For LJ users who had just discovered the existence of ЖЖ, it was kind of like discovering the lost continent of Atlantis. The datavis made it very clear. It represented the social graph of the platform they were on as two huge crescents barely connected, but about the same size. And all along, the governance parties of LJ were also the governance parties of ЖЖ.
And it turns out, absolutely unsurprisingly, LJ and ЖЖ had very different cultures, because they had had different adoption filters to start out with. LJ initially had been overwhelmingly adopted by emo high school students as a *diary* platform (LJ once jokingly announced it was adding an extra server just to index the word "depression".) ЖЖ had initially been adopted by politically active adults – average age, in their 30s – as a *blogging* platform.
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