I trust the LJ development team. Do you?

[azurelunatic]

I trust LiveJournal's development team to have LiveJournal's best interests at heart, to lead LiveJournal in a good direction, and to listen to constructive feedback.

I will do my best to make the feedback I leave for LiveJournal developers constructive in nature.

---

If you wouldn't do it in fandom, don't do it to the devs. I know that this is the choir section here that I'm ranting at, but I've spent the past couple hours in a room with some rather irritated engineers who are really code people, not people-people. They've been busting their asses for months to track down random crap that goes wrong. This site is so bloody huge and robust that Bantown could not take it down for long, even though they tried. Slashdot fails to have the Slashdot Effect on LJ. LJ is thriving and functional thanks to the developers who put it together and the engineer-types who keep it running day-to-day and the people who keep the money coming in to feed the monster bandwidth and all the rest of it, and the people who make sure that other people know how to use it, and the people who stay here and hang out and talk with friends. The developers work hard to keep things working and keep the site evolving so it doesn't become a great big code dinosaur. Lately it's been seeming that the harder they work to fix things that are broken and update things that are out of code (building code metaphor, not computer code; work with me here), the more they get screamed at for trying to ruin LJ.

In every news feature-type post where something new and bell/whistle is announced, there is the inevitable complaint that things like virtual gifts are a waste of developer time that would be better spent on problem X, Y, or Z. And when LJ has been having a couple weeks where there are problems, and the problems stay there even though people are complaining about them, and the problems are still there, and still there, and still there -- yes, it does seem illogical that developers would go and do something like make it possible to put a flaming bag of poo on your least favorite serial adder's profile page. But sometimes you have to step away from a problem to get it back in perspective. I'm not in LJ Central, so I'm not there watching them bang their heads into a stubborn problem until headaches ensue, but I trust that they are allocating their time reasonably.

You know what I think the number one biggest waste of developer time is?

Dealing with unaccountably rude and hostile users.

LJ as a culture has the hugest sense of fandom entitlement ever.

LJ users want the same thing they've always had from LJ, namely, a place to put their journals and communicate and be with friends, and a geek-friendly, open, caring, open-source, user-supported, small-town environment.

LJ geeks want pretty much that same thing. Really. Truly.

Somewhere along the line, LJ users as-a-collective got the idea that if the development team did something that they didn't like, the best way of solving this was not to give constructively critical feedback and debate it with vigor and the knowledge that the developers had the good of the site in mind, but to jump on any available surface and flame away.

Imagine the utter fucking joy that the LJ developers must be having, wading through gods know how many hundred comments of flame to find the legitimate kernels of actual problems in between the complaints. Go through one of those posts announcing changes to LJ some time, and pretend that the changes to LJ are a fic that's already been beta-read, and the comments to those posts are comments in response to the fic. Read those comments with an eye to constructive criticism. The analogy doesn't stretch particularly far, because the core site pages of LJ are not a piece of fanfiction, but the principle of effective communication holds true.

Dear users, the way to get the development team to listen to your concerns is not to scream abuse at them and then expect them to abandon their ideas of what is right for the site and adopt yours. The louder you scream, the louder they're going to hit the delete key and say "Na na na can't hear you na na na." I don't actually think they're doing that now, but the temptation is very much there and very much real. LJ is a maverick site in that it has such open forums for user feedback and discussion. Plenty of services do not have anything resembling that. Do you really want to convince the developers and volunteers that an open forum will only collect whining and flames?
Hint: Bantown tried forcing the issue by attacking LJ. We all know how that turned out. Pwned, craxx0rbitches, pwned. In a similar case, visible nipple is still not allowed in the default userpic, and the flaming tantrums thrown at LJ's support staff by assorted self-proclaimed "boob nazis" have assured that visible nipple will never be allowed, on the principle that it's bad precedent to cave when the toddler has a meltdown because they didn't get their little way. Even though there are many people who do love the boob.

Tell them what you like about the shiny new stuff. Let them know what they did right. Sit on your hands for a few hours until you try using it a few times before you flame off at them. If you have to say something immediately, remember what you learned in those sensitivity training sessions and use your "I" statements. "I'm frustrated with this new user interface, and I'd really prefer something with the look and feel of the older version" comes over a whole lot better than "What the fuck did you do to my user interface, you morons? I liked it the way it was! Put it back!"

LJ, even current LJ under 6A management, is capable of recognizing if something goes really badly. The developers actively ask for reports of broken or unusable behavior. Things may not be fixed immediately, but there are little things coming out every here and there to make things better, things that you may not be aware of unless you're watching lj_releases or changelog.

LJ really is a group effort. I do not have Super-Secret Inside Information that no one else has. I'm a relatively average occasional Support volunteer. (Very occasional, since Life Attacks.) I put time and effort into making LJ a better place, and I see the results of that effort. Things may not always go my way when LJ policy and I disagree with each other (I wouldn't mind seeing nipples in any boobtacular default user pictures, for example), but at least my technical suggestions are often dead-on, and my social suggestions are at least listened to respectfully.

I really do think it all boils down to three or four questions:

1. Do you trust the people who are running LJ, including Six Apart core and the developers?
2. If you do not trust the people running LJ, what can they reasonably do to demonstrate that they're worthy of your trust?
3. If there is nothing the people running LJ can do to gain your trust, why are you still here?

---

And you know? I find that I'm never short on database handles after this update. How about you?

Comments

[bekijane.livejournal.com]

*standing ovation*

Pssst: welovelj

[azurelunatic]

/me takes a bow

[lacey]

Brava.

[azurelunatic]

Thank you. I hear these discussions and instead of ranting hugely there or having it all boil around inside me, I have to get it out of my head and that means writing it out into coherent format.

[kiwiria.livejournal.com]

Agree with you completely. I'm not happy with the new update page, but realize it's mostly a matter of getting used to it. My one problem that I considered a bug rather than an 'issue', I adressed in LJ-design (line breaks and paragraph breaks not being recognized in html) and it has already been fixed! :-)

Random raving will get you nowhere - as the nipple debate indicates. I don't agree with LJs initial handling of the problem (as there are a LOT of other icons more offensive which are still allowed), but once the boob-nazies started throwing tantrums, there was nothing else for them to do.

I'm still occasionally short on database handles though. Or rather, I was yesterday - haven't been online long enough today to tell.

[azurelunatic]

They're very good on either fixing bugs or at least getting them on the list of things to fix. I watch what I believe is the official bug-tracking community, and I see things being put in there within five minutes after a problem is proven reproducable.

[blueutopiah.livejournal.com]

Seriously, as an LJ user I'm stunned at how well the site runs. I've never heard of anyone losing their journals and I've never really seen the site go down for extended periods of time (like the debaucle at aff.net earlier this year). I mean, the only time that it went down in the past year was a few weeks ago and it was only for a few hours AND LJ more than made up for it by extending paid account time (which surprised the crap out of me, IMO they didn't have to do anything, sites going down here and there is a fact of life but I'm sure you guys got a HOST of OMGELJAYINEEDYOUNOW complaints.)

And the only time I had a problem, you guys responded pretty quickly and even though I had taken care of it, you were still interested in why it happened and how to fix it for other users. Trust me, I spent far too long dealing with health insurance companies who didn't care a lick about me at all and were eager to prove that at every turn - LJ spoils me by contrast. Some people just don't know what they have.

[azurelunatic]

It helps the uptime that virtually *all* of volunteers (and probably staff too) are The Biggest LJ Addicts Evar. That's actually how I got into volunteering -- the Great Power Loss Incident with the Big Red Button happened, and I remembered that there was an IRC channel for volunteers (I'd poked around the edges of volunteering) and since I wanted up-to-the-minute info, I knew that's where it would be...

Backstage of your request, there was a general shout of glee upon finding out that someone had duplicated the problem and had a working breaky-link. The general userbase just does not have random troubleshooting skills, and it's always a joy to find that someone who is having a problem that we need to know what is before we can get it nailed down to report to developers to fix is willing/able to actually *help* us reproduce it.

While sometimes the LJ staff's love for the *users* is called into question by one too many socially suicidal stunts on the users' part, the love for the site is there, and that includes taking care of the users. Gods help us all if staff ever loses the love for the site.

[solcita.livejournal.com]

As a long-time loyal user who has done Support (Abuse) volunteering for LJ, I can say only one thing to this:

Wordy McFreakin' Word. THANK you.

[azurelunatic]

You're welcome. I've considered applying for the Abuse team, but don't yet have the spare time + social stats leveled up yet.

[sarahendipity.livejournal.com]

Ye know, if it doesn't affect me or my journaling, then let them do what they want to do with their business. I use Semagic, so any post option changes they've made have been mostly unnoticed, other than the bitching of a few ljfriends. I read my LJ pages in my own style, as long as they don't take that customization, cool. So really, it's about perspective and figuring out what really matters to a journaler.

[azurelunatic]

I use semagic a lot too, though I had to use the actual update page when IE updated and I hadn't rebooted yet (something about that made Semagic all crashy).

I heard someone sourly recommend that if someone really had to use a site page rather than a client to post, and they needed something bare-bones without the shiny, then they should really be using the mobile update page and do anything custom they had to do by editing it afterwards.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Was mildly cranky earlier this week when code tags weren't working. Not worth screaming over, since it was a pretty simple knitting chart and the code tags were largely to make it more understandable visually. And the target reader appears to have puzzled it out ok.

On the other hand the journal style mod tools are sexy. They made it a *lot* easier for me to redo my journal to something decent looking.

I find it very hard to scream about a site that gives me a journal that works this well for free. And if I can duplicate the problem with the code tag, I can post to say they've got a bug.

[azurelunatic]

And it's so immensely appreciated when people are reporting valid bugs. It comforts me so much that people will a) notice bugs, and b) realize that they're bugs rather than misfeatures.

[prissi.livejournal.com]

You are nothing short of amazing for this. *standing ovation, encore, etc. etc.*

[azurelunatic]

Thank you. I couldn't do it without y'all. I may not be the most reliable person on the boards, but I do like to be involved in what's going on so I can know what's happening and explain it to people.

[jennifer.livejournal.com]

As someone who's been working DAMN hard to report stuff and help people: thank you.

[azurelunatic]

You're welcome.

[elance.livejournal.com]

I think I pretty much trust LJ about the same way I would trust any other company -- not to have /my/ best interests at heart, but their own, what will make them money. Sometimes what I want and what they think is in their best interests will conflict.

But I can certainly say that berating them, swearing at them, treating them like /enemies/ is completely non-productive, as it would be for any other company I treated that way. Would someone do it to their bank, their insurance company? Never. But they do it to LJ without a thought.

[azurelunatic]

(And why should I treat an enemy that way, if they don't know that they're my enemy yet? Or if they don't know that I know that they're my enemy.)

[selenite.livejournal.com]

I trust the developers. But I'm seeing them make the same mistake I've seen in other projects, one which I'm prone to myself: focusing on the programmers' priorities instead of the customers' priorities. The new update screen isn't bad, it only took me a few seconds to find the stuff that moved, but that's not what I'm objecting to. The old one worked. People were content with it, so any change, no matter how much of an improvement, would get objected to. And there's not much improvement between the new and old one, it's just fine-tuning.

Fine tuning dialogues that work well is a classic programmer behavior. "This must be PERFECT!" is the thought, so they're going to fiddle until it meets their aesthetic ideal. Meanwhile there's other tasks--less fun ones--which are lying undone even though they'd contribute more to user satisfaction. Or there should be. If rearranging the text fields in the update screen is actually the most important thing on the development team's to-do list they need to step back, proclaim LJ finished, and start something totally new. Something whose worth will justify the value of the programmer hours put into it.

On a more practical note, is there a PO Box for the dev team? I'm tempted to send them copies of Peopleware and The Inmates are Running the Asylum as references.

[cmwinters.livejournal.com]

My biggest problem is that they add things that people don't seem to want, and ignore the things people do want, and then seem quite put out when people aren't delighted with the new stuff they didn't want in absence of the useful stuff they did want. (I.e. - "no you can't have full-text searching but LOOK! New hideous bright green and fuschia styles!!! That makes the WHOLE SITE better!") *shrug* It's why I don't even bother posting to suggestions anymore - it's a great idea but it's the black hole of nothingness at LJ, and I don't need false hope because it's frustrating and demoralising.

Neither, however, do I bother ranting and screaming. Not any more. :P

wordy mcword.

[ursamajor]

Hahaha, I'm about to go out to my local bike shop, pick up some bike handlebars, write "DATABASE" on them, and send them to certain people who need to just get a grip. I'm grateful there's not a lot of bitching among my friends, and what I've seen appears to be mostly blowing off steam privately to be able to give concrit publicly without being flamey.

I ain't lookin' in communities, though. *g*

Re: wordy mcword.

[pauamma]

That may work, but to really nail it down, you would need to send them a clou.

[moniqueleigh]

As I see it, the biggest problem here is the biggest problem pretty much anywhere: On average, people aren't taught proper communication models. The general population is not taught to listen, re-state, etc. Genpop is not taught to make "I" statements. And somehow, the cultural lesson seems to be that it's okay to remain in the behavior patterns of a toddler even when one reaches the ages of 15, 25, 35, and beyond.

Unfortunately, this is true of folks on both sides of this particular equation. So we get announcements of "this has been changed. *poof*" instead of "Problem X was reported by a large number of people. In order to correct X, we have found solution Xy." And then we get "OMG, Xy is soooooooo EVEEEL. We HATES it!!!" instead of "Thanks! ... Oh dear, solution Xy has problems Xy1 and Xy2. Can these please be corrected next?"

[azurelunatic]

Sometimes it does seem that the eloquence is in short supply. Actually, it seems like their Trusted by the Userbase Eloquence Person is also their "Stuff no one but Brad will touch with a ten-foot pole because of the PR storm that will follow" person.

(I've occasionally wondered if a few of the engineers who announce things could use ghostwriters for Big-Ass Posts.)

[dawna]

As one of those supporty types, I wanted to join the echoes of the others who have said thank you..

<3

[azurelunatic]

You're welcome.

[tango.livejournal.com]

*applauds* Can I link this in my journal?

[azurelunatic]

Of course!

[elleve.livejournal.com]

yay for developer love (=

[azurelunatic]

There is all kinds of developer love.

[azurelunatic]

Further discussion over on no_lj_ads.

[weofodthignen]

1. No.
2. Stop paying people simply and solely to change things; instead demonstrate that they care about functionality by fixing the problems. I've seen enough demonstrations that I believe those geeks who tell me LJ has sucky sysadmins over you telling me LJ's really hard to fix. What the heck does LJ need 2 or 3 "change things" people for?! Especially when the update page was just changed a year or two ago?
2a. Beta testing; asking users what they want rather than assuming we'll looooove some new esthetic; providing an option to keep the old, or at least looking at what it looks like on a standard size monitor and testing how long it takes to load on dial-up.
3a. I sometimes wonder why I am still here. I know I've made fewer comments and fewer posts over the past month than I would have if the site had been working right and if they'd left the update page alone. In fact when the last change was made I couldn't comment for a while--the "post comment" button was a graphic and my iBook was so b0rked, graphic elements didn't appear. A friend was kind enough to give me a new computer, but nobody's going to give me a blindingly fast connection or a humongoid monitor because LJ decided to pay someone to make a job for himself by making the update page headache-inducing.

I think they got onto fixing the problems after the comments on the update page change finally brought them to their attention. They showed every sign of being oblivious earlier.

. . . Why assume that any company has customers' best interests at heart? Hardly realistic, surely. I suppose it might be the difference between those of you to whom it matters hugely that LJ's open-source and has volunteer user help and those of us who just use it. But I really don't give a damn about more user pix or virtual gifts; no skin off my back if LJ spends time and money providing such stuff, I just ignore it; I do expect to be able to use the thing without LJ employees standing by while it's breaking, let alone making it harder to use. Why should I have to download a client when there's an update page on the site?

Puzzled,
M

[beckyzoole.livejournal.com]

1. I trust the LJ developers to be good developers who want what's best for LJ. But I trust the Six Apart core of venture capitalists to be venture capitalists: investors who would suck everything they can out of LJ and then throw it away to die if that would make more money for them.

2. What could 6A do to demonstrate that they are in it for the long haul and not just to get as much money out of the blog boom as they can before it goes bust? Run LJ according to the principles Brad used to run it with:

• Post frequent detailed updates to news, updates that assume that the readers are intelligent.
• Beta-test everything thoroughly and hand out prizes to users who find bugs.
• Go back to the philosophy that Brad espoused, that "New features are nice, but I care more about system reliability, cleanliness, and documentation."

3. I'm here because I've found community here. And I'd like to help. Also because I heard there were going to be cookies. Chocolate chip?

[azurelunatic]

When you say "updates that assume the readers are intelligent", what kind of stylistic/content assumptions are you looking for to demonstrate this? Technical details, adult-to-adult writing style, college-level vocabulary? Formal or informal? Geek writing style, Trained Professional writing style, natural writing style of the poster, or something else?

Most beta testing right now is done by the enthusiastic team of volunteer support people. Anyone can be a Support volunteer. It's become easier and more straightforward to volunteer in recent years, though a lot of people aren't aware of how to get started volunteering and that the volunteers double as beta test crew. (Prizes usually involve appreciation from the admins, though on Serious Big Bug-Hunts like the one last spring, Brad was handing out permanent accounts for first verified finds of security holes. The volunteer community is reasonably tight-knit, but welcoming to anyone who shows signs of wanting to volunteer and stick around.) Support can probably always use more volunteers.

From reading what rahaeli wrote in that scary-long thread upstream, the idea of a return to system reliability/cleanliness/documentation is a hairy one, and one that the new features are in part aimed at. I know that if she hadn't explained why the features have been added, I'd probably be agreeing with you that there are a lot too many bells and whistles, but after reading what she's said, I think they're trying to do quite a bit of just that. Some of the things that I would see as a new feature or a surface re-design seem to actually be fixes to bugs that I never even knew existed, and changes toward long-term code stability and ease of maintenance and update.

Documentation is another thing that's being done by volunteers as well as developers and other employees. lj_userdoc is the user-end of the documentation, where people bring up undocumented, underdocumented, or misdocumented things in the FAQ files.


*grin* The Communities support volunteer team is the one who has cookies. Though I think they're mostly virtual.

Didn't find this till today ...

[mudo.livejournal.com]

But hoorah. I never read news and the like because of the flaming that happens. It's excessive.

I am pretty proud to say that my usernumber is under 100,000 (just barely, but still!) and I've been on paid account status all but perhaps 9 months of my LJ life.

Excellent post.

Re: Didn't find this till today ...

[azurelunatic]

Thank you!

I do summaries of many news posts and their comments so people don't have to wade through the flames. This brings smiles to the faces of Support.