the rumour
Jan. 5th, 2005 10:18![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
piranhalots of people seem all atwitter about the rumour that "six apart" (the "movable type" company) is buying LJ. and, this being LJ, the drama is already surpassing all sanity.
here's what i think after reading a lot of speculation about how this would affect LJ:
i'll believe it when i hear it from one of the principals.
i think brad's biggest problem doesn't have to do with business, but with people skills, and i don't see how LJ users have suffered from brad's business decisions. on the other hand, six apart just made a really dumb kerfluffle about its license when 3.0 came out, and caused a mass exodus to other weblogs. so how this would automatically be good for LJ's business side, and why the average user would think an improvement would be in zir favour, i don't know.
volunteers versus paid employees doesn't IME say anything about the quality of the work produced, so people who expect that six apart would dismantle the volunteer support system in favour of paid employees are indulging in lots of wishful thinking. six apart relies a heck of a lot on users of their system to help other users, it's simply less formalized than what LJ does. i actually think LJ's support system is quite good in comparison with many others i have seen, and better than quite a few staffed with paid employees.
some people claim MT is better than LJ -- i've used both on my own server, and i wouldn't say that. it's different. the code is horribly clunky in places just like LJ's, and it does a lot less and is slower. (i haven't used 3.0, and i ditched MT for wordpress, so who knows, maybe it's since gotten much better.) i don't think there'd be a wholesale shift to MT anytime soon. in fact, it might go the other way around. one of the best things about LJ, however, is that it's open source, and MT isn't.
"OMG, they're going to remove free accounts!" -- say what? if six apart wants LJ because of its large userbase, it would not make sense to remove free accounts and make the service much more expensive, as i've seen people suggest. that would only cause a mass exodus to DJ or some other site who'd gladly take advantage of millions of people, a small percentage of whom will fork out $2 a month for a pretty decent service.
oh, and we're not talking about a huge conglomerate here; the company started in 2002 and has about 40 employees. i see no reason why they would make the LJ community "go to shit". uh, any more than it already has. if there is even such a thing as one single LJ community -- i don't feel that there is, i think the days of that are long past. and while it may be hard to believe for somebody whose first close online community was LJ, there are lots of great online communities out there just waiting to be found, should this one go totally down the drain.
here's what i think after reading a lot of speculation about how this would affect LJ:
i'll believe it when i hear it from one of the principals.
i think brad's biggest problem doesn't have to do with business, but with people skills, and i don't see how LJ users have suffered from brad's business decisions. on the other hand, six apart just made a really dumb kerfluffle about its license when 3.0 came out, and caused a mass exodus to other weblogs. so how this would automatically be good for LJ's business side, and why the average user would think an improvement would be in zir favour, i don't know.
volunteers versus paid employees doesn't IME say anything about the quality of the work produced, so people who expect that six apart would dismantle the volunteer support system in favour of paid employees are indulging in lots of wishful thinking. six apart relies a heck of a lot on users of their system to help other users, it's simply less formalized than what LJ does. i actually think LJ's support system is quite good in comparison with many others i have seen, and better than quite a few staffed with paid employees.
some people claim MT is better than LJ -- i've used both on my own server, and i wouldn't say that. it's different. the code is horribly clunky in places just like LJ's, and it does a lot less and is slower. (i haven't used 3.0, and i ditched MT for wordpress, so who knows, maybe it's since gotten much better.) i don't think there'd be a wholesale shift to MT anytime soon. in fact, it might go the other way around. one of the best things about LJ, however, is that it's open source, and MT isn't.
"OMG, they're going to remove free accounts!" -- say what? if six apart wants LJ because of its large userbase, it would not make sense to remove free accounts and make the service much more expensive, as i've seen people suggest. that would only cause a mass exodus to DJ or some other site who'd gladly take advantage of millions of people, a small percentage of whom will fork out $2 a month for a pretty decent service.
oh, and we're not talking about a huge conglomerate here; the company started in 2002 and has about 40 employees. i see no reason why they would make the LJ community "go to shit". uh, any more than it already has. if there is even such a thing as one single LJ community -- i don't feel that there is, i think the days of that are long past. and while it may be hard to believe for somebody whose first close online community was LJ, there are lots of great online communities out there just waiting to be found, should this one go totally down the drain.
no subject
on 2005-01-05 19:06 (UTC)I love the idea!
no subject
on 2005-01-05 19:17 (UTC)*cough*
I'd have to agree that dropping half the userbase in a mass exodus to DJ, GJ, etc. couldn't be anything but a good thing. ;)
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on 2005-01-05 19:15 (UTC)My thoughts exactly. Thanks, piranha.
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on 2005-01-05 19:21 (UTC)no subject
on 2005-01-05 19:52 (UTC)no subject
on 2005-01-05 19:31 (UTC)If it does, I just hope they kill #@% TypeKey and let us use LJ accounts to sign in to TypeKey-enabled blogs.
no subject
on 2005-01-05 19:40 (UTC)(My own nightmares on this count have less to do with change than with disappearance due to technical failure or other causes. I've stopped keeping paper journals entirely since coming over to LJ, and wouldn't want to lose the work).
no subject
on 2005-01-05 19:46 (UTC)When told that support is almost all volunteer, they apparently went. "Really? You guys were not only faster than most commercial services, but the info was better, too."
(I'm with you on the rest of it: just thought I'd mention this bit.)
no subject
on 2005-01-06 04:14 (UTC)(For that matter, it was also valuable just to read it; chances are that answers to a common question were already there on the newsgroup, so one didn't have to ask. And I learned quite a lot about the systems from answering questions on the group -- as well as making many good friends.)
But, eventually, someone decided that the help system needed reorganization, and with the reorg came a new ticket tracking system, and with that came the end of gating questions to the public newsgroup.
no subject
on 2005-01-05 20:11 (UTC)no subject
on 2005-01-06 05:33 (UTC)