IJ problems, Identity accounts and "commitment"

[charmian]

http://asylums.insanejournal.com/announcements/83654.html?thread=4290758#t4290758

Above link has more details about the reasons behind Insanejournal's decision to institute a purge: financial and spam problems.

In other news, a majority of respondents to the "should identity accounts be allowed to post on DW comms" poll answered yes. In the comments foxfirefey points out there are some spam concerns with this. Spam is a big threat the the finances of a Web 2.0 site, so that's definitely a big issue.

Thinking more about the openID/identity account issue, I noticed that many people who opposed the change in that LJ thread cited "commitment" to LJ itself as being important. People may believe that such "commitment" to LJ means that the user is less likely to be a troll, yet wouldn't a really dangerous troll be the sort to put in more effort into their trolling? But does using an openID account mean that you are inherently a suspect character? Couldn't it be just indicative of not wanting to remember another login? What if you simply see no benefit in having a journal at LJ/DW? Now, on DW, it could mean that the person has no idea how to get an invite code, or just doesn't see any point in becoming a DW user because all they want to do is comment: however, I don't think that would make the person suspect.

I think there are more people who use LJ in this way, and thus have little need for anything other than an identity account. Personally, I often see many users who seem to have accounts solely to participate in communities, and with largely blank journals. If this describes more and more of the LJ clientele, it has consequences for LJ's financial model. And, if many people see LJ not as "site where I have a journal and talk to friends" but "where Community X is hosted," that's a significant change in usage, too.

Comments

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

Heh. Since I was just looking it up while responding to matgb, here's the reply I wish I'd remembered during that above LJ news thread.

http://suggestions.livejournal.com/928644.html?thread=14782852#t14782852

"OpenID is merely an authentication mechanism. It is the authentication mechanism I would prefer to use for every site I interact with, including LJ. Which authentication mechanism I use has nothing to do with how much I will participate in anything."

[charmian]

Yeah... I was just trying to use an old AIM account I had, and have totally forgotten what I put down to the secret question, and that means I'm locked out. With more and more accounts at different sites, openID and similar logons are looking more and more useful.

[foxfirefey]

Said this in the last post and feel a bit dorky but I'll repeat it, since the relevant IJ thread is relinked here and this is more recent/top level:

This bit fascinates me:

It is very expensive and the fact that some other sites that had funding ahead of time to do it the way we always wanted to have popped up and taken a lot of our traffic away has hurt us.

Because it sounds like it's alluding to Dreamwidth except we didn't have funding ahead of time at all, unless you count the owner's credit cards as funding, so I wonder what site's being talked about there.

[synecdochic]

I read that as talking about us, too. Which made me sad, because we've been trying very hard to give Squeaky a hand with things, and because we believe so s trongly in there being a very strong ecosystem of alternate chioices, etc, but still. :(

(I mean, he could be talking about things like Tumblr, since Tumblr has been taking a lot of traffic from LJ-style blogs, but I dunno, man.)

Still, I think IJ's problem (from what I can see from the outside, etc) is twofold: offering too many userpics, and having offered perm accounts so often/so cheaply. I don't know what he can do to fix it, sadly.

[charmian]

re: IJ's problems.

Couldn't offering fewer userpics help? On the other hand, that's probably the selling point of IJ now and people would be even more angry about that than this purge.

[synecdochic]

Yeah, pretty much the one thing you can't ever do without armed revolt, pitchforks at the gates, yadda, is lower the number of icons. It's the reason we were so conservative at first with icon slots (and upped them later); we knew that it was far, far better to underpromise than overpromise.

If I were Squeaky, I'd raise the price on the extra userpics (and get rid of the permanent extra userpics) and on rename tokens, then start developing new paid features as fast as I could to make paid accounts more appealing. But I get the sense he doesn't have much time to devote to IJ at all, which kinda sucks for him :(

[charmian]

It seems pretty hard to develop new paid features, though. Even LJ doesn't really roll out new ones that quickly.

Yeah, the permanent extra userpics seem pretty crazy.

[synecdochic]

It really is, yeah. If it isn't a quick and dirty hack, it is a pain in the ass to find the time to do the big stuff. I mean, we have trouble and we have a dozen regular developers, one full-time! But that goes back to the LJ codebase being full and full and full of deferred technical debt; we have made some massive payments, and we're still only maybe 10% of the way to digging ourselves out of the hole.

[charmian]

It's hard to say. I took it as referring to Tumblr and Posterous and other venture capital funded sites. But DW probably has taken away some of IJ's traffic, except for the people who want tons of icons.

[foxfirefey]

I'd think that, too, except then I wonder how is, say, Tumblr especially doing it the way IJ always wanted to do it but couldn't, considering it's such a fundamentally different experience? Posterous is a bit closer, though I can't say I've seen it have as much mindshare. But since "sites" is plural, he can't mean just DW, and DW and IJ are the biggest. And IJ is still the far biggest if you're going by the stats pages unless some insane majority (more than my estimate standards) of active journals/actively posting journals are spam journals, and that number hasn't gone down since March of this year or August of last.

And having something leech away the less expensive customers and leaving the more resource intensive ones is even harder on a service than just losing custmoers to begin with!

[charmian]

It depends what Squeaky means by that... To understand that, you'd really have to ask him. I would say though, that given that he's probably not making that much via advertising, a more relevant statistic is the number of paid account revenue. (http://www.insanejournal.com/stats.bml) There are 2K permanent users, and 700 something paid users, and some more people (under 1K for each category) paying for various types of add-on packages,with an active userbase of 180K. DW has 2Kish paid users paying more, with an active userbase of now around 25K, with the usual historical userbase being more around 21-22K. And IJ gives far more icons than DW to paid users.

Yeah, pretty much. DW is IJ's direct competitor for personal journaling, though I don't know how popular DW is for roleplayers. It was inevitable that DW was going to have a negative effect of IJ's business, especially since now under SUP LJ has gotten less strict with content.

If IJ goes down, I suspect DW might get most of the people... But I'm not sure what the RPers will do, as DW doesn't offer more icons than LJ itself, and icons seem to be the major factor in their favoring IJ.

[azurelunatic]

When I'm to be interacting with someone, what I really want is to read who they are and what they've been up to lately. I don't really give a fig for where their place-of-choice is, but I don't really want to navigate away from the site either.

I would be very happy if ext_ accounts were able to claim the syndicated feed of their external home.

However, due to LJ's conflation of subscribe and access, that could make for some cranky readers.

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

I can't follow the code changes in this LJ changelog entry (http://changelog.livejournal.com/10098511.html) but I got excited back in March when I thought it meant that personal journals would be able to watch other personal journals. I may have gotten it completely backwards, however.

[sub_divided]

http://correlate.googlelabs.com/search?e=livejournal&t=weekly

Google correlated search terms for "livejournal".

What does this mean? That people who run LJ architecture use google to search for the appropriate public pages? Or that there are way too many robots searching LJ?

[charmian]

No idea what this means.