No longer a paid account

[unixronin]

I've just allowed my LiveJournal paid account to expire.  There are basically two reasons for this:

1. For some time now I've found myself reading, and posting on, LiveJournal less and less;
2. It seems that for some time now every change LiveJournal has made has been in efforts to make LiveJournal more like Facebook, which is not only a trend I detest,

Comments

[lblanchard]

I'm not killing mine. I bought a lifetime account in 2004. What's the point of killing that?

I still like the archiving options for LJ (aka LJBook).

[unixronin]

Well, as long as it still does what you want it to do, none.

But I've found since I actually found work again that LJ is well down the priority list of uses I have for my non-working spare time, and as previously noted I've been increasingly displeased with LJ's apparent attempts to chase Facebook like a dog chasing cars. Which makes renewing my non-permanent account a questionable choice right now. (I'd already been doing almost all of my journal posting from Dreamwidth for over a year anyway.)

[blackcoat]

The only reason mine is still a paid account is that I picked up a permanent account at some point in the past.

[mr_spock]

I'm with you. It's getting harder and harder to justify putting anything on the internet when you know data-miners are scouring like crazy to build a "perfect" virtual "you". I'm getting very tired of playing tag with them. First I left MySpace, then it was Facebook, then it was Google+, now I'm considering leaving Diaspora (which has started a flirtation with Google Analytics). Through it all, I've been here, slowly watching LJ slide away from anonymous and private. It's almost impossible now to use the internet without using TOR & a half-dozen other tracker-killing programs.

[unixronin]

I don't think the underlying concepts of "anonymity/privacy" and "social network" are inherently compatible. (Which is not to say that I don't find Facebook's "all your personal data are belong to us and our marketing partners" reprehensible.) Where I think LiveJournal jumped the shark is the day it added Facebook-style web "games".

(No, they're not games, they're recruit-your-friends timewaters.)

[mr_spock]

Oh, those types of games are sometimes mildly entertaining, but you're right about most of them being timewasters. I tried playing a few of them when I was still using FB, and most I only played once. The best were something like 8-bit versions of Morrowind, which doesn't say much for them.

[mr_spock]

I used to use DreamWidth, but I stopped because I only had one reader, and it didn't seem to be worth the effort of cross-posting everything, especially since that one reader also uses LJ.

[yndy]

I bought my "lifetime acct" before Fitz left. Much of what G+ and Facebook have "innovated" recently were here on LJ and better implemented 10 years ago. It's always sad to me that things went the direction they did here. I touch base every now and then. But nothing like the old days.