June 8, 2013

• Maybe Xanga did the right thing

  If I’d have had to imagine how Xanga was going to pass away from this world a year ago I would have said they’ll probably slowly dwindle, hemorrhaging active users until for whatever reason it was no longer monetarily viable to run the site. Then they’d announce on some random day that the site was going to close in like a month or so and most people wouldn’t even notice or care. Then poof it’d be gone.

  But I didn’t expect and didn’t even imagine was that Xanga would announce both that it was closing AND that it would be changing into something totally different… maybe… only if they can only get enough money to do it. 

  Now I don’t pass judgment on whether that itself is a good idea. I don’t know. Maybe they’ll totally fail to raise anywhere near the money they want, maybe they’ll easily surpass their threshold with ease. Maybe the new Xanga will be a roaring success, maybe it’ll be a dismal failure. I don’t know. I can’t see the future. Of course, I have my own opinions about whether they should be doing this, its chances at success, what the new Xanga should look like if it exists and whether I think Xanga or Xanga’s community is worth saving anyway. But they are just my opinions. Maybe I’ll share them later, maybe I won’t. 

  But here’s the thing. Not only do I have my plethora of opinions, so does EVERYBODY else. And that’s why I think, perhaps inadvertently, Xanga has done a very good thing for the Xanga community with it’s dying  (or changing) breathe.  Because whether or not Xanga survives or cacoons up to begin its WordPress metamorphoses, Xanga has gone out with a bang and not a whimper.  It’s gone out doing what it did best.

  Getting its community worked up.

  You see Xanga has created a controversy. And what more do Xangans want really? An opportunity to argue and fight and struggle and rage. An opportunity to metablog like CRAZY. An opportunity to try and convince people that their way of seeing things is the one and only true way and why on earth isn’t everyone else of the exact same opinion? 

  And it’s basically this aspect that is bringing Xangans back together. People are reconnecting like crazy, Through Google Docs, On Twitter, on Blogger, on Redditt, on Xanga itself, through Blog Talk Radio, and mostly on Facebook.  People are waxing nostalogic like nobody’s business and numerous people myself included have come back to Xanga and posting again having been gone for ages. Sure other people are closing up shop and heading for the hills while the going looks good, but that’s normal for when a site announces it’s impending demise or that it’ll . What is unusual I think is how many  people are out thinking about and talking about Xanga during its last days. 

  Whether or not Xanga makes the transition to their new fancy wordpress site, I think this is a great way for Xanga to spend it’s last days as the site it once was. It’s a good way for people excise their unresolved feelings about Xanga and to come to grips with the coming change. Generally it’s keeping people occupied and distracted and in the end I think people will feel better about how things turned out because they had a say in it. They were able to fight to save Xanga or fight to see it end and so either way they feel they were a part of the transition. It’s much better this way then for the site to simply announce it’s death leaving people feeling powerless and helpless against the flow of time.  

  Maybe it won’t work or maybe it will. But at least it’s something I haven’t seen before and it seems to me to be shaping up to be a mostly good thing, so far anyway. I wonder if things would have turned out the same if Xanga had simply announced its closing with nothing more to it?

   

   

  • 2:52 pm
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