And the debate continues.

[ffutures]

Livejournal's latest missive about the god-awful new S1 reply page is now up to 23 pages of comments, which I think makes it one of the hottest topics I've ever seen on livejournal.

They really seem to be lacking any clue as to what their users actually want to do with livejournal, which is truly bizarre.

http://news.livejournal.com/140969.html

Comments

[purplecat]

I'm fairly sure that they are more worried about why the people who don't use LJ, choose to use sites like Facebook instead, than they are in what the people who do use LJ like about the place. I'd be kind of interested if they have any stats on how many users they lose each time they do something like this because it wouldn't surprise me if it's actually quite small (i.e. there's a lot of sound and fury, but not a lot of actual action). The potential market in becoming "the next facebook" is a lot larger than anything they lose by pissing off us lot.

Bottom line is they no longer care what we (defined loosely as english-speaking media-fandom) think. They are, rightly or wrongly, chasing bigger fish.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you're right - it's just very annoying,

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I think what's happened is most people now cross post to Dreamwidth and LJ, so they continue as LJ users, even if they have in essence moved across.

Plus I think LJ has a slightly sneaky thing going on with the way they keep promising to do the inactive account purge, but never do it. I think the number of unique user accounts LJ has on record on their books includes all of the many millions of totally inactive accounts, but in order to make their business look better, they're pretending every account is an active one. After all, even if nobody has posted, they might be using it to follow other people.

Which is to say, yes, I agree, I think the bottom line of numbers of people who totally leave the site over these recurring issues that piss off the users, is probably a drop in the ocean.

[purplecat]

I suspect they are probably not too worried about people cross-posting from DreamWidth as long as they are still creating network effects at this end. It'll be interesting to see if there comes a "tipping point" were one of the alternative places gains enough critical mass that people start to move there for the actual content not look/feel/attitude/whatever. If LJ hasn't managed to bring in this hoped for new market before that happens then they could be in trouble. But predicting how large groups of people will behave en masse is never easy, and predicting when they may do something is even harder.

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

What louisedennis said.

It's clear from their comments, and especially their tweets on the whole thing, that they don't care about the hassle they're causing us. Which is fine by me; they're not the only Internet blogging site and I had my contingency plans laid in a while back. If they can make more money by turning themselves into the Russian FarceBook, then good luck to them. I'll be taking my money elsewhere.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I've had a dreamwidth account for a long time - I need to get into the habit of posting there routinely.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

I'll just remind you/point out that you can set up Dreamwidth to automatically crosspost to LJ, via the Other Sites tab on your account settings.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes, I have it set up that way, but it doesn't work the other way around, which I would prefer.