The thing I found most surprising is that the name that came up over and over was someone I've never run into called
shadesong . The reasons given for hating this LJ included that she's incredibly self absorbed, overposts, and that she goes back and reedits old LJ entries to reflect new realities as she sees them (aka "revisionist history"). Okay, I'll buy those as reasons not to read someone's LJ But then the weird thing is that her LJ has 730 friends- I mean, people who list her as a friend, AND there's a community for her (with 58 people in it) whose sole purpose appears to be "do people who list shadesong as a friend have anything else in common". I read about 20 of her entries, and they weren't inflammatory, just dull. Maybe they're compelling if you know her in real life, but I suspect that isn't true for most of those 730 people.to put this into terms y'all can relate to:
avphibes 365 friends/readersjathomas 406 friends/readersmerovingian 450 friends/readersspoonfeeding 467 friends/readerszeppo 803 friends/readerskim_jong_il__ 2964 (not a typo) friends/readersgo to any of these LJ's, and you'll understand why their LJs are so damn popular. And none of them are conceited enough to design a GIF you can post in your LJ stating that you've gone back and read their ENTIRE journal (which
shadesong has in fact done- see her user page) But I cannot understand the cult of shadesong. Unless there's some great friends-only stuff in there, I can't even see friending her out of schadenfreude to laugh at emotional-trainwreck posts (not that I would ever do that, of course, but I'm told it happens occasionally on LJ), because the material just doesn't seem juicy enough.One of the comments in "The Doom Thread" was something like "Reading
shadesong is like LJ basic training; you read her, you take your lumps, and eventually you get wise to the drama and unfriend her". Has this happened to anyone out there?Interestingly, of her 730 friends of, the only ones I have in common with her are 3 people on my above list of "people with over 300 friends that 'everybody' reads because they write so well", who may well have friended her out of reciprocity. None of my "non LJ celebrity" friends seem to read her. I guess I'm just surprised that someone can be both so popular AND so reviled AND that I was unaware that anyone cared one way or another.
PS only one of my friends made it into the Doom thread, and he already knows he's there. Like
shadesong, almost all of the people mentioned were LJers I'd never run into. 