What's the "controversy" this time?

I heard something about doing away with the free accounts without ads, and given the current climate of the economy, I don't really blame them.

I read the article... and um, I still am not sure what's going on.

And when they came for the depressed bisexual interests...

Yeah, I don't know. I find it hard to care about it, but I'm also not at all trusting my care-about-things intuitions these days. OTOH, it's not like not posting for a day is a particularly disproportionate response, either.

wait what? did i miss something? what's going on?

Meh.

I think it's just the straw that broke the camel's back, in terms of multitudes of changes made without any sort of consideration of community impact. Banning hundreds of accounts that wrote fanfic, then the sudden "this post may contain adult content" system, disappearing interests, etc.

I think some of those are over-reactions, but the bizarre levels of censorship that randomly pop up for no apparent reason make me worried about the future of LJ. There's no apparent way of telling what might be suddenly considered inappropriate.

No?

I am always very skeptical when people are convinced they're entitled to real resources for no money; it seems crazy to rely on that and assume it can keep going forever. So I've always assumed LJ would just close up shop (or become totally different) someday.

If you've been counting on it to be permanent, then yeah, this is probably a huge deal.

Yeah, it was all "we're going to keep you informed about what's going on"

And then "Here's what we did with our first hundred days" (with no mention of the change to basic accounts)
and then fifties of comments in respon"Oh yeah, we did disable basic accounts, we were trying to make a better user interface for new users."
and then it turned out that the vaulted "LJ community members" had been strongly opposed to it, but were basically told about it when it happened and given no opportunity to change the outcome.

So yeah, blargh on them.

(Says the permanent user who don't see no ads never.)

Well, sure. But I've been seeing boycotts and objections and defections for two years over the same problems. Remember the breastfeeding-icon brouhaha? Two years ago.

In a word? No.

The entire thing seems to be distilled entitlement with a twist of bershon.

It's obviously not the end of the world. :) It's just another little data point in the schism between business models that believe "free stuff is stuff we aren't making money on" and models that believe "free stuff hooks people into spending money."