Comments | zhai: Souveniers du Montreal

zhai

Souveniers du Montreal

Dec 03, 2007 23:08

And that is about as far as my French gets!

Like most, I don't quite know what to think of this second sale of livejournal, but this discussion of the specifics on Slashdot was quite interesting. The future of Russia on the Internet is not something that has figured largely into projections for the cyber-future, but it certainly contains some most ( Read more... )

writing, speaking, philomath, best of

Comments 8

genmaicha December 4 2007, 05:22:49 UTC

That's...rather amazingly funny. :D For some reason the virtual gifts thing rather offended me, timed as they were, so when I heard the idea to give them to someone who evidently valued them, I was all for that. :P

I just hope that the SUP purchase isn't a frying-pan-to-fire situation when it comes to mishandling the userbase of LJ.

zhai December 4 2007, 15:41:51 UTC

What was it about the timing of the gifts? I think I only vaguely remember when Pepsi became available -- did they give Pepsi gifts to people for free or something?

And yeah, I hope not too. :(

genmaicha December 4 2007, 17:37:46 UTC

It was at the same time as a renewed surge of dramatics, I remember that. I think it was when the TOS was being clarified and a lot of questions were still going unanswered. It looked an awful lot like an attempt to pull attention away from that as well as introduce another version of ads that people didn't want. The Pepsi gifts were free to give to everyone, though you had a daily limit of 10, I think. The others were still $.99-$2.99. So someone suggested what we could do with all our free unwanted ads, and I thought that sounded pretty good to me. I was already irritated about the ads thing to begin with, since we'd been promised no ads unless we opted in--and now anyone could give anyone ads. I'm sorry, sponsored virtual gifts.

devilwrites December 4 2007, 05:51:26 UTC

Very cool response to your talk! I wish I could've been there to hear it! :)

Your hair is SO LONG. I envy you. :)

zhai December 4 2007, 15:41:07 UTC

Thanks!

My hair seriously needs a trim. I'm going to get yelled at by my hairdresser again. I've been considering just taking trimming scissors to it myself -- I should probably get used to doing that anyway. But yeah, I saw that picture and thought -- crap, my hair is getting long. I don't really notice most of the time.

brennye December 4 2007, 06:51:45 UTC

*sniffles* there you go, saving the world again! :) Seriously though, awesome review. Congrats on getting the facetime!

re: LJ and SUP. I have no earthly idea how this is gonna play out. Russia needs to develop such things though, and become more diverse. However, there is the base fact that their internet laws are on average 7-10 years behind ours.... that could get frightening at some point.

but what do I know. The part of Russia I'm focusing on right now is their 19th century history. ;)

zhai December 4 2007, 15:39:53 UTC

If I can't save the world, I don't want to play. :)

It is indeed the political ramification side of the buyout that I would be concerned about... ie at some point having to boycott LJ if we get wind of some of what appears to still be common practice behavior over in Russia towards activists. I can easily see that happening -- the problem being that I doubt they would care. But these issues would exist regardless of whether SUP bought LJ, we'd just be less aware of them, so there is that.

brennye December 4 2007, 16:30:16 UTC

See, I thought you were going to take over the world to save it. Now you're telling me you just want to play?

With the whole "Putin stealing the election" thing, I'm wondering about it too. It could turn out rather... scary. I'm prepared to spend a weekend deleting out the posts in scribe-fu if necessary.

On the other hand, LJ has always had a decent Russian user base, interestingly enough. So I want to see how this plays out.