azurelunatic | I trust the LJ development team. Do you?

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I trust the LJ development team. Do you?

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:

Do you trust the people who are running LJ, including Six Apart core and the developers?
If you do not trust the people running LJ, what can they reasonably do to demonstrate that they're worthy of your trust?
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?

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Wow, this is really kind of insulting. I pay LJ $20 a month to maintain the paid journals that are the backbone of my RPG. I make people in my game pay for their journals if they want extra icons so that my players don't have to see ads. And you come to me with this brussels sprouts thing?

The thing is, my mother could say that to me because she paid for my existence; I help pay for LJ's. And yeah, I know that I am one person, but this? This is not the kind of explanation that leads me to want to Trust My Developers. Being told that you know what's good for me. It's because of explanations like this that I make friends with people who can write css code to protect me from the Latest Best New Thing that people have thought up that annoys me past reason?

I dunno, maybe if those other 8 million users wanted to know, they'd pay attention? How many of them are journals that don't update? How many of them are journals that are secondary? I own 100 journals or so. Many of them never use New Cool Thing X because even though they know about it, as a matter of fact, they have no need for it, being that they are fictional people in the year 1942.

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.

I actually figured you were her friend.

I also understand about things like the update screen and the new site schemes. (Initially, I hated Horizon; now, I rather like it but I'm hoping for Vertigo soon, because I'm not such a fan of dropdown menus. Though, at least it doesn't require the precise mousing Xcolibur did. I loathed Xcolibur, I have RSIs.)

But those (except for the site scheme) are not opt-out anyway. I accept that the site will in fact make overall changes and golly gee whiz--most of them are good changes, too.

Where I get angry isn't because you changed the update screen to fix your task abandonment rate. I actually totally get that and...rather like the new update screen.

Here are *specific* things that have made me angry.

* The fact that when people were discussing the CProds and why they hated them in

no_lj_ads,

burr86 took it upon himself to tell me that I SHOULD NOT be allowed to turn them off and decide for myself whether I want to be told in a prod screen about every new feature (in each and every one of my accounts, too!) This actually inspired

foxfirefey to write CSS that makes Firefox not display CProds, which I tested and Foxfirefey then distributed to anyone who wanted it, with loads of pimpage from me.

* The fact that in this same or a linked discussion

winniewong thought it was funny that we were likening the CProds to Clippey and seemed to take pride in the fact that they annoyed the shit out of people.

* The unilateral decision, not once, but twice, to turn the Navigation Strip on for everyone, including the option which forces you to override other people's preferences. (Honestly, I can't think of any reason other than "to be annoying" why you would say to someone, "You can turn this thing off if you hate it, but we're going to let other people MAKE you look at it whether you hate it or not if THEY like it.") I had to turn that off in all the game journals because I don't believe that's right and I told my players they had to turn it off and they were having trouble finding it.

* The unilateral decision to autohide all birthday information even though the option to hide it had always been there and many of us had told LJ to display it please.

* The way that once LJ talk got turned on, suddenly all the other IM service information in most profiles was hidden unless you told it not to display LJ talk info (which I would never do even if I used LJ talk, because I don't put a working email address unmunged up anywhere on the internet nowadays).

I mentioned your brussels sprout comment as a particular irritant because it seemed to amuse you, just like Winnie Wong was amused by the furore over CProds. Here's a tip you and all the other developers could stand to take: when people are already annoyed over something you've done, smiling and laughing at their disgruntlement does NOT make them happier with you.

The thing is: we honestly don't want to piss people off. The whole LJ staff are also LJ users, and we're in a constant, chronic state of juggling fifteen different balls; seriously, you should hear our project/product planning meetings, because they're hours of "well, okay, we could try THIS..." "Nope, that'd cause World War III." But we have the same problem that the Vocal Outcriers have; we see our own particular 'sector' of LJ, and no matter how much we try to expand past that, we all bring our own particular tailored usage to the table.

Now, I think we've got an advantage in that the mixture of decision-makers on LJ comes from a very diverse cross-section of LJ users; we have the Geek Subset and the Fandom Subset and the Here For The Cool Communities subset and the I Want a Private Journal subset and the Web 2.0 Blogging Crowd subset all represented in just the core LJ-managers team, for instance. So, say, our Geek will see Trend X and propose Solution Y that won't piss off his fellow Geeks, and our Fan will say "well, no, that'll break this" for her fellow Fans, and our Community-user will say "yeah, but we could do this instead", and the Journaler will say "that would make it more difficult for people to do this," and etc etc ad nauseam. Ultimately, though, it falls down to our product manager and our general manager to say, okay, we need to do something, and it's going to piss people off -- because there are, literally, thousands of different subsets of LJ, and they're all using LJ in drastically different ways.

We think we have a responsibility to all the users, though, to make sure that LJ's still around in {one, two, ten} years for them to still have that platform, however they use it. And there are a shitload of things we have to balance and juggle and tweak, and sure, we get them wrong sometimes, or it turns out that something we thought would only piss off Subset A and make things better for Subset B-G actually pisses off Subsets A-F and only makes things better for Subset G. (This is when we send the crystal ball back to the shop and go back to, well, drinking heavily.) But we really do have an eye on the long-term health and viablity of LJ as a whole, and it sucks that we can't release our statistics and show people exactly what we're trying to fix, but we can't.

To address your specific point -- yeah, in an ideal world, people would pay attention to the news channels, but in practice, they don't. There are several million active or semi-active accounts on LJ, held by someone without any other journals, that don't read

news. Depending on word-of-mouth to reach them just flat-out doesn't work. However, when we make a change and offer an opt-out, they generally accept the change and integrate it into their LJ use; the percentage of people who actually use the opt-out is very small. Fractional, even. (For me to prove this to you would require another small novel of a comment, but I've got multiple examples.)

Okay, I get that you honestly don't want to piss people off, but...

If you don't want to piss people off, why do you SAY things like "Well, when I didn't want to eat brussels sprouts, my mother always insisted I try them first." That tells me that you think I am five and that you are my mom. My honest reaction to a comment like that when I am genuinely upset is, "Bitch, PLEASE." It's not cute, and if you thought it was, that's because it was cute to you, but of course it's cute to you--you're not on the end of it that's been made to look five in public.

(And

winniewong made you and me both look like a goddess of tact.)

Also, you can't make people try things like the Nav Strip. I never "tried" it. I went, "oh shit, there's something ugly on my screen, how do I turn it the fuck off?" and did so. Then I had to do it or help someone else do it 200 more times, which, I might add, really put me in a great frame of mind for a comment like that. The CProds were pushing Phone Post at me like crazy "We've noticed you never made a Phone Post!" before I turned them off. I have auditory discrimination problems and two of my computers don't even have sound enabled. I am not going to Phone Post any time before the Messiah comes unless, like, I'm trapped in the wilderness with no internet access save thru my RAZR. I frankly hate Phone Post, I go to LJ to write and to read? How do I know I won't like Phone Post? Well, I like email better than voicemail and text messaging better than phone calls. This is not a giant leap of logic here.

So, with all of this having been said -- we've basically got two fundamental choices in any scenario: opt-out and opt-in. (And, honestly, I think the fact that LJ generally offers an opt-out is cool. I can't think of a single other site that lets you customize your user experience so drastically, often at the expense of things that will keep the site itself healthy; if given a choice between Fixing Something 100% And Pissing 20% Of People Off, or Fixing Something 80% And Pissing 5% Of People Off, we go with the latter, every single damn time.) Hypothetically, let's take an issue that has, we suspect, a 50% chance of causing us to reach Shutdown Point within the next two years. (Shutdown Point: the point on the graph at which projected income coming in < projected expenses going out and the trend is going downward to the point where we feel it can't be reversed.)

We have two possible solutions. Solution A will "fix" the issue if only 20% of people opt into it; solution B will only "fix" the issue if 80% of people opt into it. Solution A only fixes the problem for a projected 18 months, while solution B fixes it permanently. We think Solution B will piss off X% of people and make us lose $Y in paid account revenue in abandonment (churn), while Solution A will piss off X-10% of people and make us lose $Y-Z in paid account revenue in churn, but fixing the problem totally will bring in $Q more in different paid account revenue. Solution A will give us, we think, a 40% fix (and therefore 40% of $Q) but Solution B will give us a 90% fix (and therefore 90% of $Q). So ... do we go with Solution A and make it opt-in? Solution A and make it opt-out? B, and opt-in? B, and opt-out? Will we get the necessary opt-in for B if we make it opt-in for us to reach the level of "enough" fix? If we go with A, and it fixes it now, what's the situation going to look like in 18 months when that fix "runs out", and are we going to have the resources to make a new fix then, and what are the other variables going to look like then? Is it better or worse to fix it permanently or fix it temporarily and re-visit it later? What, in short, is "enough" of a fix, what's the point where we've pissed off "too many" people, and what's the point where benevolent neglect (ie, doing nothing about a problem) stops working and we have to take action?

Now multiply that by every decision we make. No, they're not all that dire -- but the scenario that I just painted arises at least once a month, minimum. And say we have three of those scenarios running out, at various sections of the cycle, and we're tweaking one thing and it's having an impact on the other, and there's the problem of trying to assign engineering resources and people to manage projects and priorize things that way and we have to decide which is most important and which can wait until next week when we have a free minute to breathe and then we get it wrong and something tanks suddenly and we don't know why and we have to do something about that and ...

...Well, let's just say there's a reason that we have a game theory expert on staff. We do this every day.

And this is, of course, only referring to things that can, reasonably, have an opt-in/opt-out switch. Something like the new Update Journal page can't. Sure, it's possible, but then we'd have two different versions to maintain; bugfixes or security fixes would have to be done to both, for instance, and that's immediately double the engineering time. And that's one page. Multiply that by however many pages we have on the site, and suddenly we're bogged down in a sea of backwards compatibility that means we can't fix anything. Rocks fall, everyone dies, and there's no more LJ at all -- which means there's no more clone sites, because they get their code and their development time from us.

but then we'd have two different versions to maintain

Serious, curious question: how does this interact with the various styles (Dystopia, Lynx, etc.) that are offered?

From this end of the screen, it seems very unintuitive that I can be viewing with Dystopia, MadeUpUser can be viewing with Lynx, and JoeBlow is using Xcoliber or whatever -- and that this is less hard than having the thing check my account's settings and decide "you view with Dystopia, you Post To Journal with GrayBox."

Now, if there actually is a code nightmare associated with maintaining the various styles, but it's being stuck with because of A) legacy code and/or B) projections that the users really would scream and desert if you pried Dystopia from their cold, dead hands... Well, that'd be good to know.

Nope, site schemes (Horizon, XColibur, Dystopia, Lynx, etc) are totally separate. The site was designed to have multiple schemes (nobody remembers Opalcat or ... the other one whose name I totally forget, heh), but it's like an overlay on top of the site. The underlying pages, like the update page or whatever, are very easy to maintain, because it's just a series of HTML instructions; they're skins. We find a problem with one of the site skins, we change one file and it changes everywhere.

Individual task pages -- update journal, customize journal, etc, etc -- are actual pages, which (if there are multiple versions) require multiple versions being maintained. Say we forked Update2 from Update1 six months ago, and now we find a security hole that requires, say, 8 hours to patch. Now we've got to do it twice, once for Update1 and once for Update2. Say we add a new field on the Update page ("current book", or whatever, theoretically, like we did with "current location"); we've got to add it in multiple places. Etc. We just don't have the resources to support multiple versions.

Oh-HO! Interesting.

Another serious question: would it even be possible to make an "update journal" scheme/skin that overlays like the other skins?

(Because that's something that, if possible... Heck, I dunno. Set up a contribution fund for the cost of it, and let individual users donate to it, and when it's done, have some kind of "This feature sponsored by The LiveJournal Users" with a link... O:> )

Not at all easily, no, and again, the overhead necessary in designing such a system and maintaining it wouldn't be at all worth it for the number of people it'd please. Plus, you gotta remember -- the people who are shouting in

news or wherever are a very, very small fraction of people -- say .5% of the active userbase. Then you figure that maybe 1% of those would put their money where their mouth was. Sure, you might, and some of your friends would, and more people would say "eh, I should think about contributing to that", and even more people would roll their eyes and just not care enough...

There's totally a point of diminishing returns. We make change very carefully, but there comes a point where we just have to say: screw it, this is changing, we think it's changing for the better, people will learn to live with it.

(don't tell work I'm replying to LJ while waiting for my co-worker to get done with her paperwork.)

I think I saw a cute script trick that would do something like that on

lj_nifty.

There's a lot that can be done with user-end scripting these days. (Though I doubt there's a script that can make the vast majority of MySpace pages readable.)

(Though I doubt there's a script that can make the vast majority of MySpace pages readable.)

What you do is use Opera in User Accessiblity mode without images or Flash enabled.

Welcome to my visitors from lj_design! This is an old post, so not all of the original parties to the conversation are likely to be around, but there's still a lot of interesting discussion here; feel free to take a look around.

Still a good conflab though, and one I appear to've missed (probably due to that Real Life bug I seem to keep coming down with). Am gonna be linking to it, or summat, 'cause there's much in here that I don't think even my truGeek mates are necessarily aware of (given that they can bitch as much as me sometimes ;)).

And to wind all of this up and omg I'm sorry I'm so wordy, this all sucks. I hate it when we piss anyone off. We all do. But looking at things from a cold business standpoint, there's a point where we have to piss people off in order to preserve LJ as a whole. LJ as it existed in 2002, if we hadn't made any changes, wouldn't be alive today. LJ from 2003, if we hadn't made any changes, wouldn't be alive today. Etc, etc. There's a huge, complex, arcane equation of activity level + brand loyalty + expenses + "shiny" features that "everyone else" has + market forces + whether the Dow is rising, falling, or standing on its head and whistling Dixie, and the target's constantly moving and we have to keep up in order to be able to afford to keep the lights on. If we're too afraid of pissing people off to make necessary changes, there's no more LJ, you know? And that'd piss people off way, way more.

I'm really not trying to be insulting, by the way, and I'm sorry if I'm coming off as that -- I'm just trying to give you a window into our perspective here. We can't say a lot of this in public, "official" posts, because the companies who want nothing more than for us to shrivel up and die watch that kind of thing like a hawk for any signs of weakness. But this is what we do, every day, and it's a little bit more of a look at why "five thousand screaming people" can't necessarily be a reason to revert changes. Sure, we always have improvements we can make in the process of communicating those changes, and that's something we constantly try to do.

Incidentally, if you ever happen to notice me saying things that shouldn't be said out of a lock or out of channel/filter, feel free to smack me.

Trust me, I will ;) But no, talking in generalities like you do is cool.

And if anyone plans to go bitching in any random rant comm, they had better be using a sockpuppet. I'm just sayin'.

Incidentally, we've been featured on

no_lj_ads. They've asked that people not dogpile the post here, so there isn't pissing-off-of-people (like you and me), but if you're so inclined, there may be questions over there that the linker over there has cordially invited you to answer.

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I trust the LJ development team. Do you?

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Belated reply due to holidays

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