The State of Livejournal, Your Opinions and what YOU'D like to do

[headmasterhand]

EDIT: PLEASE GO READ THIS IN REGARDS TO SUBJECT LINES.

Starting on December 22nd 1:00AM EST, Livejournal's New Site-Scheme (Update 88) was put online. The public outlash so far has been pretty vocal on their page (you can go read it here). A few hours ago LJ put up a new post regarding the update and what they are doing to fix it. However, we'd

Comments

[tribulune]

I would much prefer to move.

Allow me to reiterate my point here, my main point: The reason I want to move is not at all because of the design. I cannot express this enough and I still feel my reasons are being interpreted as something completely different by a few people. Yes, it is fuck-ugly- god knows it's fuck-ugly- but I'd deal with it if it weren't for my real reason to move.

The LiveJournal staff has always been bad, yes, but the past year or two, it has really gotten out of hand. Horrible treatment has been dealt directly to users. Complaints are ignored. Problems are pushed to the side for useless things like games and laggy updates. Not only that, but then there's the downtimes. The DDoS attacks. The people dealing with the results of the Russian government who really don't deserve to be the brunt of it. I mean, government interfering with fun times? Really?

Let me just reiterate how unprofessional the site staff's customer service itself is. They:

1. Ignore complaints, and,
2. Most importantly, call our usages for their service, and I quote, "Bullshit," when we're the ones who keep their site afloat by not Adblocking their revenue and paying them money from our pockets.

If it weren't for the people on LiveJournal that they so terribly fling shit at, their site would be nothing. Thus, I refuse to support them by even doing so much as associating with them. It's a logical choice: if something is bad and there's a much better alternative with very little cons involved, you get away from the more toxic environment, and that is my plan.

(Yes, this means I may drop from Smash if the move doesn't happen, or at the very least drop everyone but one character and stick to that.)

tl;dr: let's move. There's no reason we should stay in an environment so downright shitty.

[ihateplumbers]

The LiveJournal staff has always been bad, yes...

Sadly this is untrue. They were actually quite good from, say, 2002-2004, and moderately good from 2005-2006.

Which makes all of this dicking around that much more frustrating.

HI, WHEN I FIRST JOINED LIVE JOURNAL YOU HAD TO HAVE A FRIEND CODE.

[badasscopters]

Oh. OKAY I STAND CORRECTED ON THAT THEN.

I remember hearing that LJ only had 6 icons default in the olden days. 8Ua

[usesearstofly]

Three, actually, if memory serves. x.x

[badasscopters]

that is a really small amount pfff

I WONDER HOW RPING EVEN WAS BACK THEN.

[ihateplumbers]

My original account is back to its 6-only setup. There may be a way to opt into that still, I don't know. Originally the whole "we will never have any advertising, ever" promise was broken by the now-standard 15-icons-with-ads setup you could pick for yourself.

I don't remember having only 3 though to be fair it's been almost a decade that I've been with LJ. It's possible that in 2002 when I first started it was only 3 icons.

[things_go_boom]

There were indeed only three icons at the time. One of my other accounts (not Pixle) that I made at the time only has three.

[badasscopters]

DAYUM SON.

Shows how much a place can grow with the right work. even though it is no longer good work anymore but still

[things_go_boom]

Keep in mind that at the time people were hosting blogs on their websites. LJ gave us a place that didn't make us do the whole blogging programming, friend each other easily and work without our hosts going down, so we were fine with just one or two icons - that's what the blogging layouts gave us. (I know I have my old stuff somewhere on my CDs)

Moreover, at least from the crowd I came from (Sailormoon RPs and the like) we were used to Message Board games which have only one icon at a time. LJ is actually the first place where the icons were used for each post (and to be frank I LIKE IT MUCH MORE THAT WAY). It actually was only when I got Lash that I started paying for accounts because I really did want her to have more expressions.

[badasscopters]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I can understand why it was like that back in the day, let alone bandwidth things that might have been tough for a very small company (back in the day) to pay for.

I CAME FROM AIM RP SO I WAS LIKE. NOT USED TO ICONS AT ALL. but ilthem.

[things_go_boom]

Oh I meant more like say, I had a blog with physical links to someone else's blogs but their site was down. Well I couldn't read their posts that day.

And then when we all saw the 'friend page' on LJ, well, everyone was like COOING about it, and I remember that very clearly.

We did an entire invite congo line back them so we could all get in.

[badasscopters]

OH. Oh okay I get what you mean. |D Friends pages really do make things so much more of a convenience.

i just pictured a lj userhead congo line really...

[ihateplumbers]

Okay the more people say this the more I think I -do- remember going from 3 icons to 6.

"Wow, six whole icons. What will I ever do with all of them."

[operatingbuddy]

Just playing devil's advocate for a moment here. LJ went from an invite only, no advertising structure to an ad supported open system. And Dreamwidth is currently an invite only, no advertising journal system.

My greatest fear is that in moving, we'd be trading one evil for another, if Dreamwidth looks at the influx of users and decides to give everyone more icons at the expense of switching to an ad-supported system, and taking a slippery slope down to the standards of LJ today.

I'm probably wrong, and I'm definitely thinking worst-case-scenario. But reading this thread and seeing people talk about how in touch the DW admins are compared to LJ's, but talking about how LJ's admins were much better years ago, just makes me wonder.

[whitetoxin]

It's an understandable conclusion and worry to have. I was thinking about that too. But LJ's transformation took years to get to where it is now. The ads still didn't happen until a few years after the invite codes were done away with (I got my first LJ a few months before that ended), and I believe it was only because they were bought out. DW is still very much a young site, and still very much their own people.

The founders left because they weren't satisfied with LJ, and they know they're getting a larger userbase because of LJ. They've kept their foot down about Pay Pal, so i doubt they're going to slip down that slope... at least not any time in the foreseeable future.

If they do manage to ever find a way for extra userpics to be available, its probably going to only happen if they get enough paying users to make it feasible.

[things_go_boom]

It's a risk persay, yes, but a smaller one than LJ I would say. LJ was in many ways, a story of its own success, someone making an easier blog system on a central page everyone could join back just barely before the bubble dot com boom (While invite started in 2001, LJ started in 1999 I believe).

I don't think he(Mark) would know what would happen.

With DW, they've already proven they haven't taken that stance just by their interaction with paypal. Yeah it's incredibly annoying you can use paypal on the page but the reason they took it out is paypal wanted them to censor some of the journal entries, and they refused. Paypal backed out.