First off, just so you don't think this is some random Act of LJ Staff popping in or anything, I'm actually a friend of azurelunatic's -- I don't want to give the impression that I, like, monitor all of LJ to find people talking smack or what-have-you. I just happened to find this post as my Other Self. :) And I seem to be running off at the mouth here, so this is going to have to be multiple comments...
You pay LJ for services rendered, which is awesome of you and I appreciate it. On the other hand, though, your particular situation is an edge case; the "average" (median) paid user is a 24-year-old female with one account who updates between 5-10 times a month. The percentage of people with 2+ personal journals is very small; 3+ personal journals, you're down to a fraction of a percent (even when taken over active usage, not just total journals), and when you get to 10+ journals you're looking at -- well, I can't give numbers, but I'd call it a "handful". Which is not to say that your opinion counts for less, not at all -- just that your opinion has a greater chance, statistically, of being different than everyone else's opinion, because you're using LJ in a way that's less like the majority use.
And we don't want to create a product that can't appeal to both our hypothetical Annie Average and Emma Edgecase, but when we have to make a decision -- and we have to make decisions every day -- we need to consider what's going to serve the greatest good for the greatest number. And this isn't intended to be paternalistic at all, but to be completely, absolutely blunt: yeah, the people who are making the decisions know more about what's best for LiveJournal than you do, because they have access to more information -- usability studies, site workflow information, internal statistics, etc. They don't know what's best for your (or any one person's) personal use of LJ, because LJ users are an amazingly resourceful, adaptable bunch of people who have tweaked and fussed with the existing LJ resources into doing things they weren't intended to do (which, for the record, we think is immensely cool and we do, believe it or not, bend over backwards to avoid 'breaking' those uses). But they/we do have aggregate information that shows what effect changes have on the general usage of LJ as a whole -- which we can't publicly release, because it's the kind of thing our competition slavers over -- and decisions must be made on that big-picture level or else LJ risks tanking.
So we do something that's intended to fix a particular trend that frightens us (because it says bad things about long-term health and viability), but the most dedicated LJ users see it as a personal insult, because their use of LJ and their friends' use of LJ don't support the specific problem that we're trying to fix -- they just don't see it, because their particular circle uses LJ in a different way. And when we fix that problem, they see it as "messing with something that's not broken". Except it is 'broken' -- it's endangering LJ as a whole. So it looks to 'you' (generic 'you' here, not you specifically) like "LJ" decided to just fuck with something for the hell of it, while in actuality it's fixing a problem 'you' didn't even know about.
So then there's a huge outcry in news comments or what have you, with people objecting to the redesign/addition/revision/new feature/whatnot -- but there's also a quiet, mostly-invisible switch in the statistics and taskflow abandonment rate and usability/usage data that says, hey, that bad trend we were trying to fix has reversed itself. So now we're totally fucked no matter what we do; either we go back to the way things used to be (and watch those trends go right back to impending disaster), or look like we're ignoring user feedback. Or we take the path that we usually try to take: listen to all the feedback we get and implement the pieces that we don't think are going to have a negative impact on the stats.
no subject
You pay LJ for services rendered, which is awesome of you and I appreciate it. On the other hand, though, your particular situation is an edge case; the "average" (median) paid user is a 24-year-old female with one account who updates between 5-10 times a month. The percentage of people with 2+ personal journals is very small; 3+ personal journals, you're down to a fraction of a percent (even when taken over active usage, not just total journals), and when you get to 10+ journals you're looking at -- well, I can't give numbers, but I'd call it a "handful". Which is not to say that your opinion counts for less, not at all -- just that your opinion has a greater chance, statistically, of being different than everyone else's opinion, because you're using LJ in a way that's less like the majority use.
And we don't want to create a product that can't appeal to both our hypothetical Annie Average and Emma Edgecase, but when we have to make a decision -- and we have to make decisions every day -- we need to consider what's going to serve the greatest good for the greatest number. And this isn't intended to be paternalistic at all, but to be completely, absolutely blunt: yeah, the people who are making the decisions know more about what's best for LiveJournal than you do, because they have access to more information -- usability studies, site workflow information, internal statistics, etc. They don't know what's best for your (or any one person's) personal use of LJ, because LJ users are an amazingly resourceful, adaptable bunch of people who have tweaked and fussed with the existing LJ resources into doing things they weren't intended to do (which, for the record, we think is immensely cool and we do, believe it or not, bend over backwards to avoid 'breaking' those uses). But they/we do have aggregate information that shows what effect changes have on the general usage of LJ as a whole -- which we can't publicly release, because it's the kind of thing our competition slavers over -- and decisions must be made on that big-picture level or else LJ risks tanking.
So we do something that's intended to fix a particular trend that frightens us (because it says bad things about long-term health and viability), but the most dedicated LJ users see it as a personal insult, because their use of LJ and their friends' use of LJ don't support the specific problem that we're trying to fix -- they just don't see it, because their particular circle uses LJ in a different way. And when we fix that problem, they see it as "messing with something that's not broken". Except it is 'broken' -- it's endangering LJ as a whole. So it looks to 'you' (generic 'you' here, not you specifically) like "LJ" decided to just fuck with something for the hell of it, while in actuality it's fixing a problem 'you' didn't even know about.
So then there's a huge outcry in