Getting tired of Russian

[merlinofchaos]

If LJ can't fix its broken localization issues with embeds and other service integration, I'm going to have to finally give it up. This has been going on for months and it's ridiculous.

I'm starting to think that LiveJournal has decided it no longer cares about its English-speaking community because of the rise of the Russian-speaking community. That would be a sad farewell to the rise of the service, but if that's what theyr'e doing they should just announce a shutdown and get everyone to move on rather than killing it with indifference.

Comments

[sylphon.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately I have to agree. It's beginning to look like they just don't care about the english speaking community. I've been a paid user for ages, and I even pay for silly things like extra icons, but the constant localization issues are driving me batty.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

I haven't hit them, but then I'm usually running in English. I guess it's kind of like Orkut -- once a language community dominates, then there's capture.

[willowisp.livejournal.com]

Hmmmmm. Possibly, but they are, at this moment, running contests for US folks only.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I haven't hit any of the localization issues, either.

What I have also done, however, is to opt-in to Cyrillic Services. I did this mostly because I harbor hopes of learning enough Russian to be able to make full use of them.

So far, the two sides of my account don't seem to have interfered with each other in any way I can see.

ETA: What sort of issues have you been having? I'm getting the feeling that I haven't had any issues because I don't do anything on LJ that requires localization, so I don't actually know what's been going wrong. (To be clear, this is an information request, not a challenge.)

[merlinofchaos]

Roughly half to three quarters of the twitter embeds I see are in Cyrillic.

Almost all of the embeds I see from you are in Cyrillic.

There is no reason I should ever see anything in Cyrillic like that. It's like it's localizing stuff for Russians. Maybe you're doing it on purpose but that just seems odd.

[merlinofchaos]

Let me doublecheck: Is http://r-ness.livejournal.com/600193.html intended to be a post with a Cyrillic title and English text?

If so, that's kind of confusing to everyone, isn't it? I admit I assumed it was just another case of LJ localizing incorrectly.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yes, that was intentional. It's actually a post with a Russian title, a Russian initial part (a quote of the whole of the text introducing the video on the source page), and then the (Russian-language) video, finally followed by an English explanation afterwards.

I've made at least three posts in Russian and English. Usually it's because the item I'm posting about is originally in Russian, and I have some readers who read Russian--including a girlfriend who does--and in this case I posted the original before the translation into English.

I'm sorry if it's confusing, seriously. I had no idea anyone was doing Twitter embeds with my posts. None of my Russian-language readers have complained, and at least one English-language reader has thanked me for posting that way.

Why *all* my posts' embeds are in Cyrillic is probably related to my turning on Cyrillic Services for my account. I see that Google has indexed my more recent posts with Russian datestamps.

So at least partially this is my bad.

[baronnocturna.livejournal.com]

I feel like the LJ community at large has killed it with indifference. Once upon a time it was the personal blog of choice for nearly everyone I knew, now that most people can summarize their deepest thoughts in less than 140 characters, twitter and facebook have taken over entirely. Seriously, I log in to this one every 3 months and there are like 30 new posts during that time on my friends lists. Total apathy engaged, and in my opinion its been this way for a few years.

Oh happy Christmas and all. Hope you and your family are well.

[merlinofchaos]

Oh hey man! Haven't talked to you in aaaaages!

My friends list slowed down a bunch a few years ago, but this year it's slowed down even more. I admit that I do most of my social interaction via twitter these days, and to some extent facebook because that's where most of the people I interact with are. I still keep LJ because neither of them are good for longer posts when I want to actually blog. LJ reposts to facebook (but not twitter) automatically, and my twitter reposts to facebook (meaning my facebook is just a Merlin aggregator, really)