My previous post, in which I did little else than link to the first two announcements of the LiveJournal deal, seems to have received a disproportionately high number of visits. Since then, I’ve seen a couple of WTF reactions, including Justin’s.
Looking for fodder for a more substantive post, I searched for “livejournal sup wtf” and found comments on the deal by the LJ founder. Brad Fitzpatrick welcomes the new Russian overlords:
This is pretty cool because: They’re ridiculously excited about LiveJournal… They want to throw a lot of resources at LiveJournal… “LiveJournal.com, Inc.” now stands alone again, focusing on nothing but LJ… I’ll have more LJ influence (via new role as advisory board member) than I’ve had recently.
If I was on LJ, I would be reassured by this. I don’t see why Brad, who now works at Google, would feel pressured to post it. But now, as he says, we “get to sit back and watch all the community reactions and conspiracy theories.”
Some LJ users may be reassured by Brad popping up, but it’s not going to do much to placate those who blame Brad for selling them down the river in the first place. If he thought selling to 6A was a good idea, why should they trust him on SUP?
Those who thought felt betrayed when Brad sold to 6A probably aren’t on LJ any more, and so probably won’t personally feel sold down the Russia river.
Thanks for the comment – it’s good to see LJ, as well as WordPress, from your perspective.
That’s true for many, but not for all. The trouble with LJ is that it was social networking before social networking happened: people are locked into livejournal because that’s where their friends are posting their friends-locked posts.
It’s like saying ‘I don’t like the direction Facebook’s going in so I’m moving to MySpace.’ Chances are you only ended up on Facebook in the first place because that’s where everyone else was.
Good point.
I think that 6A got many of the ingredients for Vox from LJ. When I was playing around with the Vox beta, it seemed like most of the other people on Vox were LJers.