Oh look. LJ's at it again.

[winter]

In the interest of doing the community thing and spreading the word - it is no longer possible to create a new Basic (free and ad-free) account on Livejournal. Existing Basic accounts remain ad-free, existing Plus accounts can be degraded to ad-free Basic.

I can't say I haven't been expecting this. LJ remained one of the very, very few places online that offered something both free and ad-free.

I've been around for more than a decade, and I remember when this happened to webspace. I migrated from Geocities (free to banner to popup) to Fortunecities (free to gigantic banner) to the space I was getting with my ISP (limited) to paying for my own domain and has it really been six years? It's a natural progression of the online evolution: at first it's free. Then it's ads. Then you realise that if you don't like ads and you use a service frequently, paying for it is quite an attractive option.

I use LJ daily as my main source of internet-community news and my main path of communication with many dear friends. Out of the clones, it's the most stable and the one with the most attractive array of options and layouts. I've had a paid account for years now, and each year I reconsider signing up for one more year, just like I reconsider the value-for-money of any other subscription. (I'm dropping Usenet this year, for example. It's time.) So far, I still see benefits.

In other news, you can create an ad-free community, still, which was the one thing I was worried about.

Comments

[winter]

I can see where they'd be worried that people would buy a paid account for a month and sponsor dozens of basic accounts with that couple of dollars. All in all it's a minority problem, but by gods a vocal one.

(And as for something-for-free, the problem is that to date, it was. Taking something away has a much more negative connotation than never giving it in the first place.)

[artela.livejournal.com]

Yes, and people have (basically) been abusing it by creating many many free accounts - those existing accounts are still unaffected, so really they aren't having anything taken away, they just aren't being given any more for nothing :-)

There's a big big difference between "taking something away" and "letting you keep what you have but not giving anything else away for nothing"... and the LJ drama queens need to learn that *G*

[winter]

"Taking away the ability to create ad-free accounts at will" would be a better way to phrase it, I agree :) Alas, after all the SixApart policy-related messups and general attitude towards LJ and the internet as a whole, people are negative from the get-go.

[lanthirel.livejournal.com]

After reading many pages of the latest post in news, it's the fact that once again we were not told in advance about the taking away of the Basic Account creation that is really upsetting people. After SUP went on and on about how they were going to spend more time communicating with us, their content-providers, the way this was handled was pathetic. No communication at all, until after the fact.

I've worked in various types of customer service most of my adult life. If a company treats its customers badly, they go elsewhere. And not only do they do that, the old PR principle of "tell two people, who tell two more people, etc., etc.," comes into play. The old adage of "the customer is always right" is something that LJ's new Russian owners need to pay attention to, also.

Basic Accounts were the gateway into LJ. Many Basic Users, seeing the perks of a Paid Account, converted. The Plus Account users get too many perks close to those of a Paid user, so why bother to convert? LJ is only shooting themselves in the foot on this one. They might save some money in the short-term, but they have lost a lot of money in the long-term. If they want more money right now, they need to back off the perks for a Plus user, or up the perks of a Paid user. That way, more users would convert to a Paid account.

And the trust was fragile, and is now even more broken. Who can promise that those Basic accounts will not be forcibly converted into Plus accounts?

Besides, there were links to various articles, one in Business Week, I beleive, that indicates that Web 2.0 is going the free route. When content providers such as the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal get rid of their paid content, that's a clue.

And the censorship on the interest search, of terms relating to fanfiction, mental health, and sexuality, was disrespectful to those interested in those areas. That filter has now been supposedly removed, but it was posted about in the changelog community, so it was not a "mistake" as one of the LJ staffers has tried to say, supposedly.

[artela.livejournal.com]

After reading many pages of the latest post in news, it's the fact that
once again we were not told in advance about the taking away of the Basic
Account creation that is really upsetting people.

Basically it all seems to be "Waaahh - you did something and didn't tell us, *even though* it only affect new user accounts and NOT our current accounts" which, to me, seems to be the behaviour of kindergarten children.

[lanthirel.livejournal.com]

There's no guarantee that these currently grandfathered Basic Accounts won't be turned into Plus Accounts in the near future, again without any beforehand notice.

As for what you term the behaviour of kindergarten children, the fact remains that SUP promised to communicate with us, the content-providers. That they did after the fact is not communication. That's just closing the stable door after the horse gets out. It doesn't do any good.

I notice that you did not mention the problem of censorship in the interest searches. Supposedly that filter has now been turned off, but that it existed in the first place in the coding is certainly disrespectful and unhelpful to any LJ user who searched for information on fanfiction, sexuality, or mental health while the filter was in place.

[artela.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I did mention the filters, but in reply to another person's post - it's sometimes hard to keep track of who I've said what to - however, I have never seen interests mucked about with in anyway and by the time the doom-mongers were whining loud enough that I heard they were apparently back to normal... *shrug* Glitches happen - well known fact in IT circles.

And they promised to communicate with us about things that affect us - the new policy on new accounts does not affect existing accounts - I fail to see the issue - do people expect them to communicate *everything* that *doesn't* affect existing account holders as well? It wasn't part of the promise AFAIA, and where does such a policy as now being demanded stop - must they tell us if they change the decor of the office? Or if they decide to move to a different make of server? Or if they do a myriad of other things that do not affect existing users?

As for the "no guarantee" part - well, I don't hold much store in the "but they *might*" style of doom-mongering. If I had wings I might fly, but speculating on it won't make it so.

As is usual with this sort of fanwank, people have gone over the top and are just looking for excuses to take a pop, and all because they weren't told about something that didn't affect their accounts in the first place. People need to get some perspective.