PSA: No more new Basic Accounts

Do you read news? (If not, you should.)

Did you read in the recent entry that it will not be able to create new Basic Accounts in the future? It says it right there: Other changes you may have noticed are the logged-out homepage and registration process for new users. We streamlined and simplified things so that now it’s faster and easier than ever to create a LiveJournal account.

Oh? It doesn't say anything about Basic Accounts there? You're right, it doesn't -- you have to learn about that from word of mouth or from reading comments on the entry by Jason Shellen, VP of Product Development for LiveJournal.

Anyway. Users who signed up before the magic date (12 March 2008) (or, equivalently, have a userid less than 15136000) will be able to convert back and forth between Basic and Plus, but newer accounts will have to be either Plus or Paid. Because three account levels when signing up for a new account too confusing, and two is much better.

(And I believe the Advisory Board was asked for, and provided, advice, which was apparently ignored.)

So now you have users mad about the whole "Basic Accounts are going away" thing — and more users mad at not being told this, in advance, in an obvious place. (Such as a news announcement. On the other hand, apparently, news is for existing users, and this change only affects new users. Because nobody ever creates a secondary account or invites other people to LiveJournal.)

brad made a very interesting comment about the economic value of Basic Account holders: The free users, while not paying, were extremely valuable because they produced the content that the paying users were there to consume. You know, the whole network effect thing?

(I do wish people wouldn't tell him he should not have sold, though. I think he's said often enough that it was getting too much for him and that had he stayed at the top, he might have simply imploded eventually and deleted the entire thing. Though I suppose some might argue that that would have been better than the status quo...

---

Edit: See also several other entries elsewhere.

Google Desktop reinitialising

Meh. My Google Desktop account here at work doesn't recognise me any more after the change to the new network.

(And the new login name. Goodbye, "pne" *sniff*. It was nice to have used you since 1992. Though I still have that name in several other systems, my Windows login is "pnewton" now. Comes with being part of a bigger company, I suppose; you can't give three-letter nicks to everyone in a world-wide enterprise the way you can in a 50-person company. At least I have my full last name in my nick, rather than being truncated to 1+7.)

More on the Basic Account thingy

As subbes said,

The community base, the friends, colleagues, [etc.] I've got here is the one main selling point of LJ. And it's the hardest to replicate anywhere else.

(Yes, I have a GJ, IJ and a Blurty account, plus a Vox. I have an RSS feed aggregator. They're not the same. RSS feeds are public, LJ f-list includes custom securities.)

Or, as someone else put it, "the fact that everybody and their pet rock has a LiveJournal" is part of the appeal. That kind of goes away if the place is a less desirable place for "freeloaders", because it'll no longer be the place with all my friends or with my community or with interesting and diverse content. (Though that depends to some extent on how people feel about the ads.)

And also:

There's five year's worth of evidence that proves that LJ users react worse when changes are snuck past them than if you warn them in advance.

which is the point I forget to make when people say "Ooh, a company trying to make money rather than go out of business; film at 11".

No small part of the reaction is due to how this business change was communicated (or rather, not communicated); if things had been, "we needs moar munny, u can has ads now kthxbye" people would still have been miffed, but differently, and most likely less.

Talking about vaginas in the name of science

fishgreenlittle is passing along a request from a friend of hers, asking for five positive and five negative slang terms for "vagina"; I believe this is for a survey she's doing for her university course. See Amy's entry for the details, as well as where to send your responses if you choose to participate.

(You'll also need to "sign" a consent form in order for your responses to be used; sending back the form you'll get with your name edited in is apparently sufficient.)