LiveJournal actually appears to be changing its attitude to users...
So, something seems to be brewing at LiveJournal. They recently made a post responding to people's criticisms of the latest release, in which they admitted:
"We know that things changing abruptly can be frustrating, and that we don't have the greatest track record when it comes to making changes based on your feedback. We're working on changing that, and want you to know that we are taking all of your feedback on the redesign very seriously, and will be making changes based on it."
Since then, they've reinstated the lj-feedback community, and posted a survey actually asking questions they should've asked a long time ago - why we use LJ, what we like about it, what it has that other sites don't (as opposed to "what features from totally different sites can we copy in a marketing-driven panic"). Now, for a long time LJ has been very low on my list of "Sites I would trust" (an unfortunate combination with "Site that feels the most like home"), but this is an interesting change. My comment to them is here.
The tone of these recent communications is so different that I suspect some kind of staffing change - any time I've had utterly shit service longterm in healthcare contexts (be it the NHS or manufacturers of equipment I use), the thing that has changed it has been when a new manager came in and started poking about in all the disasters and cock-ups she'd inherited from her predecessor. LJ-wise, I suspect that user numbers had begun to fall catastrophically in the Russian market that they've focused on in the last while - no internet landscape is static and presumably users there are getting pissed off by the various LJ problems and moving to other sites that have sprung up within Russia and internationally.
I started to really worry about LJ when the eyeroll-worthy social capital feature informed me that mine was one of the top 1000 journals on the site. I don't post that much and I don't get that many comments (this isn't meant to sound self-pitying - seriously; any site where my account is one of the more active ones is in serious trouble!). Today, my journal is the 898th most... capital, socially. Or whatever. That's fucked up, guys.
So yeah, all credit to LJ for wanting to turn the ship around - let's hope they actually manage it. I'm willing to have a little faith, but they need to work fast and keep communicating with us.
"We know that things changing abruptly can be frustrating, and that we don't have the greatest track record when it comes to making changes based on your feedback. We're working on changing that, and want you to know that we are taking all of your feedback on the redesign very seriously, and will be making changes based on it."
Since then, they've reinstated the lj-feedback community, and posted a survey actually asking questions they should've asked a long time ago - why we use LJ, what we like about it, what it has that other sites don't (as opposed to "what features from totally different sites can we copy in a marketing-driven panic"). Now, for a long time LJ has been very low on my list of "Sites I would trust" (an unfortunate combination with "Site that feels the most like home"), but this is an interesting change. My comment to them is here.
The tone of these recent communications is so different that I suspect some kind of staffing change - any time I've had utterly shit service longterm in healthcare contexts (be it the NHS or manufacturers of equipment I use), the thing that has changed it has been when a new manager came in and started poking about in all the disasters and cock-ups she'd inherited from her predecessor. LJ-wise, I suspect that user numbers had begun to fall catastrophically in the Russian market that they've focused on in the last while - no internet landscape is static and presumably users there are getting pissed off by the various LJ problems and moving to other sites that have sprung up within Russia and internationally.
I started to really worry about LJ when the eyeroll-worthy social capital feature informed me that mine was one of the top 1000 journals on the site. I don't post that much and I don't get that many comments (this isn't meant to sound self-pitying - seriously; any site where my account is one of the more active ones is in serious trouble!). Today, my journal is the 898th most... capital, socially. Or whatever. That's fucked up, guys.
So yeah, all credit to LJ for wanting to turn the ship around - let's hope they actually manage it. I'm willing to have a little faith, but they need to work fast and keep communicating with us.