Ahahaha

[charmian]

Huh, I guess sometimes LJ employees get tired of hearing people complain about the Best Buy ads: although "how is it not?" is rather cryptic.

So as not to make this post completely worthless, here, have some links:
http://futurismic.com/2009/06/29/culture-wars-authors-social-media-and-the-tribes-of-entitlement/

http://asiajin.com/blog/2009/09/22/in-japan-freemium-works-nico-nico-douga-paid-member-user-base-passes-500k/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/27/AR2008072701440.html?sub=AR

http://www.metafilter.com/87781/Steal-This-Book

Comments

[yvi]

I just click the X and close the ad. Links work fine after that.

How very nice of him/her. I never would have guessed to click the X.

Also, news is a plus account. *boggles* Yeah, I am sure news doesn't have the money, but wants to enjoy the perks of a paid account.

[charmian]

Yeah, they could have at least referred the person to support.

It's been that way for quite awhile IIRC? But yeah, I'm not surprised they wouldn't pass up the opportunity to display ads on a comm with so many readers.

[elena]

News needs the icons, you know.

[synecdochic]

Huh. I hadn't realized they did the patch to identify staff members with a different userhead.

[charmian]

Yeah, although the different colored parts are sort of small, so it's hard to see. They don't seem to have announced it in the news post, so I guess they must not be finished with it.

[synecdochic]

It looks amusingly like the version we recolored to use before we did the wrapped-in-the-DW-spiral version, heh. I'm curious to see if they used our code or not.

[charmian]

http://community.livejournal.com/changelog/7996253.html

I see this, but that seems to be for support. Hopefully they will change more of it so the distinction is more visible.

[eftychia]

Or worse: guessing to click the X but being thwarted by the "you can bypass this ad in another 28 seconds..." countdown. I'm this > < close to just giving up on reading any comments on LJ entries, because I can't remember who has a paid account and who has ads. (I don't see the content-obscuring ads on my friendspage (so far?), only when I go directly to an entry.)

My first thought was to syndicate all my LJ friends and read 'em via DW, but that still won't get me comments, right? So my only option is to convince as many as possible to just migrate over here already.

[charmian]

IIRC, I think they may have changed that aspect.

This isn't really a great solution, but I find that Adblock makes it so I don't have to see that ad anymore.

Yeah, it won't get you comments that way. I can't really think of any solution that would get you those either.

IMHO, I think this may lead more people to leave LJ, for this very reason, especially those who are extensively read by non-LJ members.

[phoenix]

Also, news is a plus account.

... oh, wow, wonder when that happened? (It used to be a permanent account.) Note also that the userinfo page for news doesn't show the account type!

Aha! It looks like it's still a permanent account, but the ads capability has been turned on (I think all journals *can* turn on ads, if they want to). The 'not showing account type' isn't nefarious, as far as I can tell now, but just because of the limitations of the news account type (which is so obsolete and pretty much only still exists because news itself uses it).