Automatic Payments Turned Off

[matgb]

I got my renewal notice from LJ a few days back, and managed to actually compose my reply-the below has just been sent to Accounts @ LJ:

FAO Livejournal/Six Apart senior management,

I have taken the decision to switch off automatic payments while I decide whether I wish to continue giving money to your company. I have two, specific, current concerns regarding Livejournal and the services it offers that are forcing me to rethink my status as a paid user.

1) Datacentre security.
Competing blogging platforms such as Wordpress.com and Blogger.com have a multiple redundancy system for its hosting, so that if one centre fails there are backups elsewhere; specifically, they do not trust all their data security to one location situated the wrong side of a major fault line.

2) Lack of clarity regarding abuse procedures and protocols--I accept the Terms of Service, and understand that the law regarding what is acceptable content is not clear. What I am not happy with is the unclear manner in which the TOS are applied and the perceived inability to explain procedures to your userbase.

Both are significant concerns for me; I like my content and have been using the Livejrounal service as a store for my thoughts for some time, I would not like to see this service suddenly cease due to inadvertent breach of TOS or the loss of the datacentre on a more permanent basis.

I would like to see a public statement from senior Livejournal management, especially on my first point; Anil Dash has already acknowledged my datacentre concern,s if Six Apart intends to remedy this lack it would substantially assist me in making my decision.

Regards,

Mat Bowles (MatGB)

On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 19:36:16 UT, LiveJournal.com <accounts@livejournal.com> wrote:
/> Automatic payments have been turned off on your account, matgb.
/> Your current paid account item(s) will expire on the following date(s):
/>
/> Paid Account: expires Aug 22, 2007
/>
/> To reactivate automatic payments, please visit:
/> http://www.livejournal.com/manage/payments/
/>
/> To renew your paid account manually, please visit:
/> http://www.livejournal.com/shop/view.bml?item=paidaccount
/>
/> You may reply to this email with any payment questions.
/>
/> Thank you for supporting the site,
/> LiveJournal Team
/>

Renwal date 22nd August. I'm torn. I still hate that LJ has an ad supported level, ir destroys the effective business model and removes part of my impetus to actually pay them money. In addition, the presence of these very adverts was a specific cause for 6A to overreact and mess up in the initial strikethrough debacle.

But now, the main reason to continue paying is to not see the damn things (I don't use adblocking software--the web does need to be paid for). Secondary reasons include access to userpics (I've sort of got used to having 110 of the things), easy syndication of other blogs, post pages in my style (which while it's not finished I'm still uite happy with), etc.

But can I, in all conscience, continue to give money to an organisaton that is as incompetent as this one blatantly is? Is it possible to continue to support the site (which I love) without supporting the current management style (which is crap)?

I may go for a monthly renewal or similar, or I might just suck it up and pay the tenner it'll take. But I did feel I had to express my opinion to them, so thought I'd share the letter openly.

Comments

[andrewducker]

If I stopped working with incompetent organisations I'd....

Hang on - are there any competent ones?

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

You know, I don't think there are :(

[malkavelli.livejournal.com]

Yes there are, although sadly "competant" doesn't necessarily mean "human."

It can mean things like "efficient", "pragmatic" or even "ruthless" tho' :-(

[fearmeforiampink]

Ignoring your high minded theorising and moralising, my question would be this:

Do you feel you get yours moneys worth, for what you pay for?

[matgb]

Value for money? Yes.

But I also strongly believe in asserting market pressure through consumer choice; I don't buy Nestlé products, I avoid other products if I can, etc. Any consumer choice has to be about more than pure money, the externalities matter.

In this case, I'm not sure I can continue to give the company money; the product is good, but the way they run it isn't, so applying a little financial pressure is a good way to go.

[fearmeforiampink]

True. Just wanted to make sure the value for money criteria was in there.

[poifaerie.livejournal.com]

I like my "sponsored" option. All I have to do is scroll past the ads on my page, something I seem to do a hundred times a day while on the net anyway.... If companies are so desperate as to advertise on my blog, I don't care; it's their money being wasted! I get fun things for free... what's not to love?

[foxfirefey]

Well, it's always possible advertisers will figure out their money is being wasted and the value of the ads on your blog will drop. Then the company wouldn't be able to support your blog anymore. Many Plus users use ad block. That, too, reduces the value of the ads.

It also puts users into a position where they are not the customer, but the product, and the company's main objective is to be able to deliver you to the advertisers. The more banner blindness you develop, the more the company has to figure out how to get you to pay attention to the advertising.

Also, sometimes there are security breaches and spyware and malware gets through ad screening. However, you are probably running decent security on your computer and wouldn't be affected by that.

[poifaerie.livejournal.com]

Well, it's always possible advertisers will figure out their money is being wasted and the value of the ads on your blog will drop.

That's LJ's problem, not mine! If sponsored privileges were revoked, I couldn't really care too ways... I'd just have to choose which three icons were my favourite and go back to life pre-ads (or just switch to Greatest Journal permanently, snrk!)

As for the customer/product relationship? Everyday, in newspapers, magazines and on television I see women like me being used as commodities to sell a product. Doesn't faze me any more. In one way I love adverts because I'm interested in how the world works, in particular the ability to manipulate the mind of another... ads are a great example of this.

And I have firewalls and virus scanners and the like, IMO LJ is just as safe as any website that carries ads, and I'm still happy to view them.

PS: cute rat!

[foxfirefey]

I think at this point if ads ended up failing, LJ would shut down. It's too late to just say oopsie and revoke sponsored privileges. Hopefully GJ would be able to make a living off of its ads in a way that LJ could not.

And please don't think I mention the user as a product in a way that implies you shouldn't like it because it demeans you in some manner, if I'm reading your response--I mention it because it has a serious capacity to be detrimental to the user experience. One of the most obvious examples is interstitial ads. It's very possible that they don't bug you! But most people don't like them--they want to go directly to the page they clicked on the link for, not have to click past a page ad. Some places manage to do them okay, such as Salon.com where you go through one interstital ad and then get to browse content for a day. But on other sites they can be quite the pain.

On LJ, an example I could give would be how, after a lot of feedback saying that most people found MyLJ to be useless and didn't go there...they decided to make the homepage into a version of MyLJ. Except unlike MyLJ, the modules cannot be removed or customized to the user's liking. I suspect they never will be, even though many people request it. This is because some of the modules contain sponsored content or have the possibility of being sponsored, and if users could remove them, the page would not be as valuable for advertisers.

PS: Yay ratties!

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

I now login to a post and not the LJ homepage just to avoid it, and that's without adverts on it!

[matgb]

*cough* 'twas 'fey that taught me that trick...

(I'm working, honest, working...)

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

Chuckle - getting a bit circular here!

[foxfirefey]

Well, even the homepage has ads on it before you log in, so...

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

For me, the main loss with giving up my paid account was that I lost the ability to add feeds or to create polls. Obviously no one really needs their LJ gallery. And with a basic account you hardly ever see adverts, so paying to avoid them doesn't make a lot of sense!

[andrewducker]

I need my LJ Gallery - it's where I keep my photos online!

[(Anonymous)]

Just thought it'd be a problem if you wanted locked pictures in it. Otherwise it doesn't matter a hoot where your pictures are, since off-site images can still be displayed in LJ.

When I backed up my gallery I gave all the pictures their LJ file numbers, so if I need to find picture X that's no longer appearing in post Y, the link in post Y tells me which picture it is.

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

There you go - I wasn't even logged in...

[paulrattew.livejournal.com]

Personally i really don't mind the adverts. I have a 'plus' account and like the extras thaqt it offers me over the basic one, although i barely make any use of all but the most basiic features of Livejournal. Most of the time i barely notice them - if you have them on you just tend to focus on the other parts of the page. A bit like if you live by a busy road, after a while of living there you barely notice the road noise. Also, the adverts do not really interfere with the way i view the page - they are not in the way and it is not like i have to scroll down past them to get to the content.

As i have other 'social networking' pages i do not use livejournal for things like putting up photos. Livejournal just does not do that as well as facebook and whatever you may think of facebook (i know it is hardly perfect) it does enable me to keep in touch with many friends, that i would otherwise lose contact with, far more easily than livejournal. That may just be because it has more of the people i know on it (a subjuect that i know Mat has posted about recently) but i also think that its whole set up is just more suited to that sort of thing.

Recently i was considering upgrading my account here to a paid one from a basic, but instead lumped for the plus. This is partly due to the comments made by people like Matt. I want to be able to have a service that is safe, secure and not going to die on me, that allows me to blog. That's about it. I do not need many fancy other things like userpics, they are superfluous to the blogging. I don't like thinking that this service may go down at any point with little back up. Most of all, i don't like having to self edit before i even start to write, wondering if i write about something really contreversial will i get pulled because someone complains. To me, adds are not an issue, nbut the other two that Mat talks about are serious concerns

[el-staplador.livejournal.com]

I'm quite happy with my basic account, but then I don't have the expertise to do anything more exciting even if I were to upgrade to something more snazzy.