Why Did Fans Flee LiveJournal, and Where Will They Go After Tumblr?
“What you’ll notice from the chart is that between 2007 and 2009, things were happening with LiveJournal that made people not like it anymore. From the chart, you’ll see that it didn’t start to precipitously dip until a couple of years after that. You can see that Tumblr and Archive of Our Own, or AO3, are both climbing around the same time. I think that those had to get popular enough, enough people moving there so that those were a place for people to move to, because when there’s nowhere for you to go, they don’t go. You can think of AO3 and Tumblr as sort of the archive side and the social side of LiveJournal, so there wasn’t a single place that people could move to, so instead you see people going to both of those places.”
Good article! (though, minor quibble, I wish Slate hadn’t made a graphic of which fandoms were most popular on each platform. I suspect those answers were the ones most influenced by survey methodology and the specific sample that happened to participate while the survey was open – which the original write-up was good about mentioning, but the graphic makes it look more authoritative.)