![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Having got a DW account, I need to decide what (if anything) to use it for. After all, I have a permanent account on LJ, and have done for years (the account is over 8 years old, I can't remember when I permanentified it). Even if I wanted a permanent account here (they seem to call them seeds), I can't have one (I'm on holiday well away from the internet 24 April to 4th May, and I full expect the seed account options to have all gone by the time I get back); there don't appear to be any plans to sell more seed accounts in future. I really like having a permanent LJ account, so that's quite a downer before we even start! Maybe there could be a way to hold an option on one before the open beta...
The key advantages of DW seem to be twofold - firstly, it has more clear trust network functions (you can separate who you want to read from who you trust to read your protected entries), and secondly it is aiming to be "fluffier" than LJ. There are some more or less substantial other UI tweaks, but they seem to be aiming to fix some quirks in LJ that have never bothered me.
As a network analyst myself, the first feature is definitely sensible (and might even reduce some of the de-friending drama that drifts round LJ from time to time), and I'm interested to see what difference it'll make to peoples' social networks over time. There might even be a short research paper in it :-) The flip-side here is that LJ might reasonably decide that this feature is good, and incorporate it into their code-base; in fact, I'll be a bit surprised if they don't do so.
The second I'm less sure of; back when LJ was starting up, it felt fluffy and community-oriented. I really applaud the Dreamwidth founders for trying again, and for making commitments to being ad-free and suchlike. But; will things still be this good 8 years' hence? Will the be-nice business model succeed?
[I wonder how![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise finds time to read users' entries!]
The key advantages of DW seem to be twofold - firstly, it has more clear trust network functions (you can separate who you want to read from who you trust to read your protected entries), and secondly it is aiming to be "fluffier" than LJ. There are some more or less substantial other UI tweaks, but they seem to be aiming to fix some quirks in LJ that have never bothered me.
As a network analyst myself, the first feature is definitely sensible (and might even reduce some of the de-friending drama that drifts round LJ from time to time), and I'm interested to see what difference it'll make to peoples' social networks over time. There might even be a short research paper in it :-) The flip-side here is that LJ might reasonably decide that this feature is good, and incorporate it into their code-base; in fact, I'll be a bit surprised if they don't do so.
The second I'm less sure of; back when LJ was starting up, it felt fluffy and community-oriented. I really applaud the Dreamwidth founders for trying again, and for making commitments to being ad-free and suchlike. But; will things still be this good 8 years' hence? Will the be-nice business model succeed?
[I wonder how
denise finds time to read users' entries!]
thoughtful
Well...
a) they will have some sensible ideas about how much this will really cost them to run in the real world
b) now that the web 2.0 bubble has come and gone, the lure of filthy lucre will not enduce them to sell out
Also, to be honest, I suspect the LJ user base is regarded as being extremely high maintenance so no-one would want to pay much for its successor.
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As someone who came over here from her reading page, I have absolutely no freaking idea.
(Hi! Nice to see you. :D)
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If you're curious about business matters, by the way, check out
LJ didn't add ads because they were hurting for money; Six Apart was trying to get rich, and now SUP is trying to recoup the vastly inflated purchase price they paid for the property. A while back, I wrote a series of essays about why advertising is bad for social media that I should clean up and post to
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Sorry, I didn't mean to imply you were a pair of numpties with no idea of what you were letting yourselves in for! Thank you for the comment, though.
Do you have any definite plans wrt future permanent account sales, OOI?
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Perm sales are bad for the users, because they wind up feeling "hey, they already have my money, why should they care about what I say?" and bad for the business, because it privileges short-term revenue over long-term sustainability. So we really don't want to do it again if we don't have to. We may do one more sale when we move to colocation, if we're making enough to support the business but not enough to do the capital outlay of the colo, but I'd really like to avoid it if at all possible.
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It's nice I can use LJ as openid to comment though, and that I can have quite a few simple settings here to make it more friendly.
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