Dreamwidth Update: 16 December

[denise]

Hello, Dreamwidth! This news post is full of a lot of exciting things, so I will dive straight in.

Behind the cut:

* Development news
* New Create Entries beta
* New themes and styles
* Also new in the last code push
* Open account creation
* Reminder: holiday promotion
* Possible import/crosspost problems
* Deleted accounts purged
* The Ada Initiative
* Version 2.0

Development news

Code tours for the bugs that have been resolved since the last update:

21 Oct - 31 Oct
1 Nov - 11 Nov
11 Nov - 21 Nov
21 Nov - 3 Dec
3 Dec - 7 Dec

All of those above changes are now live on the site and available for use, so if you see something interesting, you won't have to wait for it.

Welcome-back this week to kaisa, laitaine, and yvi, who return to us after a break from DW development!

I'll get into some more of the awesome changes included in this last code push in a minute, but first I wanted to talk about the ...

New Create Entries beta

It's been a long, hard road -- you would not believe what we had to do on the backend in order to make this work! -- but the first draft of our new Create Entries workflow is now in beta testing. If you're interested in participating in the beta test, visit the Beta Features page, and the second of the two beta testing opportunities is for the new Create Entries page. (The first is for the new-style Javascript behavior -- we've been working on modernizing all the JS across the site to run faster, better, cleaner, and more adaptably.)

Not everything is finished yet -- among the things not yet available are the "don't autoformat entry" option, the rich text editor, editing existing entries in the new workflow, and the saving of draft posts of any type -- but this beta is an opportunity to spot not only bugs but workflow, usability, and accessibility problems.

I personally turned on the new version the second it was live and I've been loving it -- fu and hope did an amazing job taking my original crappy pencil sketches with lots of handwaving and turning them, with your feedback, into something that Just Works. It's also amazingly customizable: if you hit the image, the page will enter "settings mode" and let you collapse, move, and remove any pane you don't use regularly (or put back something you got rid of and now you miss).

There are still some bugs we're uncovering -- no matter how well you test, having tens of thousands of people using something will always turn up something you don't find in testing -- so if you spot something weird, report it on the bug reporting post in dw_beta. We especially want to hear from anybody who has accessibility problems with the new workflow.

Massive, massive thanks go to everybody who's offered feedback on the changes so far. This whole process may have been relatively painful on the technical end, but it's been a delight to go through on the user-facing end, and y'all and your smart, productive, constructive feedback are a major, major reason why.

New themes

The last two code pushes included a massive number of new themes for customizing your journal -- 160 in total, spread out over 17 different styles. If you've been looking for a new look for your journal, why not try browsing through the featured styles and see if any of them strike your fancy?

There are also three relatively-new styles: Crisped, Dusty Foot, and Five AM. Check them out!

Also new in the last code push

Since our last code push, we've had a collection of interesting bugs resolved. A large number were to fix problems with the Create Entries beta (or the new-JS-on-journals beta), or backend things you wouldn't notice (go on, ask kareila about moving around all of our perl modules; I think she'll still be twitching about it in another six months), but there's still a whole host of things that you should find interesting. The full details are in the code tours, but if you're curious, some of the big ones:

Bugfixes

* Polls with more than 90 checkboxes in a single poll question weren't recording votes properly. This is now fixed.

* The display settings for when to show image placeholders for images of unknown size were accidentally switched around, so that never meant always and always meant never. This is now fixed.

* If you had a lot (like, thousands) of multilevel tags (of the "category: specific" form), the display of those tags was timing out in some cases when viewing your journal or your tags page. We've optimized the code to display the tags so they won't time out anymore.

* If an entry had over 10 pages of comments, the box that displays the number of pages was behaving weirdly in some browsers, which has been driving me nuts for like, two years now and which I never got around to filing a bug for. Fortunately someone else (namely ninetydegrees) noticed and patched it :)

* When you created a new community, it was accidentally being left out of your Default reading filter if you'd created one. This is now fixed!


Enhancements

* You will no longer receive a success notice for every crosspost you make by default; you'll only be notified in your Inbox if an attempt fails. You can still go to the notifications setting page and choose to receive success notices if you want, though!

* On the interests search page, you can now specify up to three interests to search for at a time. This is an AND search, not an OR search -- if you want to find people who are interested in knitting, cats, and textual deconstruction of Japanese RPGs, you can do it now. (And then introduce me to them, because I think we'd probably get along.)

* A massive new update to the external sites you can use in the <user name=foo site=bar> tag: now you can also refer to people on Blogspot (blogspot.com), Delicious (delicious.com), DeviantArt (deviantart.com), LastFM (last.fm), Ravelry (ravelry.com), Wordpress (wordpress.com), and Plurk (plurk.com) and have the tag pull the correct userhead icon.

* The option for setting who could send you a private message was on the Manage Profile page, which only made sense if you thought of it as a contact method and not as a privacy-related setting. Since it was clear that most people thought of it as a privacy setting, it's now on the Privacy tab of the Manage Settings page.

* Poll enhancement: you can now not only view how everyone answered an individual poll question, but also view how each individual person answered all of the questions in the poll. Hopefully this will make things easier for people using DW to conduct surveys!

* Another poll enhancement: if you use the scale question type in a poll, you can now add labels to the high end and low end of the scale, so people don't have to stare at the question and think "okay, does 1 mean I agree completely or I disagree completely?"


Honorable Mention

In the "things you will hopefully never notice but oh my god, so much work" department, we totally have to say a thank you to kareila for all her work on reorganizing the backend code so things are where you'd expect them to be (instead of where they got put randomly over the years) and to ninetydegrees for not only patching a ton of new themes, but also going through and optimizing over six hundred preview images to make them load faster and display with more reliable color information. Both of y'all deserve cookies, seriously.

Open account creation

Earlier this year, we decided to try out a "no invite codes needed" week to see whether we could do it semi-regularly and still keep the same level of service (and of spam protection) that the invite codes let us stick with. The results were pretty good, so we've decided to try it again, and for a little longer this time!

For the rest of the year, creating a Dreamwidth account will not require an invite code: just visit the Create an Account page.

We do reserve the right to switch invite codes back on if open account creation is causing problems -- invite codes let us carefully balance the site's resources and keep spammers from overrunning the site -- but with luck, that shouldn't be a problem.

Reminder: holiday promotion

Just a reminder: for the remainder of 2011, all orders made in the Dreamwidth Shop will receive a 10% points bonus for future use. For instance, if you buy yourself a 12 month paid account (350 points), we'll give you 35 points to spend later once you complete your order.

This is one way of saying "Thank you!" to everyone who helps to support Dreamwidth -- it's your support that keeps us on the air. We're completely user-supported: we take no venture capital, have no outside investors, and are completely advertising-and-sponsorship-free. Your support is what allows us to keep making Dreamwidth better, and we are super grateful for everyone who's given that support.

Possible import/crosspost problems

Things have mostly calmed down now, but if you've been watching dw_maintenance (and you should be!) you'll have noticed that over the past few weeks there have been some issues with importing from and crossposting to LiveJournal. This is because LiveJournal has been having problems with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks intermittently for the past few weeks, and their DDoS mitigation attempts can make it very hard for Dreamwidth to contact the site.

In general, if you receive errors in your inbox telling you that the job can't connect to LiveJournal, you're running into that problem. Until you receive the error in your inbox, the job is still running. For imports, wait a little while after you get the failure message and then schedule a new import. For crossposts, wait a little while, then edit the entry and check the crosspost box, then save the entry. (You don't have to make any actual edits to the entry.)

LJ's people have been absolutely great about keeping us in the loop about what's going on, and we'd like to thank them for the information and wish them luck in their mitigation efforts.

Deleted accounts purged

A few months ago, we mentioned that we don't regularly run the script that permanently removes deleted accounts from the site, because of the load it can place on the servers and the databases. We realized that we never did run that script after all -- oops! We've fixed that now.

Because we've been so irregular about running it, we changed the time an account has been deleted to make it eligible for complete removal from 30 days to 90 days to give a little more wiggle room. The script has finished running, so if there's a username you've had your eye on for renaming, check to see if it's available now.

We'll try to be a little more regular about purging deleted accounts in the upcoming year. Also, remember: this does not affect inactive accounts, only accounts that the owner has chosen to set to 'deleted' status. Once you register a personal DW account, that username is yours until you choose to delete it.

The Ada Initiative

One of the things Dreamwidth has received a lot of press about is the gender balance of our contributors -- while most open source projects struggle to have just a few contributors who identify as female, our volunteer base is well over half female-identified. We're just one small fish in a very big pond, though, and there's been a lot of discussion in the open source world about how to address the gender imbalance problem: while women make up slightly over 20% of the IT world as a whole, statistics show that they make up about 2% of open source contributors.

I've been volunteering on the board of directors for the Ada Initiative, an organization dedicated to concrete, active efforts to improve women's participation in open technology and culture communities and projects. The experience of being a board member has been awesome (and exhausting!) and although the heavy lifting is being done by the two employees of the Initiative, it's been great to have an opportunity to pitch in and contribute.

Diversity, opportunity, and equality of all kinds are incredibly important to me and mark, and in the spirit of furthering that goal, we'd like to invite you all to consider contributing to the Ada Initiative fundraising drive. Meanwhile, in the spirit of putting our money where our mouths are, we'll be donating 10% of our gross revenues for the month of December (with a minimum donation of $1000) to the organization ourselves.

Version 2.0

No, not Dreamwidth version 2.0. We're pleased to announce the arrival of mark and aposiopetic's version 2.0, Oliver Graham Smith.

Oliver has already mastered serious face and is a champion sleeper. Mom, Dad, and baby (and older brother!) are doing wonderfully, and we're looking forward to getting Oliver's first Dreamwidth patch in another 13 years or so. :)

Congratulations to Mark and Ari, and welcome to Oliver!

*

That's it for us for another update! As always, if you're having problems with Dreamwidth, Support can help you; for notices of site problems and downtime, check the Twitter status page; if you've got an idea to make the site better, you can make a suggestion. We'll see you in a few weeks for our next update.

Comments

[rainne]

That's actually really interesting - I don't really know much about social media except how to use various bits of it, so that impromptu lecture was all new and good info for me.

It makes sense, though - it's why it's hard to get away from LJ, even with all the fuckery, because it's so difficult going through the friend-making process on a new site when you have 300+ friends on LJ, many of whom haven't switched/won't switch/won't switch until everyone else switches/etc. Also, I don't think they were intending to try and be like Facebook, just that it had a Facebooky sort of feel to it - which again makes sense, considering what you said about the social media underpinnings.

What I don't understand, though, is if they are trying to make the commenting function better, why would they do away with subject lines - those are important! - and mess with the way the threading works? Those were two of the things that were best about the old way of doing comments!

[denise]

Having subject lines on comments is actually fairly unusual if you look across various platforms, and the reason for that is, everything you can take out of the process reduces the chance people will look at it, say "eh, too complicated" and wander off. (It's known as 'decision fatigue': if you offer people too many things they have to do/add/choose/decide between, they're statistically more likely to say "fuck it" and do nothing. It ties in with low-engagement vs high-engagement.) Somebody in charge of the design most likely decided that comment subjects weren't in use often enough to justify the added "cost" to user engagement -- not that they weren't used at all, just that they weren't used enough in the target demographic/audience/use case to justify the penalty to user engagement. The threading changes, almost certainly the same thing: the whole "use direct comment link to re-parent the thread" is not very well known at all outside the circles of people who use it all the time, and the changes do make it easier to walk up the comment tree and see things above the comment you're replying to without reloading the page.

Mind you, this is all speculation from my knowledge of the industry; I don't know what the decisionmaking process is over on LJ. But I get so :( when I see people railing about them being incompetent. They really, really aren't. They may have made some bad decisions here and there, everybody does from time to time (we've had some scorchers) and I don't think anybody would dispute that, but they're not stupid or incompetent; they're just designing for a different use case, and making decisions about tradeoffs.

And there are a lot of different use cases for LJ. Historically speaking, LJ was designed to be very flexible and the userbase responded by using it very flexibly, and because of the network effect everybody only sees their own use case and that of their friends/communities -- and they think everyone uses LJ like that, and don't realize that if they went out about any more than 2 degrees of separation they'd find how people were using LJ unrecognizeable. In 2006 I sat down to make a list of all the different use cases for LJ, and I came up with over two dozen before I threw up my hands and gave up. From a site owner/decisionmaker standpoint, that's very cool in that it proves your product is adaptable and it's awesome to see people using it in awesome ways, but it really ties your hands in how you can adapt and improve the product, because everything you do is going to break something for someone and you have to make tough choices about where you're going to draw the line and say "this use of our site is very nifty, but we can't design with it in mind".

Which, for a large site like LJ that has to not only make payroll but also recoup initial investments and answer to venture capitalists and outside investors, is going to be in a much different place than a smaller site that's entirely user-supported like DW. We have a huge advantage (from one point of view, mind you, although it obviously happens to be the point of view we espouse) in that we don't have to justify ourselves to outside forces like that. It means we don't have the financial resources LJ has, nor the usage -- because, again, sites that concentrate on the high engagement end of things are always going to be smaller and grow less quickly -- but it also means that we don't have to court the high usage and high metrics that outside investors and advertisers want to see, and therefore we can have a little bit more wiggle room in how we design. (Obviously we want to be easy to use, and we have a lot of usability projects in progress because of it; we've also been talking about lots of ways to improve our low-engagement "routes in" without compromising the existing high-engagement offerings or affecting the site culture too badly. And of course it would be nice to have ten times the budget we have! But as long as we're achieving a certain number of paid accounts, we can keep operating, and we are hitting that number.)

It's all a tradeoff: if we wanted to have the resources to become a superstar in the Web 2.0 world, we'd need to put a lot more attention into attracting low-engagement use, and we'd probably have to go for outside investments in order to have the resources to support things. Which is all well and good for many startups! It's just not what we want for Dreamwidth, which was always envisioned as being the neighborhood corner store and not the Wal-Mart superstore. I mean, I totally wouldn't turn up my nose at that ten times our budget, but I wouldn't want it to come at the expense of what makes DW special.

I AM REALLY RAMBLING NOW. See, this is what happens when you ask me questions about things I love to talk about. Social media is so fascinating, and I've been working in it since before it was even called social media.

[rainne]

I WOULD RAMBLE SIMILARLY IF YOU ASKED ME ABOUT MEDIEVAL EUROPE SO THERE. :D

And while some might say that DW's low usage (compared to LJ) is a bad thing, I say at least it means you aren't getting DDoS'ed by the Russian government. Personally, I prefer shopping at the neighborhood corner store. I haven't been in a Wal-Mart in ages.

What you said about the decision fatigue - I think I read about that somewhere else, in a different context - they were talking about how people get super-stressed doing things like grocery shopping a lot more than they used to, because say you want a box of Hamburger Helper or something - where maybe 10 years ago there were two or three kinds, now there's 150 kinds and you stand there staring at the shelf like I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I AM GOING TO WANT ON FRIDAY until you just say "oh, fuck it" and blow your whole shopping budget in the chocolate-and-potato-chip aisle.

Isn't there some way for the changes they make to be optional? Like, you have S1 and S2, right? So make an S3 that's designed for the low-engagement users, and make that the default, and then people who don't want it can opt out of it. Is that kind of thing even possible?

Also, what you said about resources reminds me that I need to contribute. I always forget, since I have a seed account and don't have to pay every year. XD

[denise]

Possible, yes -- just about anything is possible -- but introducing another choice is a bad idea, plus it would increase the support necessary. (Like, now all of a sudden you'd have to test changes in even more settings and configurations. It's already bad enough. There's a reason one of the first things we did was kill S1.)

(Also, it wouldn't be "S3", since S1 vs S2 are actually journal customization systems. The fact that the new design only applies to S1 right now is a very long explanation and only partially relevant, but essentially: they probably started with S1 because the S1 concept of "journal entry page" was ridiculously old and needed an update desperately: S2 handles journal entry pages through the journal customization system, not through the site templating system that S1 uses. Way back when Brad started work on S2, he intended for all entry display pages to be handled through the journal customization system someday, because the old code was really really old and inefficient, even back then. On DW, every entry page is displayed through S2, believe it or not, even if it's site-styled comment pages: that way we only have one code pathway to maintain.)

But, yeah, offering an opt-out for a full redesign is very, very rarely a smart choice. If you scroll down to "Will new features be opt-in or opt-out?" in our pre-open-beta business FAQs I go into it in more detail, but essentially, it's easy to do an opt out for a new feature (if the opt out isn't just "okay, so don't use it then!") but it's often counterproductive to do an opt out for a new design. We're back to the decision fatigue again.

(frozen comment)

[rainne]

OK, that mostly makes sense.

But you did manage to scare me. Are you saying the reason I (and others) still have the old style comments page on my LJ is because I'm using S2, and that eventually they're going to do this to S2? Because if that happens I might just have to cut a bitch.

[jeshyr]

Thanks for all this discussion about social media theory and how it applies to LJ and especially to Dreamwidth and such. It's really interesting and the stuff about engagement ladders and decision fatigue makes a lot of sense!!

[schwertlilie]

Seconding rb - thanks for this crash course in social media. :) It's made some things online make more sense, and not just in blogging-service-land.

Thanks too for staying classy about what's going on with LiveJournal right now, and (as a company & a representative) not dragging their name through the mud to win points with disgruntled LJ users. It means a lot. ♥

[aesopian]

I truly appreciate you taking the time explain this. I want to think that I'm a half-way intelligent person so it's nice to have someone who will explain the ins and outs behind the system changes and offer a reasonable explanation for a site's actions and decisions. It doesn't make me entirely happy with the changes on LJ still, but at least I can start to look at it a little more objectively.

My love to you and yours. <3

[phenylalanine]

Seconding everyone else, denise, thank you for taking the time to explain all of that! It was very interesting and stuff I hadn't heard before. And it really does help explain some of LJ's reasons for removing features, which previously made NO sense to me. :)

[exor674]

On DW, every entry page is displayed through S2, believe it or not, even if it's site-styled comment pages: that way we only have one code pathway to maintain.)

Not true yet <333 -- we still use talkread for site-styled comment pages sadly ( now, ?style=light/site on [most] other views goes through S2 ) -- haven't gotten that converted over yet.

( Not that it really matters, *g* I am just being pedantic )

[darkrose]

The thing about decision fatigue is interesting to me because it seems like there would be a point where the lack of decisions makes a user feel powerless. Decision fatigue was the reason that in Dragon Age 2, you spend about 5 minutes playing the game at an artificially high level before going back and creating your character. The devs explained that this was because people who weren't steeped in PnP gaming culture were overwhelmed by having to choose a race, gender, class, and origin, assign attribute points, pick skills, and give the character an appearance--all right after the game loading screen. The problem is that for longtime RPG players, not having the chance to design our character from the ground up felt like we were being railroaded and forced into playing a character that didn't feel like "ours".

[denise]

Oh, absolutely, there's a point at which you need options. But your example is actually another perfect example of low engagement vs high engagement: longtime RPG players were already familiar with the conventions and already had a high level of engagement in the game before they even started, simply by virtue of it being an RPG that they had chosen to play, so they were used to the process of having to make all those decisions up front. Someone new wouldn't be.

Basically, any service has to make decisions about how much they want to court new people vs people who are already experienced in the conventions of the genre of the (site, game, service, etc). The signup process is one of the easiest places to lose people due to decision fatigue, too: new people aren't invested yet, so if you give them too much to think about, they'll just throw up their hands and say "eh, screw it, I'm gonna go play Farmville instead".

[blizzardseason]

I wish you'd taught the Social Informatics course I just finished, it would have been a much more enjoyable experience.

[formerly_known_as_prince]

Hi V! Bet you can't guess who this is!

[denise]

Popping in to reply to myself just so people who are linked to this thread can see it: the frozen subthreads are because I don't think it's right for us to be encouraging discussion of LJ's perceived failings in our news comm. (Discussing general principles of site design and management is one thing, but when it gets to be specific about LJ, I start to get uncomfortable.) I know people are upset and very emotional, but please remember, Dreamwidth could not exist without LJ and we ask that people bring their discussions of LJ to their own journals instead. Thanks, all. :)

[krissasaur]

I am just replying here because the thread below was frozen so I couldn't, but it is something I bring up all the time in my reasoning to my friends in "why its so hard for me to switch to DW" etc etc.

You said:
"(there's a reason we have site skins with three different background colors and the default skin is a very light grey and not white),"

After seeing that, I just wanted to point out that one of my biggest problems with DreamWidth is actually the fact that the background isn't white. The black on grey gives me a really bad headache after a while, and I just.. I can't. So maybe I am backwards or broken.. :( idk. But I really wish their was an option for a white background other than the Lynx or... Celery (I forget its name sorry, and it is celery colored, so... :p) theme. :(

Also, if curious, I think my ideal theme would be "Gradation Vertical" if it..... wasn't black. Which I guess would be "Tropospherical Red Vertical" with a white background, if it existed haha.

ANYWAY. With all this LJ drama, I decided I really wanted to make DW my new home. But I was once again faced with this "grey" issue which has driven me away a few times before. I know it sounds stupid, that something as simple as a background would bother be so much.. but when a site is made for reading, and something is making it hard to read.. it makes me not want to read/use the site, you know? SO YEA, RAMBLING. I AM GOOD AT THAT TOO. BUT ANYWAYS. SO. LJ has just gone to far imo, so I came back *waves* and.... Ran into the problem again. This time I don't want to go back to LJ though, so I decided to make my own stylish theme, so yea, that's cool, I have my white background.... but my computer is slow so... yea it doesn't work too well, and applies the style slow or not at all sometimes... so. :( IDK I JUST WISH THEIR WAS AN OPTION :(

IDK SORRY. IDK I FEEL WEIRD COMPLAINING ABOUT THIS... but... IT WAS ON MY MIND AND THEN YOU MENTIONED IT.. so I took the bait. /hides

[stuntpilot99]

Oh now there's topical I made a couple of comments over in LJ News Part the first, Part the second.

Part of which being "...and yes, I realise others will be here for icons, or graphics, or videos which are different, and equally valid use cases which deserve time and effort. But text is, very probably, still the core use-case of LJ."

Is that an invalid assumption? I know there are whole RP, gaming, Singapore blog-shopping use cases that I know little of, but surely the core use case is still reading/commenting/blogging, which yes, is high engagement and given the history and volume of the site possibly always will be.

Though in light of your comments here I'm now thinking more in terms of news-reader 2.0 as the possible end result than yet another FB clone. My total lack of Cyrillic leaves me pretty unclear when looking at some of the mockups.

I think a lot of the angst is less they're trying to make changes, but more the manner in which they're doing so.

Oh, and feel free to ignore this entirely if you don't want to get dragged into another distraction, but I'm interested in this stuff too. :)

[denise]

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.

[kore]

That's really fascinating and very clear. Thank you for writing that all out.

[flippet]

Thank you, this does help explain a lot, even to a complete technical dunce like myself. (You say so much as 'code' and I start to glaze over - I just don't speak geek, unfortunately.)

This is probably 100% not the right place to put this, but I'll mention it since you mentioned 'hitting a certain number of paid accounts' and designing for a different use, etc, and since people seem to be justifiably concerned that the direction LJ is going in will not be friendly to the fandom users.

I haven't really *used* my DW account in the two years or so that I've had it, for one reason - there's no way to import communities from LJ. My way of using LJ doesn't rest in making a solitary blog post, then waiting for the world to come to me and comment on it - instead, my friends and I have a comm that's more like a 'common room' - we all come to it, and chat away. (One daily thread, many chatty comments.) Actually, very much like the 'neighborhood store', when you put it that way.

We don't want to have to start over from scratch at DW, and we don't want to lose the history we've built in the comm at LJ. (And we're probably not alone in that - I wouldn't be surprised if it's why many users stay put.)

If we could import the comm, I know that I'd be thrilled to convert to DW, and would happily have a paid account with extra icons, and I'm sure many of my friends would as well.

I'm sure there's probably very good reasons why comms can't be imported, but I've just never understood the technical explanations!

[denise]

See the news post made after this :)

[harpsiccord]

I enjoy your rambling! I've learned a lot from it!

I'm afraid to ask this because I don't think I'll like the answer, but... in your opinion, purely speculation... what do you think will be Livejournal's future as far as looks, userbase, primary use, and current unhappy users. As dweebish as this sounds, if there's no way to word it without potential toe stepping and you'd rather not have it in public ("on the record" as it were), please do PM it to me and I'll keep it private.

Essentially, I'm asking "what will become of us?" but without so much emotional attachment. I'm just so worried right now. Feels like a dear childhood friend is dying.

[radiantsoul]

Facebook and Google Plus are so easy to use. This gives them a potential userbase of almost everyone.

I have been on LJ for ten years and don't think I have ever used comment subjects or the threading tools. Equally I tend to use the default icon and would pay nothing for any more icons. So I guess it is interesting how people value things differently.

If you look at from a newbies eyes all those options are quite scary. Here on Dreamwith now I cam reply to this, thread from start, parent, thread or hide 50 comments.

Below this I can icon(or make it random), I can enter a subject and then a message, there is a quote icon, I can post or preview, there is a more options tabe and a button to check spelling. Finally I am told that my IP address is logged. I can imagine if I introduced my mum to this site cold she would be completely confused. She would understand none of the threading, hsve no idea what an icon is, would expect a message to not be public and have no idea about IP logging and even be fearful of it.

I have a hunch that most Dreamwidth users are ex-LJers, but LJ cannot really rely on being fed by another site and ensuring people are versed in "genre codes". So it needs to move towards simplicity if it is to grow.

[rike_tikki_tavi]

You are right, simplicity is not bad and a newbie user might indeed be overwhelmed by all the choices in DWs commenting form.

But there's making things simple and easy to use and then there's making things so "simple" that they become actually harder to use. I can't say much about threading because I've never used it much either and I guess subject lines are mostly used in comms and depending how much time one spends haunting those places one needs them or doesn't. What really annoyed me though was the nixing of spell check and preview.

In a text based medium it strikes me as a less than ideal decision to do away with the spell check and the preview button. I might be biased because I'm a non-native English speaker, but I used the spell check option all the time and checking one box and pressing one extra button is so much easier than opening an extra tap with the online dictionary and checking every single word I feel unsure about. And considering all the time I've borked my HTML, I wouldn't want to miss preview either.

So there's simplifying and then there's oversimplifiying to the point where the user is made to feel powerless/has to fear looking stupid on the internets. And I feel with this latest change LJ overshot option one and headed straight into territory of option two. Plus, the way the whole thing was communicated was just really unprofessional and condescending and I think that's where a lot of the user vitriol is coming from.

[radiantsoul]

I do see where you are coming from, but on the other hand all the many features are used by someone and if you are going for easy to use you may wish to side on overcutting features, or tucking them away. Preview to me has always seemed more useful for HTML coding which is fairly advanced.