Hee, it's not that I don't want to get dragged into another discussion, just that I realized after-the-fact that what I intended as an abstract discussion of possible motivations for the changes LJ made this week from a social-media-theory standpoint is possibly also encouraging people to say grumpy and/or nasty things about LJ in comments to dw_news, which I am trying very very very hard to keep from happening. (For a lot of reasons! But mostly because we couldn't exist without LJ, and we have a lot of friends who still work for LJ, and Mark and I worked for LJ for a really long time and still feel that vague fondness like the kind you feel for the ex-significant-other you broke up amiably with years and years ago and have sort of drifted apart from, and I try to heavily moderate the comments to dw_news to keep them productive, and and and...) I realized a bit too late that analysis could be taken as an invitation to griping, heh.

But I should maybe post something in my journal about the changes, because it is interesting to analyse what they're doing from a social-media-theory standpoint, even if I'm totally off base about what they were thinking! And I find the whole thing utterly fascinating, not in the least because of the tension between what people say they want (and, almost always, genuinely believe they want) and what actual, observable, quantifiable data says they want. It's very, very fascinating.