Insomnia ([info]insomnia) wrote,
@ 2008-03-13 04:49:00
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Another promise broken by the latest LJ lackeys.
You know LiveJournal is full of lose when the former business hack from Blogger is telling LJers to pay up or be bombarded with MySpace levels of advertising.

Jason "Shillin'" Shellen even buried this very important change announcement deep, deep, deep within an LJ news post, as a comment to someone's polite question as to where exactly the basic account level suddenly disappeared to. Nice to see that nothing has changed since SixApart, eh? Let the flaming begin!  Something tells me that this n00b is going to quickly learn now to turn his email notifications off... Welcome to LJ, jackass!

So, with this new business model, we're just supposed to leave the money on the nightstand afterwards, right?!

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[info]delusionalangel
2008-03-13 12:23 pm UTC (link)
Yeah I replied to him a few hours ago. Heh, hopefully he was smart enough to turn it off before posting there. If not it serves him right for basically saying we're all too dumb to figure out how to choose between three account types so they did it for us! I admit I have stupid moments, but ugh that's offensive.

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[info]lakme
2008-03-13 01:23 pm UTC (link)
....and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

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[info]bjenright
2008-03-13 03:26 pm UTC (link)
Wow, that's a total bonehead move. I've been through a lot, but this is by far the dumbest yet.

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[info]bjenright
2008-03-13 03:31 pm UTC (link)
See http://brad.livejournal.com/2368071.html

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[info]lafinjack
2008-03-14 06:03 am UTC (link)
That Jason guy just doesn't know when to shut up, does he?

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[info]phenyx
2008-03-13 03:33 pm UTC (link)
Wow. What an asshole move.

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[info]qilora
2008-03-13 04:10 pm UTC (link)
making my brain go spin in circles back to the LJ-village paradigm in my mind's eye and its making me realise that this feels exactly like that: like we are all members of this huge serfdom** that is being run by a couple greedy nit-wits who have no loyalty to their subjects.

every time the masses threaten revolution we are shunned (banned, deleted, etc.), silenced with threats-thereof, or forced to run off into exile (people attempting to leave LJ for the other blog-sites) for the "principle" of the matter)...

all of which really costs LJ fucking *nothing* to lose a couple of us proles here and there, but costs every one of *us* some of our most intimate confidantes and our network of support...

folks can argue that "its just business", but this isn't about selling a material product (like a car, dinner, or bath-loofah!) its about controlling people's personal/intimate lives, and that feels a hell of a lot more like living under a dictator as opposed to "just doing business" with someone..

i'm an anarchist at heart.. i'm all for peaceful resolution, and if not that, revolution... but i'll be damned if i can figure any way out of this...


** serfdom = surfdom! hahahahah

Edited at 2008-03-13 04:12 pm UTC

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[info]screamingshiva
2008-03-13 04:27 pm UTC (link)
lj code started as open source... what's stopping someone from starting a new community ? ... is brad entitled to stay by contract? .... I wonder if you and brad left lj and started a new venture if there would be a mass exodus with you guys.

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[info]insomnia
2008-03-13 04:52 pm UTC (link)
The problem is, the software is such that full interaction between lj code sites just isn't likely to ever happen, numerous parts of the latest source code is no longer being open sourced, and the real value of LJ lies with the community.

Mass defections simply aren't that doable, in part because only a small percent of people will leave, even when given a free, non-commercial alternative. If people can't seamlessly interact with all of their friends, why would they leave? And LJ, the business entity, has blocked code to do that sort of thing for years.

That, and Brad is utterly useless. He's the reason why LJ is covered with ads today and played a key role as apologist to the first ads, promising people that it wouldn't become widespread and would be done tastefully and discreetly. Ultimately, he simply couldn't be bothered to run the site, and didn't want to let the community do so, so he sold it.

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[info]screamingshiva
2008-03-13 05:14 pm UTC (link)
ouch.

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[info]blackheartgirl
2008-03-13 05:23 pm UTC (link)
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
FINALLY, somebody saying what I've been thinking all along.

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[info]kayay
2008-03-13 06:38 pm UTC (link)
Agreed. While many say and do leave LJ for other places, wordpress, blogger, insane journal, and (before the drama) greatestjournal, it's not a choice to be taken lightly by those who have been here for years and have established contacts and communities. To some it's just a silly journal, but to others it's a lot of history and their online "family". I believe Livejournal replies upon that. Moreover, I wonder about the percentage of LJ's users that do leave. Is it significant? Alternate sites did get a noticeable influx of refugees, but compared to LJ's total user population I'm not sure the big wigs care. Moreover, how many were paid users? Finally, what about permanent account holders? LJ has their money already, they get no income from ads from perm members, so what leverage do those account holders have?

And I'm rather surprised by the link [info]bjenright posted to brad's response. I think this is the first time ever I've seen him take anything resembling a stand against the powers that be. At least it's the first in my memory.

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[info]screamingshiva
2008-03-13 09:54 pm UTC (link)
if you are like me you have at least 9 years of history here... spread out over 2 different journals... I wouldn't just leave either... I would have to think long and hard about it as well. the changes don't affect me either way... I am a paid user already. however due to a recent coment by shellin I am wondering what their plans for paid users are...

I think it was something like... soon you will see a major difference between the two acct types.... will there be a price hike soon?

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[info]swingland
2008-03-14 12:28 am UTC (link)
where do you find out what the current population of LJ is versus before?

you were keeping track of the dwindling pop before. you got a link to those stats?

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[info]insomnia
2008-03-14 04:42 am UTC (link)
There are several people who are tracking it and occasionally updating the stats in a post I made awhile back at http://community.livejournal.com/no_lj_ads/48335.html

Basically, the site is still shrinking in posts every 30 days, despite what appears to be a change in how they did their stats -- thousands of accounts suddenly became alive a few months back, resulting in a temporary increase in users without any obvious reason for the change -- and also the addition of several "nag" features in the code.

Currently, it appears LJ is shrinking by about 6000 people a month who update every 30 days -- it's at about 965K now -- and if many of those are simply phoning it in with one of those LJ nag questions, then I don't think that their friends will view that as the kind of content that would encourage them to stay on the site.

The big concern is whether getting rid of free accounts will increase the rate of losses. I suspect it might.

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[info]insomnia
2008-03-14 04:47 am UTC (link)
I should also point out that while a monthly decrease in site activity of a few thousand users a month might not seem like much, the effect is amplified, as new users keep joining every month.

It's a bit like saying that 200,000 people you don't know are using their -- increasingly private, friendslocked, less "connected" -- journals to post, while 206,000 people you *might* know who were more well connected to the existing userbase aren't regularly updating their journals anymore... every month.

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Gallows Shadenfreund
[info]flying_blind
2008-03-14 08:03 am UTC (link)
Even given its steady decline, it looks as though LJ is still doing better than our former Step-mom's project, Vox. I checked their Alexa ranking and that site's daily reach is down 25% over three months, while their traffic rank is down 770 places over the same period. Their page views per user have held steady at a piddling 3.6.

Altogether, Vox appears to be declining about four times as fast as LJ, and Typepad is doing about as poorly as Vox- though Typepad has a greater height than Vox from which to fall. I wonder how long 6A will last, even given the infusion of cash from the sale of LJ to Russia's Internet advertising mavens? 6A sold off their most successful site!

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Re: Gallows Shadenfreund
[info]insomnia
2008-03-14 10:42 am UTC (link)
6A's future isn't in blogging communities, but in enterprise blogging software, I suspect. The problem there is that they may be overestimating the real need for it, or the general feature set may be integrated into other pieces of corporate software.

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[info]swingland
2008-03-14 01:54 pm UTC (link)
thank you.

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fyi
[info]thies
2008-03-14 01:54 pm UTC (link)
http://eng.cnews.ru/news/top/indexEn.shtml?2008/03/13/291948

There is nothing unusual in closing of basic account registration, says Anton Nosik, head of the blog service at Sup: ‘There are no other commercial services in the internet with similar accounts. There are non-profitable blog resources (for example, Lj.Rossia.org, Diary.ru, - CNews’s note) with no advertising, disputes committees, technical support services, additional services. So one can hardly predict what might happen to such blog resources in case of sharp increase in the number of subscribers’. Mr. Nosik adds that there is also nothing illogical in LiveJournal to have made no announcement: ‘We do not consider it necessary to inform those, who have not opened a basic account during 9 years of LiveJournal’s existence, that there is no such an opportunity any longer’.

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Re: fyi
[info]insomnia
2008-03-14 03:34 pm UTC (link)
...because nobody who uses LiveJournal ever creates more than one blog, apparently.

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Re: fyi
[info]thies
2008-03-14 03:57 pm UTC (link)
...because no one who used LiveJournal up until now is inviting friends to create a free journal - well, now they really won't.

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[info]fengi
2008-03-16 08:40 pm UTC (link)
One: What do you thing of the decision by all ISPs in Japan to ban file-sharing?

Two: This may not be a new development, but my Livejournal profile will no longer display my friendlist - instead it takes me to a search result. I'm not sure if this is due to having 500 plus friends, or the default. I might not mind it if there were different views for search results, but they're only displayed in order of most recent post. Which isn't useful if you're trying to check on a specific name but don't know the exact spelling.

This also makes me wonder if I'm even seeing all the journals on my friend's page.

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[info]insomnia
2008-03-16 09:25 pm UTC (link)
I think that we're going to see this happening all over the place. The movie/music industries are pushing this kind of enforcement everywhere, and people in pretty much every government are on board, in large part because people in pretty much every government are getting political contributions, or otherwise being leaned on.

That's why I've warned so strongly against recent French legislation and now British proposals for "three strikes" legislation. Like Japan, these changes may very well come about voluntarily due to the ISPs... and really, there's money to be made by the ISPs for not allowing file sharing.

I think that we're going to see more ways that ISPs can get their own take of the money involved in music and video sales/ad revenues, with ISPs becoming business partners in turning their customers on to approved downloads. Basically, it will be kind of like a bribe to the ISPs to turn their back on non-approved download sources. I just don't think that most people are noticing that their previously assumed "rights" are likely going away if things don't change soon.

As for dealing with your friends list, yes, the way LJ handles a large friends list really, really sucks. When I want to check on a specific name, I usually do so either on my userinfo page or theirs. I re-friend someone, for example, to modify which filters they are part of.

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