what happened in Sept '04?

It's about the only comparison that's epic enough sometimes :P

But that's the beauty of working here! There's always another battle to scar you. (I'm still smarting from April of '02, just a little, deep down. heh.)

I will never laugh at your scars! You earned them with honor. *g*

Ah, yes. Re-reading I get what you're saying.

Actually, that's kind of a tricky question - should we post to news and say "So, we squeezed another 3% speedup from the DBs this month. Not that you'll notice but, hey"?

That seems like it'd get real old, real fast but on the other hand then at least there'd be a sense we were doing something.

I shall have a ponder.

It didn't go in the official LJ news and meta discussions because, well, it wasn't an official LJ thing ;)

Most of the info was on brad's journal - the initial announcement was here I think and you can follow the development using the 'djabberd' tag

But yeah, when we announced it we probably should have mentioned that it was something they'd done in their spare time.

First off, no worries about commenting or anything. It's why I write these sorts of things[*] - as evidenced by other comments to this post keeping the community informed about stuff is hard and there's a fine balance but, at least this way, the information is out there.

So there's two things I think you're bringing up (I'm tired from driving back from Tahoe yesterday so if I've missed anything then let me know). I'll deal with them in no particular order.

First - Plus accounts. It sucks that we had to break the social contract. Yes Brad said "No adverts". But that was when LJ was small. Things are different now. It sucks. It really, really sucks.

I wasn't here for the buy out of LJ nor for the decision to create plus accounts so I really can't speak authoratitively for anyone. My understanding is that without the sale to SixApart LJ would have gone under a long time ago. Put simply - the emotional and financial strain was just too much for Brad and Danga to bear.

And LJ needs to make money to pay for staff salaries and pay for bandwidth and hardware costs. And paid accounts are a relatively small proportion of people. As far as I know the choices were - adverts, increase paid account fees or have limited time span free accounts. All of those suck but the last two would have had far more of a deleterious effect on the social dynamic of the site. So it had to be the first (I suppose there could have been other options like asking people to pay on a scale depending on income or something but my guess would be that they just wouldn't work). In fact I think the solution is both unique and innovative. Nothing changes unless you happen to want more features. Then you have to give us money. Either flat out or by watching adverts.

So until then if you didn't wnat to see ads then you wouldn't. Just like the old days.

Then two bones of contention - sponsored communities and ads on the front page.

Sponsored Communities - this one took me by suprise. As far as I know the companies who wanted a sponsored community could have just bought a paid account like anyone else and then that would have been that. But, instead, they gave us more money which we can then put back into the site. So the end result is the same except that we've got more money to spend and we get to mark it as commerical so people can avoid it. I thought that was a win-win situation but, after the announcment I started to see why people were upset. I still think it's an ok thing to do but I can see why people don't.

Ads on the front page - again. They suck. But only a tiny percentage of paid users will ever see them because most stay logged in all the time. And when they see them it's only for a second. But they get us money which, unfortunately, we need.

Of course, both my arguments rely on the fact that I feel ads are a necessary evil. And this is from me. I left a previous company due to the fact that I didn't want to be involved in internet advertising. I've ranted and raved on mailing lists, at conferences, in letters to magazines. I've flamed marketing people till bile came out of my eyeballs and I gave myself an ulcer. But the alternative is shut down LJ or get more people to sign up for paid accounts.

Second part continues below.


[*] Well, actually 90% of the content of this journal used to be in a private diary that nobody else could read apart from me. When i was writing my dissertation I found that writing a diary as if addressing an imaginary audience helped me sort stuff out in my brain - sort of like debugging with teddy - when I came to work at LJ I transferred them all over because I figured they may be useful.