we could slip off the edge and never worry 'bout the fall
So apparently SUP (the Russian company that recently acquired this site from Six Apart) has disabled the creation of ad-free Basic Accounts on LiveJournal. So it's been reported, anyway -- my understanding is that they tried to slip the change in under the radar, buried in obscure language in an announcement, but their cagey users found them out. They also noticed some subtle censorship taking place in the Most Popular Interests list, and now the hardcore LJ kids are up in arms.
I could get riled up about this, about the fundamental lack of understanding of the user base being displayed, but really, why bother? The site is a business, and they are trying to run it like one. And they're doing it in a shady and asinine way, and if they piss off their user/customers enough, they'll lose money. That's a pretty strong feedback loop, a pretty sharp learning curve, so here's hoping they'll learn.
But I'm honestly not sure how much I care anymore.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a die-hard. I'll be here until the bitter end. I've been on LJ for over 6 years, and I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. My friends page is still an important stop in my daily browsing, and I expect it to remain as such for the foreseeable future. If nothing else, it's a convenient aggregator for RSS feeds from elsewhere (I kid, I kid.)
Still, this flub on SUP's part makes a pretty convenient clarion call for the beginning of the end. It will take a while, but sooner or later this too shall fall into obscurity (and go dead, entombed in distant servers, &c.) And it will just be another cultural phenomenon that exploded and changed the way human beings communicate and went mainstream and, in the end, was displaced by something newer and smarter.
Oh, you thought I was talking about LiveJournal? Oh, no. No, I was talking about blogs. In general.
But I digress.
In a conveniently related announcement, I have started moving some of my blog-like content elsewhere (this is in addition to the Twitter account I've had for a while now.) Redoing my tags made me realize how much link-dumping I was doing here, in place of actual posts, so now I have a Tumblelog (by Tumblr), and I highly recommend you check it out.
I've also started putting a bunch of my really pretentious indie gaming musings on an entirely separate blog (syndicated here: enthusiastick.) I knew not all of my LJ friends would be interested in reading that stuff, and a lot of my other friends in that circle have WordPress blogs. I could have set up a custom friends filter, but as I said, why bother? I was moving webspaces anyway, so the timing just seemed right.
And, as it turned out, it was.
I could get riled up about this, about the fundamental lack of understanding of the user base being displayed, but really, why bother? The site is a business, and they are trying to run it like one. And they're doing it in a shady and asinine way, and if they piss off their user/customers enough, they'll lose money. That's a pretty strong feedback loop, a pretty sharp learning curve, so here's hoping they'll learn.
But I'm honestly not sure how much I care anymore.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a die-hard. I'll be here until the bitter end. I've been on LJ for over 6 years, and I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. My friends page is still an important stop in my daily browsing, and I expect it to remain as such for the foreseeable future. If nothing else, it's a convenient aggregator for RSS feeds from elsewhere (I kid, I kid.)
Still, this flub on SUP's part makes a pretty convenient clarion call for the beginning of the end. It will take a while, but sooner or later this too shall fall into obscurity (and go dead, entombed in distant servers, &c.) And it will just be another cultural phenomenon that exploded and changed the way human beings communicate and went mainstream and, in the end, was displaced by something newer and smarter.
Oh, you thought I was talking about LiveJournal? Oh, no. No, I was talking about blogs. In general.
But I digress.
In a conveniently related announcement, I have started moving some of my blog-like content elsewhere (this is in addition to the Twitter account I've had for a while now.) Redoing my tags made me realize how much link-dumping I was doing here, in place of actual posts, so now I have a Tumblelog (by Tumblr), and I highly recommend you check it out.
I've also started putting a bunch of my really pretentious indie gaming musings on an entirely separate blog (syndicated here: enthusiastick.) I knew not all of my LJ friends would be interested in reading that stuff, and a lot of my other friends in that circle have WordPress blogs. I could have set up a custom friends filter, but as I said, why bother? I was moving webspaces anyway, so the timing just seemed right.
And, as it turned out, it was.