It's finally happened...

[_phaedrus_]

I remember last year when LJ was bought by Six Apart, all the oldbies who had been designing and running LJ from the beginning swore up and down that this would not introduce some new commercial element to the mix.  A lot of us were worried about this exact thing happening.  As a matter of fact, in the early days (2001) when I first started my

Comments

[jynxjynx]

I noticed that yesterday and had about the same impression. Major sadness abounds. :(

[_phaedrus_]

Yeah, you've been here a while too, if I recall. Boohoo and stuff... :\

[joelzero]

I concur. I think they've done it in the most non-offensive way possible.

[_phaedrus_]

Yes, you and Joel are correct in thinking that they caved to commercial pressure in the most graceful way possible. It mostly saddens me on a principled, sign-of-the-times level. It will probably not effect my journaling that much, if at all.
Maybe it just feels like a small slip at the beginning of a very long slope. Time will tell. Still, the support communities were full of denials that we would be seeing ads on LJ after Six Apart took over. Clearly, that was a bit of placating lip service.

[monotonia]

Of course, I object to it in an abstract sense, but on the other hand, I'm not sure it will affect me. I never visit anyone else's journal, so I'd be unlikely to ever see any of these ads. Unless they show up on my friends page along with their journal entries. In any case, it doesn't seem to me that it would be very successful. But they're fighting the competition of more popular and pervasive journaling sites I guess ... and that's the way things go. We could all switch to DeadJournal ...

[_phaedrus_]

Agreed. Please see my comment to Zannie above. ^^^^

[themselves]

The internet and blogging are also different than they were six years ago.

[_phaedrus_]

True. I really can't argue with that.