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

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.