I am entirely disillusioned with LJ, and have been keeping my presence there to a minimum since DW went into open beta 2 years ago. But I think this is an unreasonable level of conspiracy theory. It's much more that anglophone LJ is dying, with activity levels declining until it's barely viable (even if you don't care about the political issues). But the management has next to no interest in anglophone LJ; the whole reason that SUP bought out the site is because, apart from ONTD, Russophone LJ is a couple of orders of magnitude more profitable. And Russian LJ is plenty active, and has continued growing since the English side starting noticing the decline 3 or 4 years ago.

There's no need for them to deliberately cultivate spam in order to keep their activity figures high. They just don't care if all the American and international users complain, or even if they all, to a woman, walk out in disgust. Russian users I think are less bothered by spam (and advertising) because they're used to a web experience that is littered with all kinds of dodgy stuff. Even if Russian users care about spam, they almost certainly don't care about the pigeon kind of spammers who don't interrupt their discussions.

So I'm pretty clear that LJ has been incompetent or apathetic here rather than evil. I have seen the suggestion that sites that host (anti-)social games are easier targets for DDoS attacks. Also that the latest round of outages is revenge by the big-league spammers for LJ finally cracking down on them in response to Spamhaus. Both of those seem more plausible than LJ actively encouraging spam!