(no subject)
I posted a version of this in
cortana 's comments, but thought I'd add it here as well.
Everyone is acting like slapping ads on people's free journals is a betrayal of everything LiveJournal ever stood for, but that displays a pretty shocking ignorance of the origins of LiveJournal. Yes, all journals started out as free, but that's because LiveJournal was originally an open source software project in addition to a journaling site, and the idea was that the community members were going to be contributors to the open source project. When the devs noticed how many accounts were opened by people who made no effort at all to contribute to the development of LiveJournal (and the accompanying drain on system resources those accounts were), they offered Paid accounts as a way for those people to contribute to the project without coding anything. (The early lj_news postings show a lot of Brad Fitzpatrick's stress over keeping the whole thing running with so little help.)
So basically, non-paid, non-ad-supported, non-coding users were the ones freeloading from the beginning (and I say that as someone with a non-paid, no-ads account who doesn't write a lick of code). So, what? People are mad that finally someone has realized what a bad way to run a business that is? Honestly, it's a miracle Basic accounts have lasted as long as they have.
The LJ source code is still free- people can download it and run their own LJ-style site, on their own server space and bandwidth, if they want ad-free LJ journals.
The lesson here isn't about who to trust with your stuff... it's that web services are inherently not free- servers, bandwidth, support, all that stuff costs money, and if you as a user aren't paying, you'd better believe the company that owns the service is finding some other way to make the money to keep the servers running. It can't be given away for free, because it costs money to provide.
I hardly ever post to my LJ (since I use it mostly as an aggregator for my friends' LJs), but I plan to post a TON of content on March 21. And maybe I'll go voluntarily put ads on my journal while I'm at it.
cortana 's comments, but thought I'd add it here as well.
Everyone is acting like slapping ads on people's free journals is a betrayal of everything LiveJournal ever stood for, but that displays a pretty shocking ignorance of the origins of LiveJournal. Yes, all journals started out as free, but that's because LiveJournal was originally an open source software project in addition to a journaling site, and the idea was that the community members were going to be contributors to the open source project. When the devs noticed how many accounts were opened by people who made no effort at all to contribute to the development of LiveJournal (and the accompanying drain on system resources those accounts were), they offered Paid accounts as a way for those people to contribute to the project without coding anything. (The early lj_news postings show a lot of Brad Fitzpatrick's stress over keeping the whole thing running with so little help.)
So basically, non-paid, non-ad-supported, non-coding users were the ones freeloading from the beginning (and I say that as someone with a non-paid, no-ads account who doesn't write a lick of code). So, what? People are mad that finally someone has realized what a bad way to run a business that is? Honestly, it's a miracle Basic accounts have lasted as long as they have.
The LJ source code is still free- people can download it and run their own LJ-style site, on their own server space and bandwidth, if they want ad-free LJ journals.
The lesson here isn't about who to trust with your stuff... it's that web services are inherently not free- servers, bandwidth, support, all that stuff costs money, and if you as a user aren't paying, you'd better believe the company that owns the service is finding some other way to make the money to keep the servers running. It can't be given away for free, because it costs money to provide.
I hardly ever post to my LJ (since I use it mostly as an aggregator for my friends' LJs), but I plan to post a TON of content on March 21. And maybe I'll go voluntarily put ads on my journal while I'm at it.