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strange LJ decision?
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010 12:56 pmRe: the latest LJ news announcement.
It is somewhat puzzling to me why LJ announced that they would make it impossible for comments to locked entries to be crossposted by non-Cyrillic Services users, but possible for Cyrllic Services users. If they wanted to allow for the possibility that some users would have no problem with having comments to locked entries crossposted, why didn't they create an opt-out feature? Or, if they wanted to make Cyrillic Services the deciding factor, why not have it automatically disabled on non-Cyrillic Services journals?
This is pure speculation, but could it have to do with the way they engineered the software, so to have an opt-out based on whose post it was, vs. whose comment it was, require a huge re-engineering? So, under the current code, possibly they can only alter it based on the commenter's preferences/characteristics, thus they can make the boxes disappear for people who haven't opted in, and turn it off entirely for non-Cyrillic Services users, but not make it follow the preferences of the post owner.
http://news.livejournal.com/129945.html?thread=90205081#t90205081
Some interesting information here: currently the active users are evenly split between English-speaking and Russian.
Possibly this does go some ways to explaining the above decision. So far the English language userbase appears hostile, or indifferent to this feature, but if the Cyrillic language userbase likes it, that essentially means it's not a situation of 'vast majority of users hate this.' Otherwise, it seems like it would have been perfectly technically feasible to just shut it off entirely for locked entries like they said they were going.
According to the wayback machine, the amount of active LJ users are somewhere around what they were in the past (in the past it was higher also), which means that in absolute terms, the number of English LJ users has decreased, and the number of Cyrillic/Russian users increased. So, the perception that English-LJ has shrunk is probably accurate. It will be interesting to see in a year or two what the ratio is.
(Also, if you look at the wayback machine you'll see that the ratio of non-posters:posters seems to have increased, in that for the same number of active users, there are fewer people who posted entries to their journals. In other words, there seem to be more people who comment/lurk without keeping active journals. So, it seems that on the whole, LJ has shifted to a more broadcast model.)
EDIT: Staffer bluemeringue comments that: "We have addressed this issue internally with [info]brenden and [info]dnewhall."
(Context: This is re: the issues with dnewhall, which were already publicly acknowledged by LJ, at least as far as the commenting went, but dnewhall denied that the entry was locked when he saw it. Re: brenden's trolling, up to this point no one from LJ had acknowledged that Brenden was in fact trolling using a sockpuppet, so is this an admission that he was indeed trolling? I suppose so, because otherwise wouldn't the statement be more like 'Brenden was in fact not that person, blah blah.'?)
It is somewhat puzzling to me why LJ announced that they would make it impossible for comments to locked entries to be crossposted by non-Cyrillic Services users, but possible for Cyrllic Services users. If they wanted to allow for the possibility that some users would have no problem with having comments to locked entries crossposted, why didn't they create an opt-out feature? Or, if they wanted to make Cyrillic Services the deciding factor, why not have it automatically disabled on non-Cyrillic Services journals?
This is pure speculation, but could it have to do with the way they engineered the software, so to have an opt-out based on whose post it was, vs. whose comment it was, require a huge re-engineering? So, under the current code, possibly they can only alter it based on the commenter's preferences/characteristics, thus they can make the boxes disappear for people who haven't opted in, and turn it off entirely for non-Cyrillic Services users, but not make it follow the preferences of the post owner.
http://news.livejournal.com/129945.html?thread=90205081#t90205081
Some interesting information here: currently the active users are evenly split between English-speaking and Russian.
Possibly this does go some ways to explaining the above decision. So far the English language userbase appears hostile, or indifferent to this feature, but if the Cyrillic language userbase likes it, that essentially means it's not a situation of 'vast majority of users hate this.' Otherwise, it seems like it would have been perfectly technically feasible to just shut it off entirely for locked entries like they said they were going.
According to the wayback machine, the amount of active LJ users are somewhere around what they were in the past (in the past it was higher also), which means that in absolute terms, the number of English LJ users has decreased, and the number of Cyrillic/Russian users increased. So, the perception that English-LJ has shrunk is probably accurate. It will be interesting to see in a year or two what the ratio is.
(Also, if you look at the wayback machine you'll see that the ratio of non-posters:posters seems to have increased, in that for the same number of active users, there are fewer people who posted entries to their journals. In other words, there seem to be more people who comment/lurk without keeping active journals. So, it seems that on the whole, LJ has shifted to a more broadcast model.)
EDIT: Staffer bluemeringue comments that: "We have addressed this issue internally with [info]brenden and [info]dnewhall."
(Context: This is re: the issues with dnewhall, which were already publicly acknowledged by LJ, at least as far as the commenting went, but dnewhall denied that the entry was locked when he saw it. Re: brenden's trolling, up to this point no one from LJ had acknowledged that Brenden was in fact trolling using a sockpuppet, so is this an admission that he was indeed trolling? I suppose so, because otherwise wouldn't the statement be more like 'Brenden was in fact not that person, blah blah.'?)
