(Untitled)

[news]

When LiveJournal, Inc., was launched in December the new team made it very clear that LiveJournal was going to change. We also said that we would respect the values and legacy of LiveJournal. But, we can’t ignore the fact that as LiveJournal nears its second decade it needs to make some business decisions

Comments

[entropy_house]

Please don't hide major changes. That's really the most important thing to us.

[metanomaly]

Thirded.

[runtling]

Fourthed.

[brewsternorth]

Echoed.

(I was distinctly shocked and surprised to learn today - after the fact - that mine was one of the last Basic account LJs to come under the wire, so to speak. Still less to have to do it by chance via a grapevine of people with common interests rather than through LJ's own news services.)

[rakeofdoom]

Not that big of a deal... Would just have ads. Who cares? Do you even notice them anymore on the internet?

[nightingale0]

Actually, yes a big deal. I was about to creat a basic account, because the ads take so long to load if I'm signing on from somewhere with a slow connection when I'm not home. More of the ads are now including animation, which I find very distracting, and some of them crash my browser. I was quite upset to find out that the option to have a basic account had been removed with no notice.

[dglenn]

I've been seeing comments like this and mulling over my reaction to them. For me, it comes down to this: on LJ I am not merely a user, I am a creator. Ignoring ads on a site that is merely a service I use is one thing -- if they don't clutter things up so badly that the layout becomes difficult to read, or insert "you have to see this and click here to get to the next screen you were expecting" pages, then yes, I can take sites' being advertising-supported as the cost of making them free to me. I've even considered adding ads to my own personal web site, especially when it was hosted in a place that threatened to charge for bandwidth overages.

But although LJ can be construed as just another service -- a blog hosting and aggregating service with social networking features -- my journal is a creative work. My relationship to my journal is as a creator, not a user, regardless of my relationship to LJ-as-a-whole. It doesn't matter whether what I choose to post is fiction, poetry, and carefully crafted essays; or political

[vinval]

If I agreed with any harder I would give myself a migraine.

have you heard about the ATM that had to have its user interface redesigned because the instructions were in the same spot on the screen that too many users were used to ignoring banner ads in on web pages?

This is why anybody that tells me that advertising has no effect on them makes me nod, smile, and clench my teeth in an effort not to scream. But, as my husband put it, "This is why I'm glad I'm hardly on the internet."

Companies need to find better ways to approach the internet as an entire culture instead of a "let's all get rich!" scheme.

[n_o_m_i_c]

That was incredibly well-said.

[lastyearswishes]

iawtc

[aldersprig]

Echoed. WTF?

[allsunday]

This.

[carmentalis]

Echoed. Just be honest with us, we'll be a lot less brutal.

[murphymagick]

Some may be a lot less brutal.
My guess is that if they nicely and properly announced that Basic Accounts were being halted, 90% of the people who called them douchebags would still call them douchebags -- or worse -- only sooner.

[carmentalis]

10% less brutality is considerably less. :-)

They'd still be called douchebags, but at least only over the basic accounts and not also about thinking their customers are too stupid to notice.

[murphymagick]

NIce point to point out, and so true too. You speak as one of the rational 10%; a lifeboat in a vast and terrible sea of malicious drivel. It affects me. Thank you.
*bow*