LJ, you do not understand social networks

[hyounpark]

ursamajor just alerted me to the fact that LJ no longer provides basic free accounts to new users. Not only does this suck from a general freeloader aspect, but this actually is an extremely poor business decision for LJ

Comments

[ursamajor]

I need to make that goddamn Ravelry + targeted ads post.

- a large percentage of the new accounts being created are either secondary (and potentially topic-specific, or alternately, friends-group-specific) journals for people that already have one account, or are communities being started by those same people who already have some awareness of and participation in the LJ zeitgeist.

- many of *those* people predate the existence of Plus accounts; as you trace back in the timeline, I'll bet there's a correlation between length of time one has been part of the LiveJournal community and likelihood of any new accounts they create being specifically "not-Plus."

- I don't know how popular the trend is, but I have seen it around enough times that it's at least a trendlet - people with Plus accounts creating non-Paid communities create those as Basic accounts because it's seen as somehow less kosher to inflict ads on a comm.

- Selling "rights" to the LJ Inbox for Plus users - I guess that'd be like how Facebook inserts some ads into your "

[ursamajor]

It really is all about the money

[opal1159]

how well said people translate Russian into English, if said quote is as harsh in Russian as it is being translated into in English

I've observed this "harshness" quite often in interacting with English-speaking Russians (when compared to English-speaking other-ethnicities/cultures/whatevers anyway), so I definitely think there's something going on there.

[nminusone]

I read "The Perfect Store", a book about eBay's history. One interesting aspect was the way the founder liked to see eBay as a community. (Apparently in the early days the eBay forums were a big part of the site.) eBay went through a lot of the same types of "business vs. community" missteps that LJ has gone through, but I guess no one at LJ was paying attention

Bingo!

[coises]

"My thought is that the big hump now is the division of users across sites."

Indeed. The first thought that came into my mind when I read Hyoun's post was, "Why, again, is it that I don't just figure out how to run my own blog on my own domain? Oh, yeah... the people I know are mostly on LiveJournal and it would be a pain in the butt for them to go look for me."

It's a thing I love about the 'Net --- it keeps defying ownership. I hope it always will ('cause there's precious little in this society that does).

[azurelunatic]

synecdochic has a Cunning Plan. (Er, if you don't know who she is, ask Ursie.)

[ursamajor]

*grin* We both know synecdochic well :)