I know -- I've been sort of casually watching Dreamwidth for a while; I wrote a fairly widely relinked critique of SUP a couple years ago (http://chipotle.livejournal.com/183056.html) that got the attention of a few of the folks involved with DW planning, so despite not having an account before yesterday I've got a bit of a handle on the design here.
For the most part LJ's various headless chicken dances don't bother me greatly; I think Six Apart was vilified somewhat unfairly over their supposed "journal purging," which was certainly a stupid idea stupidly handled, but I'm not sure people understand just how much of a panic cries of "child porn! you're promoting child porn! save the children!" can send a content company's lawyers into. SUP, though, generally doesn't pull their shenanigans out of a sense of undue panic, but out of very deliberate, and occasionally sleazy, "how can we make more money off this" tactics.
At any rate, my conclusion then was that when push comes to shove, SUP really doesn't care whether the remaining American users of LiveJournal take a hike. They're interested in the Russian and Eastern European markets; LJ is still growing there, while it's been in decline here for years. I don't expect LJ to go away here, but simply because at this point there's not more money to be made in shutting off the servers in San Francisco. I suspect if there ever comes a point where an Excel spreadsheet says there is, LJ users will get maybe a week's notice. So i think it behooves me to hedge my bets. :)
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2010-03-08 16:10 (UTC)For the most part LJ's various headless chicken dances don't bother me greatly; I think Six Apart was vilified somewhat unfairly over their supposed "journal purging," which was certainly a stupid idea stupidly handled, but I'm not sure people understand just how much of a panic cries of "child porn! you're promoting child porn! save the children!" can send a content company's lawyers into. SUP, though, generally doesn't pull their shenanigans out of a sense of undue panic, but out of very deliberate, and occasionally sleazy, "how can we make more money off this" tactics.
At any rate, my conclusion then was that when push comes to shove, SUP really doesn't care whether the remaining American users of LiveJournal take a hike. They're interested in the Russian and Eastern European markets; LJ is still growing there, while it's been in decline here for years. I don't expect LJ to go away here, but simply because at this point there's not more money to be made in shutting off the servers in San Francisco. I suspect if there ever comes a point where an Excel spreadsheet says there is, LJ users will get maybe a week's notice. So i think it behooves me to hedge my bets. :)