what would you say to a new user are the reasons to use Dreamwidth instead of (or in addition to) another blogging/journaling platform? Looking for your top five persuasive reasons in comments.
I can only talk about why to use it instead of LJ/IJ and not in comparison to Wordpress, Blogger, etc. (In the case of Blogger, given my minimal experience, I'd say "way more featureful", but that'd be true of LJ as well.)
1. Division between Access and Subscribe. You can follow someone without having to reciprocally give them access to your own locked posts if you don't want to (nor having to fudge around it with fiters).
2. Ability to import content from other journaling services.
3. Ethical integrity - most recent example being how you stopped dealing with several payment processors because of the content restrictions they wanted, rather than bowing to them.
4. Lack of ads. I am one of those horrible people who uses an adblocker so o noes I am depriving sites of revenue, but it has a lot to do with how bothersome the ads are. On a site I do want to support, I can put up with reasonable size static banners, especially if they're from Project Wonderful (whose business model I like). But a couple months ago for some reason I was using LJ while logged out on a computer not mine with no adblocking, and great googly moogly, was it a pain in the rear. I can only suppose that their logic is something like "We'll annoy people into paying for the service!"
5. If I want to harass mark about something I can just turn up at that LARP downtown and get all up in his face
er.
5. Even though there are still oddities lurkng about and things not fully developed, the overall feel of the service is that it's fresh and clean of the accumulated cruft and dusty corners that something like LJ has.
no subject
I can only talk about why to use it instead of LJ/IJ and not in comparison to Wordpress, Blogger, etc. (In the case of Blogger, given my minimal experience, I'd say "way more featureful", but that'd be true of LJ as well.)
1. Division between Access and Subscribe. You can follow someone without having to reciprocally give them access to your own locked posts if you don't want to (nor having to fudge around it with fiters).
2. Ability to import content from other journaling services.
3. Ethical integrity - most recent example being how you stopped dealing with several payment processors because of the content restrictions they wanted, rather than bowing to them.
4. Lack of ads. I am one of those horrible people who uses an adblocker so o noes I am depriving sites of revenue, but it has a lot to do with how bothersome the ads are. On a site I do want to support, I can put up with reasonable size static banners, especially if they're from Project Wonderful (whose business model I like). But a couple months ago for some reason I was using LJ while logged out on a computer not mine with no adblocking, and great googly moogly, was it a pain in the rear. I can only suppose that their logic is something like "We'll annoy people into paying for the service!"
5. If I want to harass![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
mark about something I can just turn up at that LARP downtown and get all up in his faceer.
5. Even though there are still oddities lurkng about and things not fully developed, the overall feel of the service is that it's fresh and clean of the accumulated cruft and dusty corners that something like LJ has.