Well, I mean, I live in a community, but I pay rent for my apartment. They're providing housing, and it's pretty cheap. If the only people who make it a cool place to live are the free account peeps, who get pissed and move someplace else, LJ will become, um, Brentwood.

But is there evidence of that?

It feels like a business decision to me, but it does seem to position users as consumers, not community members. Not that I care that much because for me LJ never felt like a community. B.org is my community, LJ is just a website.

When I joined LJ, which to me is where the other half of my online community is, there were no ads, only a few hundred thousand users, and you had to have an invite code or pay to create an account.

When SixApart bought it, the message we, the community, were told was that there'd be no ads coming. (Not that anyone thought that would stay the case.) Really, it all went downhill from there.

As for this latest dust up, it's not really even about the ads; it's the continued failure to communicate.

But is there evidence of that?

I think the thought of *my* particular community is that as soon as there's a better option, there will be a migration away. The same thing happened when we moved from mailing lists to LJ. Slow, gradual adoption, and one day, the lists were a ghost town. The problem right now is that there aren't a lot of other options out there that aren't regressions from where we are now, or are likely to be stable for a long-term move. (Where long-term = 3-5 years.)

LJ will become, um, Brentwood.

Wouldn't MySpace or FaceBook be more logical comparisons?

That said, I'm not convinced your analogy works (is LJ providing me with something as substantive as housing?) Maybe it's more like a public park--like when the parks services started charging a nominal fee to use the parks/parking lots. At least that's how it feels to me. Was I a bit annoyed the first time I discovered I had to pay $8 or whatever to go to Will Rogers Park? Yeah, but I got over it.

MySpace is a trailer park. Facebook is Pasadena.

I think people have kind of suggested this, but not stated it so much. The underlying issue is partly that, like TableTalk, LJ will go pay-for-play. And then it will fall apart and people will lose something that is very important to them. So this is kind of alarming -- if this doesn't raise enough income to support them, what's their next step?

As for this latest dust up, it's not really even about the ads; it's the continued failure to communicate.

This. I think if SUP had made even a tiny bit of effort to communicate with or understand their user base, we'd be a hell of a lot more forgiving. Instead, they're running to the press and making ginormous wankery asshats of themselves by basically saying that running LJ would be so much easier if it weren't for those pesky users. As if social networks existed in some kind of magical vaccum where content is generated by the blog fairies. (Which, incidentally, nobody on LJ cares about anyway. I know because I checked the top 100 interests list.)

As if social networks existed in some kind of magical vaccum where content is generated by the blog fairies. (Which, incidentally, nobody on LJ cares about anyway. I know because I checked the top 100 interests list.)

Don't you mean "faeries?"

Which, incidentally, nobody on LJ cares about anyway. I know because I checked the top 100 interests list.

SNORF.

Thank you for that.

AhahahaHAH. This is the same kind of kerfuffle as with my local public radio station. Transparency and communication when making likely controversial changes within/to a community used to having ( or even under the encouraged illusion of having) a voice is crucial, peoples. Much smarter way to run a business. People may not like the changes, but they'll hate having their illusion completely blown worse.