Comments on: LiveJournal: A Cautionary Tale

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:42:59 +0000

you should always listen to your users. And perhaps not every site wants to be spam and adware-laden cow fodder. Maybe some places aren’t drive-thru windows on a virtual scale. I hate all of those other sites with a passion.

By: Ex LiveJournal User

Ex LiveJournal User — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 19:47:32 +0000

As an early adopter of LiveJournal, I finally stopped using it about two years ago. The reason is because of the points you touched on. LiveJournal refused to open up and really morph itself in a social powerhouse. I felt restricted while other social sites were allowing portability and put the collaborative and community features in the open. LiveJournal had syndication, but it was really a hidden feature for a very long time. There was also limited ability to really build an identity attached to the blogs.

While I agree that LiveJournal really started out as a volunteer-run community with no motivation for profit, it really did miss out on a huge opportunity. It’s funny this article was written because I was just thinking about this topic last week. I was thinking about what LiveJournal COULD have been. You are absolutely correct in stating LiveJournal had all these great features 5 years ago. They just never made it a priority to promote them, and really let users run with them. I think many people just saw LiveJournal as a restrictive “diary” style blogging platform, instead of a great social network. It was one of the originals.

I also don’t think that SixApart really had any interest in bringing LiveJournal to maturity. They already had existing blogging platforms, and I feel, only acquired LiveJournal for the technology and development behind it. Once they were done picking it apart for their own services, they promptly sold it to SUP, who has now overrun LiveJournal with ads.

By: S

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 07:31:04 +0000

Perhaps. But Livejournal was a very different organization in 2003. That was before its sale to Six Apart, and later to SUP. When it was originally started it was funded only by subscriptions and run by volunteers – it was a site with an ideology, not a profit motive. In light of that, it was entirely proper for them to listen to their user-base. Witness the way that they freely gave their code away to copycat sites, each with their own niche. Comparing the original Livejornal, part of the free software movement, to Livejournal Inc. seems like a strange exercise to me.

By: aj[fp]

aj[fp] — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 05:17:13 +0000

I have to agree with this article. I used to (well still do, I guess) run a very large social networking, multi-player MUD. Now while this had nothing on 3D games, is was extremely popular, and I too made the horrible decision of trying to please my users (and they were also normally just loud minority groups).

Now, the game is for the most part dead and I am left to start from scratch. Sometimes it is indeed best to let your better decision be the factor which changes the way of your app, not a bunch of kids with no business sense.

Cheers.