24-hour LJ hiatus

[zdashamber]

Starting in about 2 hours is a Thing, where people will not post LJ posts or comments, or go by any LJ site, for 24 hours. Midnight to midnight GMT, which for me on the Pacific Coast is 5 PM today to 5 PM Friday. The object is to introduce a noticeable dip in activity to protest the recent yoinking of the free ad-free account option. I'm going to be taking part because I'm annoyed at LJ and because I'm interested in how it will work.

Why be annoyed at LJ? Well, it was my intention to keep trying to get all the people I know to get LJ accounts so that I could maybe post the occasional friendslocked thing and have them be able to see it, and so they'd perhaps be more likely to be able to keep up with my life and the lives of other people we're interested in. But bedamned if I'm going to tout ad-spamming crufty crap accounts... So that makes it less likely that my friends will be on LJ, which makes it less valuable to me. Also, I was considering setting up accounts for future RPG characters, or perhaps an account for RPG stuff or other stuff... Ad-based accounts are distinctly unappealing.

Paying is also unappealing, as I'm not interested in buying something which is constantly getting crappier... The only change that's been good in the last few years is tags. On the other side, there's anti-nipple, rolling over to freak conservative groups, hideous info-tracking page-preview boxes, useless header rows taking up screen space, and the continual blind-dumb seekrit-society lying-through-the-teeth attitude of the folks in power.

I like the friends page of LJ, where a bunch of posts are reliably conglomerated, with color coding and avatars to tell posters apart, and cut tags socially enforced; I like the mostly spam-free nature of LJ; I like the simplicity of posting and commenting; I like the reliability of email comment notification; I like the ability to click around and look at new people and new avatars. But LJ seems bound and determined to cut its throat. Every damn time they make it harder for cool people to be here, they're making it a less appealing place for me to be. So, perhaps there will be a large enough dent in their traffic this Friday to encourage them change back, and rescue this particular slide towards suckiness.

Comments

[druidsquirrel.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads-up; I was unaware of the boycott.

[tlatoani.livejournal.com]

All the alternative services have ads too. Here's my position on the strike:

I will not be participating. If I gave up using the services of every company whose leadership includes dickheads and where they communicate poorly with their customers, I'd have to can my AT&T phone, my Mac, all my Microsoft software, anything in the house with Sony components, and the majority of my gaming collection. To be honest, I'd even have to throw out the RPG book I co-authored, because the president of that company screwed up really hard.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

My attempts to avoid buying from damnfool companies aren't remotely comprehensive, though there are one or two I manage to avoid, like Walmart. Short-term traffic-managing exercises, though, I can do without too much trouble... It's like sending a letter to the show's advertisers instead of just abandoning the show entirely.

[tlatoani.livejournal.com]

I avoid Walmart too. I'm not convinced LJ is evil.

[lordsmerf.livejournal.com]

I'm also interested in seeing how this turns out. Though I have heard from a few former LJ employees that standard practice doesn't analyze traffic rates at anything below the week level, and this is a historically low-traffic weekend already, so I'm not expecting it to have much of an effect.

Still, I'm willing to be surprised even if it already looks very likely that LJ will be reversing its decision. (It is, I find, one of the great ironies of the internet that social movements can form and move into action before their targets have a legitimate chance to address their complaint at all. I mean, it's been less than a week, and I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect a corporate entity to make a major decision in so little time. Then again, maybe it is.)

Thomas

[shadowflyer.livejournal.com]

OTOH, in a recent interview one of the Russians running the joint took the stance of no negotiating with terrorists - they don't want to be seen as bowing to pressure even if they realize they're wrong. Cultural differences in power dynamics are such fun, aren't they?