Ugh.
LiveJournal is continuing in its quest to be Facebook and Tumblr simultaneously, thereby driving even more people away. I haven't seen any screenshots of this new "release" (read: train wreck), but it sounds like they're going to make all friends pages uniform and remove a ton of customizability.
Unsurprisingly, people are not happy about this. As I write this there are 525 comments, about 14 hours after the notice was posted. The first comment links to this article, which states that LJ has almost completely eliminated any presence in the US and is pretty much entirely under Russian management now. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, and I find it hard to believe that the Russians are any happier about UI changes like these, but it feels like something that LJ users should know, especially English-speaking users. The article links to another couple of articles discussing the LJ diaspora and tracking LJ's decline.
I have no plans to leave LJ, but I'm pretty unimpressed. It makes me want to give up my paid account so I'm not funding their continual stupidity, but I do like the handful of perks that my paid membership gets me. I'm rather torn. I won't be leaving LJ though; I've been here for over 12 years and I have a whole lot of my life stored on their servers so I'll stay as long as I can.
But now it's time to save a fresh backup of my entire journal via http://ljbook.com/ , if I can get it to work ...
ETA: An update with more information has been posted over on
lj_releases. It's worth a look.
Unsurprisingly, people are not happy about this. As I write this there are 525 comments, about 14 hours after the notice was posted. The first comment links to this article, which states that LJ has almost completely eliminated any presence in the US and is pretty much entirely under Russian management now. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, and I find it hard to believe that the Russians are any happier about UI changes like these, but it feels like something that LJ users should know, especially English-speaking users. The article links to another couple of articles discussing the LJ diaspora and tracking LJ's decline.
I have no plans to leave LJ, but I'm pretty unimpressed. It makes me want to give up my paid account so I'm not funding their continual stupidity, but I do like the handful of perks that my paid membership gets me. I'm rather torn. I won't be leaving LJ though; I've been here for over 12 years and I have a whole lot of my life stored on their servers so I'll stay as long as I can.
But now it's time to save a fresh backup of my entire journal via http://ljbook.com/ , if I can get it to work ...
ETA: An update with more information has been posted over on
lj_releases. It's worth a look.