Question for Paidmembers

[marta]

We've had some conversations recently about some of the reasons people buy Paid Accounts. Rather than try to guess, we wanted to ask you why *you* have a Paid (or Permanent) Account. Hence, a poll

Comments

[rotsman]

In like vein, asking people if they plan to RENEW their paid account might be useful. If I were up for renewal right now, I'd be on the fence.

[thaumata]

Yeah.. if I didn't have a permanent account, I wouldn't be renewing this year. For one, I feel like the management is nowhere near as good as the days before the 6A sale. For two, I just don't feel like they're usually working on features I'd love to see, like making tags more manageable or giving us better customization options that aren't so complicated, or even better backup options.

If you could edit and manage LJ posts the way I can manage photos on Flickr, I'd pay double for years to come.

As it is, I have been posting more and more in other spaces lately and wouldn't renew here if it was optional.

[zeldaophelia]

I agree with this. If I didn't have a permanent account here, I would have moved on to a different journaling/blogging service by now.

[love2loveher]

Who is "we"? The community?

[marta]

"We" in this context is "staff" - many of us had our own Paid Accounts before becoming staff, but the reasons might have been different.

[love2loveher]

Sorry, I belatedly noticed the "staff" in your icon!

[unixronin]

Marta, let me expand on my poll replies a moment.

When I joined, there were no ads and there was no comment editing. There was Free, Paid, and Permanent. At that time, I went with a paid account primarily because it gave me more userpics and let me customize my style and my mood icons (and in principle even create new mood icon sets, though I've never gotten around to building my long-planned set of Easter Island mood moai). Subsequently, I've been very glad that my paid account kept me from ever having to see the ads of sponsored accounts, and eventually comment editing (something I've been wishing for almost since I joined) got added too. Frankly, none of the arguments against it ever made a lick of sense. ("People might edit their comments to make a following commenter look bad." Uh, explain to me again why people can't do that with their posts already? Think of it as a public asshat-detection feature

[beeooll]

street cred

[marta]

I think that would fit into the "I like the status of being a Paid user" response.

[beeooll]

Yeah but "I like the status of being a Paid user" didn't quite convey "being a paid user goes great with my gold teef."

[mourning]

lmao

[glenniebun]

It's interesting that there aren't more people picking comment editing.

[skreidle]

I've had a paid account so long that I honestly didn't even realize that was a paid-only feature. However, it is in my top 5 reasons. :)

[spacewolfcub]

Me too, I didn't realize it was a paid-only feature.

[blaze2242]

same here, there were a few of those things that I was like 'wait, that's only paid accounts?" Also, before i had a paid account, LJ didn't have ads at all... I originally bought it for the extra user pics, but now I keep it because I'd just hate to go back.

[qp]

actually, now that I think about it (looking at the other answers under the last question), I also wanted to see if there was anything different with the server priority; however, I haven't noticed a difference.

"dwer -- Hopefully, an "expand all" button at the top of every post for communities."
I'd love that.

[bwinter]

The server priority comes into play when LJ's slow. A few times during this autumn the Express Lane showed I got pages before as many as a thousand free users.

[qp]

*google searches*
ah, interesting.

[chezmax]

This used to be a much bigger draw. When I became a paid user *long* ago, the site was very slow at times.