The sponsored community icon is , versus the usual . Further discussion here.

My ethos:
I have a whole lot of random floating around in my head about a rather lot of this. It's building off my previous post of users as stockholders, and why LJ gets these kinds of wanktastic feedback/complaint-fests when similar and larger sites do not. My viewpoint on this comes from somewhere in between userbase-at-large and heavily involved with LJ. ( Read more... )

6A vs. LJ
6A core and LJ core have really merged and they're no longer seeing a difference in "us" and "them". ( The userbase has yet to see that. Also, usebase relations, and how we love techies and don't like smooth corporatelingo. )

The best way for the userbase to alienate LJ staff:
And I know I'm preaching to the choir, but incessantly yelling and screaming at LJ staff who are trying to do cool stuff is going to make them hostile and not want to listen. Dear Userbase-at-large, you stand the very real risk of alienating LJ staff and having them start wanting all *you* to go away. There are enough problems with disenchantment-with-the-userbase with the people who have to deal with annoyed and angry users a lot. It's that whole tech support thing. If you feel you must go away from LJ, by all means, go.

If you mostly remove your blogging to another site, but stay around and knowingly beat a dead horse to death in the comments of all official posts with public dissatisfaction that you can find, you are being a troll. The admins may not be responding to you, but you would have to work very hard if you wanted to find a way to discredit the position you are supporting even more than you already have. If you have posted a valid concern, gotten a response from a staffer that your concern will be addressed, and then post the same concern again without giving them a chance to address your concern, you are being an asshat. Admins are currently deleting comments from people who are being asshats like that. It would not surprise me if people who are doing this (re-posting concerns that have already been responded to with a "your concern will be addressed: please wait") are also the people who are complaining that LJ staff needs to really start thinking before they speak. That's just internally inconsistent enough to be really fucking obnoxious.

LJ cheated on us, that bastard!
Also preaching to the choir: LJ has a lot of good faith to consistently demonstrate before the trust of the userbase is built back. LJ has got to do that, and LJ has got to succeed in doing that, and it will take a long time for the userbase to build up faith that LJ is going to address concerns and fix things and communicate so that problems like this don't happen again.

Put in poly-type terms: LJ said they were going to be in a relationship with us, the userbase, and the advertisers were only going to be secondaries, and the paid users were going to be primaries. And they'd volunteered to not get all affectionate with the secondaries where the primaries could see them, unless of course the primaries deliberately barged in on them. Of course, this followed close on the heels of LJ saying that they were going to get married with 6A but still be primaries with the userbase, and the userbase didn't know 6A and didn't really get a chance to process it before it had already happened.

The "poll # 6666666" post that I linked essentially said "We're going to make wild monkey love to our secondaries right in the middle of the living room floor, whether or not our primaries happen to be watching Lost right then! It was our spouse's idea, and won't that be awesome? Making love rocks so hard!" Rather understandably, the primaries stood up in revolt, and wanted a total veto of the secondaries right then and there. Since the idea of LJ getting secondaries was proposed by the spouse in the first place, the primaries were kind of all "Um... shouldn't you have discussed this with *us* first?"

Of course, the primaries were not actually given veto power over the secondaries to begin with, and while LJ was not *actually* standing there going "La la I'm not listening" with its fingers in its ears while the primaries were screaming, it did come off a bit that way. (However, "la la I'm not listening" is perhaps a more mature choice of communication than the Rant McRantypants response that instinct says some of LJ-staff was dying to implement.) Clearly, the "communication, communication, communication" rule is not being followed...

So what can be done to fix some of this brokenness?

• 6A people need to have a more visible presence on key parts of LJ, parts with user exposure.


• LJ people who have the trust of the userbase need to have visibly good interactions with people who are known to be 6A. In public. Which could mean having guest bloggers from 6A core put comments in news posts and announce things that are unlikely to be controversial, and are highly likely to be cool. It could mean having 6A people and LJ people having silly threads on the first page of news posts, after having identified those people as 6A people in the post above. Yes, people will know that the silly thread is probably very carefully orchestrated behind the scenes, but the point is, we don't know these people, and we need to.


• At least a vague org chart, complete with public usernames, to acquaint the userbase with who does what. (I asked for this in the latest round of feedback questions and answers, though I expect that to take a bit of a while, since Stuff Has Cropped Up, and LJ staff will be busy putting out fires and repairing trust, rather than answering less-relevant questions just yet.)


• Past issues from the time of 6A up until current actively addressed. The big two I can think of right off the bat are the navbar and the boobies.
( Expansion on same. )

Random Misconceptions I am seeing:

• Comment-spam is related to the sponsored communities. No. It is not. I love y'all to death, but no. Not LJ, and not endorsed. ( Cracked down on, in fact. )