I wanted to read. Unlike Tumblr it didn't have masses of free porn. That's always a good way of building viewers. Masses of porn and copyright violations. Now it's a Russian company and I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole.
 
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