6 ms·

>It's just a shame that the owners couldn't make money that way, and seem to be focussed on an entirely different demographic. Maybe it was when Six Apart owne

by ben1040 14y ago

>It's just a shame that the owners couldn't make money that way, and seem to be focussed on an entirely different demographic. Maybe it was when Six Apart owned them, but for a really long time it looked like LJ had given up on trying to improve on features on the site or fixing bugs, and instead focused on cheap and dirty ways to monetize the site like e-gifts. It may have gotten them some up-front cash but you risk causing long-time users to stop renewing their paid accounts and go elsewhere.

acheron 14y ago
Yeah, that's exactly what happened to me. I was a longtime LJ user (missed out on the special "early adopter" account by a few months), and I bought a paid account every year. And within a year or so after SA bought them, I gave up. Most of my LJ friends disappeared around the same time or a little later, and the communities I used to follow pretty much dried up too. It really was a shame; they did do a lot of things right initially that FB et al. either took awhile to figure out or never did.
- ben1040 14y ago
  I kept a paid account there from 2002 until late last year. My circle of friends was pretty active on LJ and didn't bail out to Facebook until 2009-2010. One thing I remember about when LJ was independent was that they intentionally kept a feature disparity between paid & free users to steer people into paying. And I remember in 2002-2004ish if you were at all an active user you definitely had to have paid -- they had more demand than server capacity, and they configured their load balancer to prioritize paid users. If you didn't pay you'd wait 30 seconds for a page to come up. Since then they've closed the feature gap, and even if my friends were all to come back right now and post like they used to, I still don't see a need to pay. I couldn't care less about more photo hosting or user avatars.

by ben1040 14y ago

acheron 14y ago

Yeah, that's exactly what happened to me. I was a longtime LJ user (missed out on the special "early adopter" account by a few months), and I bought a paid account every year. And within a year or so after SA bought them, I gave up. Most of my LJ friends disappeared around the same time or a little later, and the communities I used to follow pretty much dried up too. It really was a shame; they did do a lot of things right initially that FB et al. either took awhile to figure out or never did.

ben1040 14y ago
I kept a paid account there from 2002 until late last year. My circle of friends was pretty active on LJ and didn't bail out to Facebook until 2009-2010. One thing I remember about when LJ was independent was that they intentionally kept a feature disparity between paid & free users to steer people into paying. And I remember in 2002-2004ish if you were at all an active user you definitely had to have paid -- they had more demand than server capacity, and they configured their load balancer to prioritize paid users. If you didn't pay you'd wait 30 seconds for a page to come up. Since then they've closed the feature gap, and even if my friends were all to come back right now and post like they used to, I still don't see a need to pay. I couldn't care less about more photo hosting or user avatars.