dragonimp

LiveJournal's quandry is simple. LiveJournal is Russia's most popular blogging platform and plays a key role in the country's Internet ecosphere. LiveJournal has a staggering 1.2 million users in Singapore who primarily use the site for “blogshops”--a local hybrid of blogs and Etsy.com-style e-commerce. However, LiveJournal's American market share has massively declined in the past five years. Six Apart and SUP were simply unable to compete in the post-MySpace era. There was talk in 2011 of Yahoo purchasing SUP; however, Yahoo's current troubles make that transaction seem quite unlikely.
However, longtime LiveJournal users are upset by the changes. LiveJournal recently unveiled a complete redesign that overhauled the service's comments system, emphasized social networking, and set the stage for the upcoming communities blitz. Reaction from longtime users has been overwhelmingly negative--LiveJournal patrons slammed the redesign on the service's official blog.
LiveJournal's leadership has made it clear that their future American business strategy lies in generating new traffic rather than catering to the service's current small-but-loyal membership. The challenge for Petrochenko and other executives at LiveJournal will be redefining the brand's identity in a crowded media marketplace.

from here

Gee LJ, maybe if you stopped sucking and actually paid attention to you user base (y'know, that "small-but-loyal membership"?) your American market share wouldn't have fallen so much.

But I don't think you really care.

Edit: this commet cracked me up: "OIC. They want to make it more "community based". By getting rid of subject lines, which were vital to a huge number of communities. Good luck with that, LJ."

That's about the sum of it.

Must ... finish ... rewrites ...... chapter ... refuses ... to end ....

FYI, Dreamwidth's account creation is still open for the time being, and they're talking about removing some of the restrictions on the community import soon.

Red Triskele Earrings:


...getting stuff up for Valentine's...

Sorry to those who get this more than once, I'm posting to both my personal and my fanworks journal.

Okay, Livejournal's newest upgrade mostly sucks. If that's all this was, people would complain, issues would get fixed or we'd adjust, life goes on. But the site admin, particularly igrick, the head of LJ Russia, have been dismissive and condescending. They ignored the negative feedback on the beta and pushed the upgrade through anyway. Specific complaints were brushed off, or even called "spam." I'm willing to believe that the automatic payment settings being switched on was a glitch, but when users complained about it the manager of LJ's support group accused them of lying.

On top of this recent fiasco, LJ staffers have been known to abuse their power for years.

What am I getting from all this? That they don't care about us, the users. They don't care about how we use the site, what features we use or don't use. They don't care about providing the best site for us or even about preserving the site we've been using for years. They don't care about treating us fairly, or listening to our concerns. Those who post in LJ news and updates are making the right noises, but what's coming down from admin paints a completely different picture.



Both of these journals - dragonimp and impishclawmarks - have been being mirrored over on Dreamwidth, dragonimp, and I would really, really like it if activity moved over there. Account creation - I believe - is open until the 1st, and they make importing your journal from LJ really easy. The community importer should be up in the next few weeks. You can also comment with open ID. I'll still crosspost to LJ for the time being, but I'm considering dropping these accounts down to basic.

Bottom line, I don't trust LJ not to screw us over and I would rather be there as little as possible.

rollback88

There's a poll there where you can lodge all your complaints/problems with the "upgrade." It may come to nothing, but it at least gives us some numbers.

Edit: Outlining the reasons LJ (and its head) now sucks (and why you might want to consider moving)

Wow LJ, are you actually trying to alienate people?

Edit: Some have already been hit by the fallout of removing comment subject lines. Brilliant, LJ.

Thanks to Three Panel Soul I have now learned that Dr. Pepper thinks soda is a gendered product:



Um, yeah. Wow. So much wrong in that.

And it meant a lot to me that the series was written and drawn by a woman. I am sometimes bothered by the fact that so few of my artistic heroes are women, especially comic drawing women. I very much enjoy the work of many female cartoonists, but they all tend to be about my age or younger, so I consider them more peers than artistic heroes. Arakawa was not only older than I am, but damn prolific, and she’d written and drawn a series that had many of the things I craved to put in my own comics: action, adventure, magic, limbs getting lost, brotherly love (I actually really enjoy stories about male relationships, especially brother relationships. Readers of my old webcomic Demonology 101 will recognize that), and KICKASS LADIES. Oh man, the ladies of Fullmetal Alchemist. THE LADIES! Strong and tough and funny and sweet and NEVER VICTIMS and every inch equals to the men in their lives (Roy Mustang and Riza Hawkeye’s respectful and deeply loving relationship just makes my heart ache), the ladies of Fullmetal Alchemist were my wildest dreams come true. It didn’t matter to me that they weren’t the main characters of the manga, because they never played second fiddle. They were their own characters with their own lives, not written to stand around and “support” the male characters. While I do care about having main female characters in media, I’m perfectly fine with main male characters as long as there are female characters who are CHARACTERS, not props for the male character’s journey.

I don't disagree with most of what she's saying here, but I have to wonder if she missed the huge, massive scene of Riza/Roy codependence. The man I love is dead, so I will SIT HERE and WAIT TO BE KILLED is not "every inch equals to the men in their lives". About any of the other ladies I agree, though.

She's also going on about how great the last chapter is so I'm going to keep my mouth shut. Though I agree that it's very good that it has an ending, unlike stories that get dragged on and on forever until they're so thin it's pathetic.