Some Press from PCMag

[foxfirefey]

PC Magazine reviews both LiveJournal and Vox.

Notes the ad controversy, although it does (probably unintentionally, due to space and comprehension issues) underplay the amount of advertising that's been introduced to the service:Community is where LiveJournal truly shines, and though Vox has done an impressive job incorporating and improving upon

Comments

[schnee]

I completely agree. I don't really care at all what happens to sponsored users - they could get tracking cookies, seizure-inducing Flash ads playing annoying music at full volume and other nasty things, and I wouldn't care at all, simply because they voluntarily upgraded to sponsored accounts and because they can downgrade again at any time.

What really bugs me is when basic or anonymous users see things like ads. Brad *did* promise that LJ would never have ads; if people have to opt in to see them in exchange for features, I don't think that promise has been broken, but if people who did not get them (and that includes anonymous users), it has. That's the real shame.

[foxfirefey]

I don't mind anonymous users so much, as long as it doesn't include things like the front page that users use to log in or other site pages. I feel like that's a reasonable compromise, since if an anonymous user doesn't have an account, they are probably not very attached to LJ as a community.

There's other little mistakes they've made, too:

In addition to text, you can post all sorts of media (up to 2GB worth)

Vox users get 2GB a month. Except that one could be easily corrected with two words: up to 2GB a month worth.

The ad situation, however, is hard to summarize in the space of a sentence, so it's understandable it comes off the way it does. I'm glad they saw fit to mention it, however, along with how it did get negative reactions from parts of the userbase.

[schnee]

Yeah, that's definitely a good thing already.

As for anonymous users... I don't know. Generally speaking, they probably aren't really part of the community, but that's not always true; outside of the fact that many people will be logged out at times that *do* have accounts, there's also those who do allow anonymous comments, for example, so arguably, some anon users will be part of the community.

And of course, there's still Brad's promise, which was flat out broken when 6A added ads for anyone except sponsored users...

[a_muse_d]

i wrote a feedback complaint about the ad on the homepage. it's exactly what shouldn't be there.

[matgb]

they voluntarily upgraded to sponsored accounts

Actually, a lot didn't. Virtually all of the recently created LJs on my friends list are Plus, and I bet none of them new at account creatioin they didn't need to see ads. I mean to write up how to avoid them pretty soon, for those that don't want them, but for new users it's still presented as the 'free' option, whereas basic is neither the default nor labelled as free.

For those that did, consciously, make an informed choice, you're right, up to them, but for new users, the information presented doesn't allow an informed choice, which bothers me.

[foxfirefey]

For those that did, consciously, make an informed choice, you're right, up to them, but for new users, the information presented doesn't allow an informed choice, which bothers me.

Well, for personal account creation, there is the table that explains it. But I'm not sure who is going to be looking at that table when first signing up to the service, when the only one with Free after it is Plus. A new users probably doesn't want to start out with a paid account, so if only one of them in the list is annotated as free, there's probably no reason for them to look at the clarification in the table.

As for communities, there's not even the table that explains that Basic is free as well; there's only "(Free)" after Plus.

[schnee]

*noddles* I didn't know that... yes, that's also problematic, then.