Administrative: dual siteizenship is a PITA; pre-annoyance at new planned LJ feature

[azurelunatic]

I have a history of doing somewhat stupid things when I'm mad. I have now sufficiently calmed down that I don't think I'll actually delete my LJ, but I did consider it until wiser heads (zarhooie) prevailed. I was on my Manage Friends page removing people when I stopped and realized that I really needed to make a public entry so no one panics when finding themselves removed.

The phrasing is such that I am not 100% certain, but my interpretation of the edit to this entry on new comment revisions by the dude who I hear is now in charge of LJ design stuff is that once this is in place, users would have to choose between comments pages with no subject lines in the comments in regular/S1/sitescheme, or S2-styled/fancy/matches-the-journal comments pages with the option to have comment subjects. (The original entry had the removal of comment subjects as non-negotiable, which caused some yelling all up in some places that I got pointed to. norabombay can attest that I did some yelling of my own when I heard about that, and she joined me. Both of us spend enough time in the lands of entries that have hundreds or thousands of comments on multiple pages that we rely on comment subjects, though they are rare sitewide.)

My loathing for S2 comment pages is legendary.

There was some discussion on Twitter yesterday, and between that and some of the discussion in the comments there, it emerged that the primary reason for the decision to take away the comment subjects was not for performance or other database-administration reasons (which I could become resigned to), but instead because the look of long collapsed comment threads with "(no subject)" is aesthetically displeasing to this dude-in-charge. And maybe something has gone missing somewhere in the multiple possible points of failure to communicate between this guy's brain and my brain, but I entirely fail to see why the answer to this problem is to take away subjects entirely (even when they are present on legacy comments), since people do use them: for summaries of long comments, for information when comments have collapsed, to make browsing large pages full of collapsed threads easier, for email threading/tracking on entries with a lot of comments, for trigger warnings if the comment should not be read by certain classes of people, first lines of comments as read in a suitably dramatic tone, and probably more. If it were up to me, I'd redo the display so that the time, not the subject, was the comment link, and then only display the subject if there were one. There are possibly other ways, but that one sounds the best to me. Auugh.

While I have friends volunteering and working at LJ, and I care about them and respect their professional skills immensely, they are not the people making the decisions on the highest levels. (Not that I'd automatically agree with everything if they were in fact in charge, but it really helps to know someone's general decision-making history and outlook on life. See also: how denise and I are doomed to disagree forever on the subject of single-journal comment bans by IP address (which will probably be my go-to example for such issues without possibility of resolution until something worse comes along). Yet somehow we manage.) The people running LJ have every right to make decisions that make design and business sense to them. I do not have to agree with those decisions, I do not have to like them, and I am continuing to take steps to ensure that I won't have to live with them. I'm getting better about being civil when I'm yelling (and I deeply appreciate everyone who has called me on it when I've failed), but I don't like the person I am inside even then, and it's hard on my nearest and dearest who have to talk me down.

No matter how this falls out, it's one more step away from LJ for me, and I don't think that I'll be stepping back closer once things resolve.

The relatively recent (but I believe past rather than current) problem with some people getting pages as if they were logged in as other people was the impetus for me to turn off comments on my LJ, and stop automatically crossposting. When I was less mad about that, I re-enabled comments on old entries and did start to crosspost a few things by hand.

This time I thought (again) about deleting my journal entirely, but the fact that I have a permanent account and I would be annoyed if I couldn't subscribe to various threads, and Kat reminding me of this, kept me from actually going through with it. I was staring at the option on the page quite a while, though.

So, long story short, I'm cleaning up my friends list on LJ. I'm trying to do this in a way that mostly won't affect people who actually still do use and like LJ, although I would like nothing better than for everyone I cared about to join me on the site I'm actually comfortable on. (See also: why I still have a Facebook account. I never cared about Facebook, though, so I am happy to display my open contempt for Facebook while playing its shiny little addictive games, while scaling my LJ use down to still-more-than-Facebook is causing me untold agonies. Except I'm telling them, because what is LJ for if not airing one's emo?)

Basically, if someone is reading me on DW now, there's no need for me to give them access on LJ too. There are no comments to read on any of the new stuff on LJ. I should make sure that everyone who needs to from LJ has access given to their OpenIDs so they can comment on locked things/read comments on locked things.

My email is this same username at gmail, though Google's on my shitlist as well. ("No one man should have all that power / The clock's ticking; I just count the hours / ... ")

Comments

[pne]

Pst, your link to igrick's entry is missing the "http://" at the beginning.

[azurelunatic]

Thanks.

[exor674]

Besides all the other flail, I have to go "Waitwait, they are adding a feature to *S1*/talkread ONLY?"

[niqaeli]

So... you're screwed if you hate S2 comment pages and use sitescheme for everything and have perma-style=mine set? That sucks.

I am really profoundly happy that I got my shit off their servers ages ago. I actually in recent months have been logging in to my native permanent account as I've let go of my anger, because I've been reading fic and prefer to use my style for readability (still grumpy they don't have a light-on-dark site scheme) and because it's an easy way to make sure I never see ads on my phone.

But the fact that they host nothing of my content except for some legacy community posts means I was finally able to hit sufficient neutrality towards LJ to be able to use my own native account. (After I bailed from even using my DW openID on LJ in part because LJ's implementation is so incredibly shitty, for a short while I was using a sockpuppet account to follow a couple of communities because I was just not willing to own up publicly to using LJ for even that much.) I now regard them as sort of an awkward and less than ideal legacy hosting service that fandom uses/used and can deal with them quite calmly on that level because they just don't have anything of mine on the line anymore. It did wonders for my sanity and rationality regarding them, I swear. :3

[connie]

First of all, obviously you need to use the internet in a way that works for you, and if being on LJ makes you angry, then of course minimizing your use of it makes sense.

That said, I do want to point out that while LJ has a long a storied history of ill-considered decisions, it's also been rare when those decisions haven't been reversed somehow or other after mass complaints. And no matter what may have been lost in translation from igrick's journal, what's happening now is actually what people have been asking for from LJ for a long time (albeit in a kind of clumsy, Russian-focused way): a potential feature is being discussed and tested before it goes live, while there's still time for feedback and changes. For myself, anyway, I'm trying to keep the comments constructive during beta and saving the rage for features that actually make it to production.

[azurelunatic]

I can't afford to have another March of 2010. I was feeling angry and helpless to the point that it was affecting my health, and that's the only place that I can see this ending. Everybody else may be having a better experience, and I'm glad of that, but for me, LJ is the guy who is usually awesome but every now and then does something amazingly thoughtless and cruel. He stops doing it when he's told how bad it was, but he rarely if ever says he's sorry, and he doesn't appear to learn what it was that he did that was so wrong. I should have quit volunteering for LJ at the beginning of November 2009, and I regret that I didn't.

[azurelunatic]

Now that the release is in production, I'm not feeling much different.

I think it's too little, too late, for me.

[connie]

Well, now that the release is live, I feel much more annoyed, since it seems like even the things that weren't related to comment subjects that were pointed out in beta never got addressed before the release was pushed to production.

[musyc]

Google translate also gives me this in regards to one of his bullet points: * All actions are accompanied by an animation that simply pleasing to the eye.

Um, no. NO animations are simply pleasing to the eye. Animated ANYTHING that I didn't choose is annoying as hell to me. Instant headache, just add flickering things.

The overall design of the Russian beta is ... decent. I don't care for the obvious web2.0 influences ("Rounded corners and drop shadow! We're IN THE FUTURE!!1!"), but they're ignorable. Someone does need to get igrick translated into English on the quick side, though. Even if this is supposedly a Russian-only beta, cat's out of the bag now. (Tangentially, rather pleased with myself for recognizing Спасибо in one of the threads. I now officially recognize TWO words in Cyrillic!)

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

Someone does need to get [livejournal.com profile] igrick translated into English on the quick side, though.
I created [http://ruljautonews.livejournal.com/] a few weeks ago to try and utilize If This Then That [http://ifttt.com/wtf] to auto-post links to Russian-LJ news from igrick and others, along with translation links. So far it's a bit spotty, but I'm hoping to get the kinks worked out soon.

[elf]

I have nothing to offer but sympathies. I am also annoyed at LJ's constant attempt to chase whatever the new bells and whistles are, and entirely ignoring what long-term users enjoy about the site.

[cleverthylacine]

I like S2 comments pages for RP accounts (if only because they serve to demarcate differences between individual character journals, the community journal and one another). But not for much else.

TBH I hate seeing "no subject" too. But what I don't understand is why the hell they can't just code it to only display a subject if there IS a subject. I'm pretty sure there are styles on both LJ and DW that allow you to change what displays there instead of "no subject". I know because I would rather have almost anything there--an asterisk or ellipse is fine if there has to be something--than "no subject".

[azurelunatic]

The thing that sends me the biggest red flags may in fact be an artifact of translation, but the initial position of "this is how it will be, non-negotiable" and then "Oh, apparently it's actually used by enough people that they'll get mad; we'll negotiate" is not something that I want any part of interactions with. Yes, backing down in the face of Angry Users with Valid Points is better than not doing so, but the fact that there was a position like that to back down from in the first place does not please me or reassure me. It's good that it was posted publicly so that there was the opportunity for users to view and comment, but it was not done in any sort of official forum (staff journals are not, so far as I know, official forums).

Hard points like that are, in my opinion and experience, best left for the things where shit is actively going to break if it's left alone, rather than things where there's only one solution that the main dude thinks is acceptable, but it's for aesthetic reasons only. Anything that's used 1% of the time on LJ is something that has a small but strong use, and is best approached from a "you use this, but it's really ... really bad. How can we update this without breaking your use? Is this possible?" perspective.

If it turns out that there is no solution that will suit both the updated vision and the 1% use, then maybe it does have to go, but the attempt to get rid of it even with notice, but apparently without any attempts to consult with the people who use it, tells me that this is not a company that I can care about my dealings with, and I'm going to have to back further off until I no longer care.

[cleverthylacine]

I don't disagree with anything you've said here. But I don't understand why it's surprising. LJ has always worked off the "we're going to do what we want without consulting anyone! oh wait, people got mad?" model. That's not how D or Carrie or the people you care about think, but that's how 6A and how SUP think.

[azurelunatic]

The perspective I had from volunteering was surprisingly different than the general LJ user experience. I find that I can't at all deal with the general LJ user experience. Because the general LJ user experience is so poor, this is not any sort of incentive for me to contemplate a return to volunteering even if they'd have me back, no matter how nice my friends wanting me to come back to the cult are.

[jd]

There's hardly anyone left, anyway.

Power

[norabombay]

you spend a weekd with me, you start quoting Kanye. I am so proud :)

And yes, deleting is going too far in this situation. You aren't paying for the account. Might as well keep it, if only for use when DW isn't quite right- memes and such.

Re: Power

[cleverthylacine]

this. I wouldn't delete a permanent account if I had one, either. (in fact I think I'd probably also use it store a lot of pictures and icons that they're not getting any money for, because I'm pissy like that)

I'm rather late to the game (which I'm forever losing), but...

[angelina]

...thanks to this post and the link to igrick's post on LJ, I'm now aware of yet another change they're planning to spring on us almost out of the blue. >.< (Although, I have to give them a few props for warning us ahead of time this time, instead of just quietly making the change while thousands of pissed-off users find out well after the fact. Still would have been very nice had they bothered to ASK the userbase in the first place, though.)

I've spoken my peace here, especially since I want to point out how comment subject lines are useful even outside of fandoms and meme activities (there seems to be this perception on LJ that it's only the fandom or RP scene that utilize this or that feature, and I always get the chilling feeling that they don't take fandom or RP folks as seriously as they do the general userbase... but I could just be imaging things, I don't know).

[automaticdoor]

I just love that when I used Chrome's native translate feature on igrick's post and read through some of the comments, there was... a LOT of wank between him and the Russian-speaking users. Wow. Also, one sentence or other translated directly to "Eye cut." I feel you, Russian LJ user. I feel you. It cuts my eyes too. Also, there was a lot of "fuck" flying around in the comments and an equal amount of "stop with your foul language!" back, and igrick insisted on using a troll face icon to comment back to users he was disagreeing with. I just... I don't even. That is not how you treat your userbase! Your paying userbase! You do not troll face comment reply yell at them! WHAT.