oh, that sucks. myspacification of LJ. Sucks sucks sucks. :(

I had a little to say about it too. So far the negative comments are in the realm of the hundreds, the positive comments in the realm of none. let's hope they're listening. I've really liked the spamless, happy community here and will miss it terribly if it really heads in this direction.

oh, and thanks for the heads-up!

Wordpress is robust, powerful, has decent anti-spam tools, and is completely configurable. I'm very happy with my decision to leave LJ as an avenue for my personal blog. I do sort of miss having a phone-post option, for the few times I actually did use it. But for everything else, it works and works well.

Make hewgill.com/blog your new home with Wordpress :)

We'll see how this plays out, but just to throw comment the other way, note that it was said:

"You don't have to use sponsored features, and you don't have to join sponsored communities."

How long do you think an anti-ScienceofSleep community would last before being deleted by LJ staff?

I'm guessing 12 hours. Tops.

I looked, but did not see on.

Please, go ahead and make one, and prove your point.

exists, and looks to be in no danger of being deleted.

By the way, did you actually check out http://scienceofsleep.livejournal.com/ ? It's pretty unobtrusive.

No, and I have no interest in doing so. What happened to the LJ social contract that said something like, "No ads, ever"? What about the new "sponsored features"? Would you like to see an ad for Pepsi on every comment page even though you never use whatever optional feature they sponsored?

FUD FUD FUD.

If you want to bitch about something, go and see what it actually looks like in practice. Hence my comment to go look at the only example of a 'sponsored community' we have.

Don't like a sponsored feature? Don't use it.

You're just spreading unwarranted fear with your other sitpulations. The intro post clearly states that if you don't want these things don't use them.

You didn't reply to the "no ads ever" part.

Find me a reference to 'no ads' ever.

I'm unopposed to ad-based services if they are unobtrustive. Example: Google and Gmail ads.

Compare:

http://www.livejournal.com/legal/principles.bml (now)
http://web.archive.org/web/20040401175244/http://www.livejournal.com/site/contract.bml (april 2004)

See also:

http://fuzzie.livejournal.com/133601.html
http://www.valleywag.com/tech/top/a-livejournal-contract-is-worth-the-paper-its-written-on-168452.php

References to livejournal social contract abound on google.

Well found.

...we promise to never offer advertising space in our service or on our pages.

That's pretty unequivocal.

Indeed, that community seems pretty nicely isolated and self-contained... From the description on the lj_biz entry it doesn't seem like they have plans to force ads or banners onto other user's personal journals.

Ok, I checked it out. Now, in the posts in the community, who's the shill and who's not? What, exactly, is Warner Bros. paying for the right to do or get? Why couldn't they just have created a normal (free) community like anybody else? What's the catch?

So I looked at it... I don't see anything there that couldn't be done with a standard paid community account. The only difference is this "LJ sponsored community" thing, and I haven't seen it anywhere on my pages.

I would stand behind and help drive a cow driven blogging site, if LJ did choose the path of money over integrity.

Until then, here I stay.