motivation to pay

[charmian]

http://ign.dreamwidth.org/592.html

Someone wonders about incentives for paid accounts at DW. I have to say, s/he is I think off the mark in discounting icons as a motivation. Very few users have a problem with tags; it's comms that had problems with the tag limits, IIRC. But a vast number of people clamor for more and more icons.

Now, I'm personally in the minority population of "doesn't care about icons." Styles are also not personally important to me, as long as there are a few that are acceptable to me. (Most important feature: Previous 20 is at the bottom of the page)

What paid features do interest me? Well, polls, and also the google analytics feature. One reason I tried out Tumblr is that it allowed Google Analytics. However, I'm not sure enough people will read my blog for it to be worth it.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I'm one of those few who has run well into the tag limit. But then, I am Weird.

[olagatohouse.wordpress.com]

It's more a function of how much one posts and about how many topics--if you are a regular journaler who has a multi-topic journal, it's completely understandable that you'd run into a tag limit.

obsessive-compulsive tagging habits ;-p

[azurelunatic]

Since for the longest time I was posting multiple entries daily, and additionally using the journal to preserve a log of all my chats, and tagged each chat with the person's name, as well as putting relevant-to-me keywords on all the entries ... I finally have it below 3,000 tags. :D

[charmian]

Oh yeah, I definitely didn't mean to imply that it was no one, but from what I see, the ones most seriously affected seem to be communities.

I use tags as categories (like on Wordpress) so I personally tend to not create new tags, though I haven't created a tag hierarchy (after the discussion on the ML, I'm not sure what if they're going to make any changes in the system)

[troisroyaumes]

I don't particularly care about icons either, but I definitely do care about style customization. It was my major incentive for a paid account on LJ, though polls and comment editing were added perks. Oh, and now the pingback feature. Do you know if DW is planning on implementing it? I hope so...I bet they'll do a much better job than LJ if they did.

Google Analytics is also worth getting a paid account for, I agree. I heard DW was going to be better about allowing Javascript; I hope so because I would really like to have widgets in the sidebar.

[charmian]

I don't really know.. IIRC they were thinking about it, but it wasn't planned for the near future.

BTW, since I don't have a paid LJ account and so haven't tried it, what are the pingback problems? I found the way they introduced it to be really confusing.

I hope so too. It would be cool if we could put delicious and Twitter in the sidebar.

[verstehen.livejournal.com]

Extra icons are nice, but, really I only use about a core of 10 on my LJ and I imagine it'll be the same on DW. Style customization, priority access and ease of use are my reasons for getting a paid account on LJ way back when. Especially the priority access; I hated waiting as a free user when the server load was high. That's not something that will be a problem with DW, at least not for a while. Customization is nice, but so long as I can change the colors I'm good.

I'd rather pay for the smaller features, like extra tags, a decent archiving/memory system, or an "expand all comments" feature. Particularly an "expand all." Those fall under "ease of use" for me.

[charmian]

What is the ease of use you refer to? (Which feature?)

Yeah, what's going on in the memory system sounds pretty interesting. I also hope they somehow fix the archives system.

[tarigwaemir.wordpress.com]

Well, mostly I'm just aggravated that the pingback system only works if the post is made by another paid user who has enabled receiving pingbacks themselves or an external site that uses trackback. Also, the choice to receive pingbacks should be separate from the choice to have your posts ping the posts they're linking.

Apparently they rolled out the feature with so many restrictions because they didn't want to overload their servers, but why implement it at all if it's going to be so limited as to be virtually useless?

Anyway, I would like to see pingbacks eventually on DW but I understand why it's not a particular priority.

[charmian]

I guess they are testing it to see if it works? I don't really understand why they just don't allow us to use statcounter or google analytics. (them=LJ) The whole pingbot thing is kind of unwieldy, also.

[tarigwaemir.wordpress.com]

You're right, ultimately a good stats add-on would basically solve the issue. (One more reason to look forward to Dreamwidth!)

[bell]

Ohhh, I think the extra-icons will great motivation for getting a paid account; it's been my own greatest temptation with lj these past few years. Polls would've been a second reason why.

DW, though, has one thing that lj lost long ago: a certain trust. I'm v. seriously considering getting a paid account to show stronger support for the site.

[charmian]

Well, I never bought an LJ account even when they were not screwing up the customer service; I may buy one just because it's been entertaining watching DW set up (and also for the polls and the analytics)

[petronia]

Icons don't matter much to me (four years and I still haven't remotely approached the permanent account limit), but these days I have to say styles are important to me. XD; Only with the last iteration has LJ itself come up with styles that didn't scream 2002.

(O HAI I LANDED MYSELF A DREAMWIDTH)

[charmian]

Heyyyy!

Yeah, I'm curious to see about what new styles DW comes up with. The newer LJ ones are quite not so bad, but if you compare LJ stylisticly to something new like twitter or tumblr... yeah, you can really see the difference.