(no subject)
so LJ has made a new post about the comments system.
to be honest, after all this time (yes 3 days, i adapt kinda quickly okay) i'm kinda used to it. because to be honest, i don't frequent communities that need subject titles, i never change my userpic (coz i never remembered what my keywords were), i don't read through that many comments to need the so-called no-refresh thing....
but the way LJ is reacting to this is just... terrible. the subject lines topic has been avoided for the last few posts, the visual and accessibility problems haven't been addressed, and just... they seem to be talking about stuff around the problem, but not the biggest problem people have. it also doesn't help the current image people have of LJ and this release is igrick, which is the worst thing on earth. yes i just used which, no i refuse to believe he's human.
i understand the html code mess. but surely if you wanted to redo the whole thing, redo it to eactly what the old one was? i think people would accept it better if you went through phases, like "hey! the old code was disgusting so we've re-written it! but everything is exactly the same as before, it just looks less messy on our side!" then gradually make the changes, eg change the position of the buttons first, then change the userpic thing etc etc... gradual change is easier to accept than a big dose of change. surely they've heard of the boiling frog story.sure you might need a LOT of mini releases, but it means you have more time to actually listen to what users are saying and you won't have people complaining about pretty basic issues, like accessbility.
their way of trying to win people back is just... wrong. removing ads from comment pages will just anger the paid users (who unlike basic users like me, actually put money INTO your company), who are already angered by you giving everyone the ability to edit comments. there's also the problem of the auto-pay feature, which i do not know of personally, but it will be hard for paid users to want to put any more money into the website. they're basically removing all the perks of having a paid account to i guess 'soothe' the masses, but what they haven't realised is that many complaints are coming from the paid users. IIRC, the poll on rollback88 said that most people who participated in the poll are paid users for a good number of years.
if the problem was aimed at basic users (which i guess they thought it was since the change was on S1 and paid users have S2 (i think)), people would not have bothered with posting on news and just left. if i wasn't paying anything and got something i didn't like, i'd have just thrown it away and moved to something else. i don't think i will any time soon since i've invested so much time here, but that's how consumers work. paid users, of course will think different. they've paid money into a service, they expect something they want. they expect the company to listen to them, since they are paying for it. and we're not just talking about paid users of 1~2 years, it's paid users for 10+ years, pernament users who have put in a lot of money because they like LJ, they like what LJ's offering. if these people are threatening to leave, i don't see how LJ is going to do afterwards.
even if you're earning more money from singaporean blogshopping, even if russia has taken over as their focus, voices still need to be heard. without the initial userbase, LJ wouldn't've grown so big to even let singaporean blogshopping start, for russian users to use so frequently. it would still be the teenager angst journal. i guess in a way it's like stock owning (yes i know it's weird but it's me :3). paid users have bought a 'share' of your company. you might be owned 49% by the mother company, maybe 95%, but the important bit is that your userbase still owns you. we all have a right to voice our opinions on something we have paid for, and the company should then response to it accordingly. yes it might not be a lot in comparison to the large stocks, but like the chinese saying, small things add up. 5% may not seem like a lot. but 5% of the whole chinese population? that's a whole lot more.
editting in this paragraph:
the whole claim on "only 1% of people use subject titles" is stupid. i'll assume igrick is right, only 1% of peoeple use it. but what he's failed to mention, and what LJ might not even have data for, is how many people ACTUALLY use it. let's just say of the 1% of people that use it in comments, 0.1% are on ONTD (most likely wrong, very exaggerated, but hey he's under-estimating i might as well over-estimate). let's assume ONTD has 10% of the entire userbase on LJ and so 1% of ONTD use subject titles in their comments. if everyone on ONTD views the subject titles and uses them (as in, makes a comment under a comment titled "GIF PATY!!!" without actually writing a subject title in), wouldn't that mean that 10% of the LJ userbase use subject titles instead of the 1%? if you use this sort of mindset on the numerous RP journals, kink memes and blog shopping journals we have on LJ, the number is not a low as 1%. it could posibly be 40% or even more. i guess this sort of stuff is hard to trace, but it's this sort of thing that LJ hasn't put into consideration.
i think i've gone all over the place, but i guess it's my thoughts on the matter after i've calmed down. i'm tempted to make a dreamwidth account and transfer my LJ over just in case, but unless all my communities die down i don't think it'll be any time soon.
if i had written this while i was the most pumped up yesterday, and actually did something about this whole mess, i might be runing from jail XD;; i guess in a way i believe in the whole eye for an eye thing, so i was VERY tempted to post some VERY triggering comments on a certain account and add at the bottom "sorry i was going to warn you, but there wasn't any subject line :)". yes, i guess that one leaked reply he did really annoyed me. i was also tempted to spam him on all his social media, but that would require too much effort. in all honesty, what that person really needs is a combination of the china "human search" (aka posting a photo of someone's face or name will get you their whole background, address and all) with the korean "angered fangirls cause people to commit suicide" sorta thing. just typing that out has made me irrationally angry so i'm just going go off and calm down a bit :)
edit again: going back to the news article was stupid of me. obviously the way to make them listen is to DDoS the shit out of the mother company. surely if we kill SUP and kommersant (the media company who has a share of SUP), they would listen? but hey i'm sounding like a 4chan activist.
to be honest, after all this time (yes 3 days, i adapt kinda quickly okay) i'm kinda used to it. because to be honest, i don't frequent communities that need subject titles, i never change my userpic (coz i never remembered what my keywords were), i don't read through that many comments to need the so-called no-refresh thing....
but the way LJ is reacting to this is just... terrible. the subject lines topic has been avoided for the last few posts, the visual and accessibility problems haven't been addressed, and just... they seem to be talking about stuff around the problem, but not the biggest problem people have. it also doesn't help the current image people have of LJ and this release is igrick, which is the worst thing on earth. yes i just used which, no i refuse to believe he's human.
i understand the html code mess. but surely if you wanted to redo the whole thing, redo it to eactly what the old one was? i think people would accept it better if you went through phases, like "hey! the old code was disgusting so we've re-written it! but everything is exactly the same as before, it just looks less messy on our side!" then gradually make the changes, eg change the position of the buttons first, then change the userpic thing etc etc... gradual change is easier to accept than a big dose of change. surely they've heard of the boiling frog story.sure you might need a LOT of mini releases, but it means you have more time to actually listen to what users are saying and you won't have people complaining about pretty basic issues, like accessbility.
their way of trying to win people back is just... wrong. removing ads from comment pages will just anger the paid users (who unlike basic users like me, actually put money INTO your company), who are already angered by you giving everyone the ability to edit comments. there's also the problem of the auto-pay feature, which i do not know of personally, but it will be hard for paid users to want to put any more money into the website. they're basically removing all the perks of having a paid account to i guess 'soothe' the masses, but what they haven't realised is that many complaints are coming from the paid users. IIRC, the poll on rollback88 said that most people who participated in the poll are paid users for a good number of years.
if the problem was aimed at basic users (which i guess they thought it was since the change was on S1 and paid users have S2 (i think)), people would not have bothered with posting on news and just left. if i wasn't paying anything and got something i didn't like, i'd have just thrown it away and moved to something else. i don't think i will any time soon since i've invested so much time here, but that's how consumers work. paid users, of course will think different. they've paid money into a service, they expect something they want. they expect the company to listen to them, since they are paying for it. and we're not just talking about paid users of 1~2 years, it's paid users for 10+ years, pernament users who have put in a lot of money because they like LJ, they like what LJ's offering. if these people are threatening to leave, i don't see how LJ is going to do afterwards.
even if you're earning more money from singaporean blogshopping, even if russia has taken over as their focus, voices still need to be heard. without the initial userbase, LJ wouldn't've grown so big to even let singaporean blogshopping start, for russian users to use so frequently. it would still be the teenager angst journal. i guess in a way it's like stock owning (yes i know it's weird but it's me :3). paid users have bought a 'share' of your company. you might be owned 49% by the mother company, maybe 95%, but the important bit is that your userbase still owns you. we all have a right to voice our opinions on something we have paid for, and the company should then response to it accordingly. yes it might not be a lot in comparison to the large stocks, but like the chinese saying, small things add up. 5% may not seem like a lot. but 5% of the whole chinese population? that's a whole lot more.
editting in this paragraph:
the whole claim on "only 1% of people use subject titles" is stupid. i'll assume igrick is right, only 1% of peoeple use it. but what he's failed to mention, and what LJ might not even have data for, is how many people ACTUALLY use it. let's just say of the 1% of people that use it in comments, 0.1% are on ONTD (most likely wrong, very exaggerated, but hey he's under-estimating i might as well over-estimate). let's assume ONTD has 10% of the entire userbase on LJ and so 1% of ONTD use subject titles in their comments. if everyone on ONTD views the subject titles and uses them (as in, makes a comment under a comment titled "GIF PATY!!!" without actually writing a subject title in), wouldn't that mean that 10% of the LJ userbase use subject titles instead of the 1%? if you use this sort of mindset on the numerous RP journals, kink memes and blog shopping journals we have on LJ, the number is not a low as 1%. it could posibly be 40% or even more. i guess this sort of stuff is hard to trace, but it's this sort of thing that LJ hasn't put into consideration.
i think i've gone all over the place, but i guess it's my thoughts on the matter after i've calmed down. i'm tempted to make a dreamwidth account and transfer my LJ over just in case, but unless all my communities die down i don't think it'll be any time soon.
if i had written this while i was the most pumped up yesterday, and actually did something about this whole mess, i might be runing from jail XD;; i guess in a way i believe in the whole eye for an eye thing, so i was VERY tempted to post some VERY triggering comments on a certain account and add at the bottom "sorry i was going to warn you, but there wasn't any subject line :)". yes, i guess that one leaked reply he did really annoyed me. i was also tempted to spam him on all his social media, but that would require too much effort. in all honesty, what that person really needs is a combination of the china "human search" (aka posting a photo of someone's face or name will get you their whole background, address and all) with the korean "angered fangirls cause people to commit suicide" sorta thing. just typing that out has made me irrationally angry so i'm just going go off and calm down a bit :)
edit again: going back to the news article was stupid of me. obviously the way to make them listen is to DDoS the shit out of the mother company. surely if we kill SUP and kommersant (the media company who has a share of SUP), they would listen? but hey i'm sounding like a 4chan activist.