Robin made a post on her site today - not even an entire post, just a bullet in one of her lists - saying how bored she was with Plurk. Eddie and I were talking about it this morning and he and Robin were commenting back and forth about it as well, and we’re also a little disenchanted with the site. It’s got a funky linear time line and threaded comments, which makes it easier for me to follow than Twitter, but it’s terribly cliquish over there and I’ll probably be using it less and less.

Like any sort of social networking site, Plurk’s also got a fair share of drama; I can think of at least 1 user who has a thing for stirring up the shit, deleting her account, and recreating a new profile and persona to do the same thing. There’s another person who is one of those people who just feels the need to turn every single thing into a sexual innuendo and flirting with anyone who has “male” in their profile. Someone else garnered a bunch of comments because she felt someone was “abusing” the ability to make posts private and didn’t feel that the items being made private warranted being private in the first place.

Unless Socialthing ends up doing more with Plurk, I’ll probably remove Plurk from my feed, simply because it does nothing but show me what I’ve posted. Completely pointless; I know what I posted, since I posted it to Twitter and Facebook in addition to Plurk, and both of those services actually show me more info on my stream. I can’t read replies on there, so if I want to actually keep track of things on both sites, I need two tabs open in Firefox. As Eddie can attest, I usually have about 8 tabs open all the time, between Google Reader, LiveJournal, links that blogs have pointed me towards, and whatever random thing I might be obsessing over this week. I don’t want to have anything open that I don’t have to, which is why I like Socialthing in the first place.

If you’re not part of the in crowd, you don’t get comments to anything that you post. You can post a lot and comment on other people’s plurks, but you may as well be doing nothing at all because these people aren’t going to bother giving you even the most cursory of glances. And if you make a post about how no one is commenting on your things, someone else will be all passive aggressive about it and make a post of their own complaining about people who complain about not getting comments. Let’s face it, most people who write things want to get some sort of comments, even if we’re just posting about stuff that goes on in our everyday life.

I’ll admit that I’m not the greatest when it comes to commenting, but I do try to post comments on things if I’ve got something to add, and this has gotten a lot better since I set up Google Reader to allow me to do it right from my feed screen. However, the blogs that I make comments on are better for actually having a “conversation” with other readers than Plurk is in my opinion, because it’s quality stuff and not just the “me too” mentality that Plurk seems to have a lot of. And I’ll take quality over quantity any day.

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