Friends and Blasphemers is a pretty great episode from the podcast Reply All. They dive into what happened to LiveJournal when it got popular in Russia.
https://embed.radiopublic.com/e?if=reply-all-OWdvQ8&ge=s1!e601a84ab2126a49a088148a33a52436f5a8b910
One of the interesting parts was a breakdown of how much Russian trolls got paid to disrupt LJ:
PJ: Emails actually leaked out later that had the rates that these guys were getting paid to troll Alexey and his friends. It would be 85 rubles for a comment, and then a bonus: 200 rubles if you could trick somebody into arguing with you.
That part reminded me of some stats on /r/The_Donald:
It turns out that the biggest growth in subscribers happened roughly 3 days after Donald Jr.’s Russian meeting.
Anyway, the point is that I’m going to see if I can import all my old LiveJournal posts here to make it even cringier.