![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
The Future of LJ
If you haven't heard, SUP has eliminated Basic accounts, going forward. So now new people will either have to pay or have lots of ads plastered all over their journals.
This was mentioned as a possibility to the LJ Advisory board a while back, and their reaction was that it was a terrible idea. So we now know just how much SUP respects the Advisory board, i.e. not at all.
There seems to be a pattern here. Bad things happen to LJ, bad decisions are made, and the user base is lied to again and again. When bad stuff happens some users go away, some complain, and some - the assholes of LJ, as I like to call them - trot out the old "They need to make money, if you don't like it go somewhere else" line. As far as I can tell, LJ is in a continuing state of decline and will not recover.
So...what do you see as the future of LJ? What big changes/surprises will SUP or any future owners have for us? Speculate wildly, if you like!
This was mentioned as a possibility to the LJ Advisory board a while back, and their reaction was that it was a terrible idea. So we now know just how much SUP respects the Advisory board, i.e. not at all.
There seems to be a pattern here. Bad things happen to LJ, bad decisions are made, and the user base is lied to again and again. When bad stuff happens some users go away, some complain, and some - the assholes of LJ, as I like to call them - trot out the old "They need to make money, if you don't like it go somewhere else" line. As far as I can tell, LJ is in a continuing state of decline and will not recover.
So...what do you see as the future of LJ? What big changes/surprises will SUP or any future owners have for us? Speculate wildly, if you like!
no subject
no subject
no subject
There is a strange perception that Net people seem to have; "Information Wants to be Free" and that means they shouldn't have to pay for anything in any way. Well, as David Gerrold (I think) noted, "Information doesn't want to be free; Information doesn't want anything." The reality is that everything has a cost of some kind; the issue is who is paying and why. If LJ is owned by a for-profit entity and not a charity then of course they're going to want an income. Heck, even if they were a non-profit they might want an income. There's often a limit to just how much money a person or entity can just give away to do something. Mind you, I'm pretty cheap myself and prefer ad-supported to subscription for access to sites; someday I'll probably get off my behind and buy some stuff from some of web comics I like but I've not yet because, well, I'm not that good a person. :)
Now, the big issue of ads to me is what the ads are. If at some future date LJ started running ads on my Journal Thingy and they were for stuff I strongly disapproved of I might have a problem. From what I've seem the "ads by Google" can be kind of wacky in their attempts at having ads relevant to page content; I still don't quite get why there were ads for egg donors on the web comic "The Wotch" other than that the main character is female and there's lots of sex change magic zapping...uhh, no, that still makes little sense. If I did a post where I mentioned a Hentai anime as an example of the Whole Weird Area that the Japanese go into and the ads generated by the algorithms for, well, hentai and other Japanese porn I'd not be a terribly happy camper.
I would suppose that the future of LJ depends on what the users want or are willing to put up with. Ads and the like are less an issue than censorship or other interference in what's posted I would hope, but maybe it's not. I'd suppose that people expect it to be whatever the heck it was at the beginning but that's clearly not what it can be ever again. From my perspective, I don't necessarily give a fig; pretty much nothing they've done has affected me in any noticeable way. Then again, I really only use LJ as a substitute for the annoying "Hey, Look at the Cool Thing!" emails I used to send out; it's not as if anybody reads what I post or cares what I think, after all.
no subject
I'm worried about the censorship. I'm worried about SUP's arrogance whenever things aren't well received. I'm worried about what other "business decisions" they'll make.
I'm going to stick around for a while, but I'm likely going to buy some webspace for myself to start a blog on, where I can post whatever I want. It'll be ALL MINE, mwahahaha!
no subject
no subject
no subject
Okay, you'll certainly have more readers than I ever did. I'm firmly convinced that women have a big advantage in terms of getting readers. But what I'm trying to say is that as far as I know, there isn't any journal/blog service out there that offers anywhere NEAR the social networking that LJ has.
I mean, I have a bunch of friends on here - some from the real world, some from Arisia, and others from god-knows-where. If SUP ends up driving off a substantial portion of the userbase, my online social world will fall apart.
And these days, that's about as much of a social life as I have!
Jeeze, that sounds pathetic. I really need to do something about that.
no subject
http://mysplash.info?moonlitmagikchild
ive dumped even myspace for it lol.. and the people seem to be a lot nicer than anywhere else compared to the amount of people i have interacted with
no subject
no subject
no subject