LJ, you do not understand social networks
ursamajor just alerted me to the fact that LJ no longer provides basic free accounts to new users. Not only does this suck from a general freeloader aspect, but this actually is an extremely poor business decision for LJ
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- a large percentage of the new accounts being created are either secondary (and potentially topic-specific, or alternately, friends-group-specific) journals for people that already have one account, or are communities being started by those same people who already have some awareness of and participation in the LJ zeitgeist.
- many of *those* people predate the existence of Plus accounts; as you trace back in the timeline, I'll bet there's a correlation between length of time one has been part of the LiveJournal community and likelihood of any new accounts they create being specifically "not-Plus."
- I don't know how popular the trend is, but I have seen it around enough times that it's at least a trendlet - people with Plus accounts creating non-Paid communities create those as Basic accounts because it's seen as somehow less kosher to inflict ads on a comm.
- Selling "rights" to the LJ Inbox for Plus users - I guess that'd be like how Facebook inserts some ads into your "friends news feed"? Not sure how well over that'd go, but perhaps as long as those types of notifications were *not* emailed, and only displayed *in* the Inbox, and LJ was completely transparent and forthcoming about this feature, that would be implemented at least 7-14 days later if not 30, it would be less wanky.
- Hell, if LJ had given even a WEEK of warning, it would be coming off far better than it is now. There'd be a bump in terms of people quickly creating journals for everything they can currently imagine wanting a separate journal or community for; there'd be protest about "Why no more basic." After the deadline passed, there'd be a lull in old users creating new journals, but as those old users gain new interests and need to create new paid-or-plus journals to express those interests, they would eventually come around. In the meantime, you'd still have your new users coming aboard, most of whom at this point are inured to the idea of ads on their websites, and those that weren't would likely pony up the cash for a paid account.
- I agree that new users find LJ complex and overwhelming; that's part of what was driving the impetus behind the Customization area revamp, and I'm sure it's the reasoning behind at least part of the simplification process of the signup. So make the introduction process as simple as possible. LJ's a complicated beast; new users don't jump in and use Every Single Feature on Day 1. Start new *users* (but not new accounts of old users, if it's possible to detect that) off with posting basic text entries to their journal and using appropriate security levels to decide who can see their entries; this naturally leads to "find my friends," which leads to "this is how the friends page works." After they're comfortable with that, then they can go on to explore communities, customize their existing style, and use other more advanced features.
- I don't think the LJ Advisory Board has met yet. It's still missing two members to be elected in May.
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