azurelunatic | I trust the LJ development team. Do you?

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I trust the LJ development team. Do you?

I trust LiveJournal's development team to have LiveJournal's best interests at heart, to lead LiveJournal in a good direction, and to listen to constructive feedback.

I will do my best to make the feedback I leave for LiveJournal developers constructive in nature.

If you wouldn't do it in fandom, don't do it to the devs. I know that this is the choir section here that I'm ranting at, but I've spent the past couple hours in a room with some rather irritated engineers who are really code people, not people-people. They've been busting their asses for months to track down random crap that goes wrong. This site is so bloody huge and robust that Bantown could not take it down for long, even though they tried. Slashdot fails to have the Slashdot Effect on LJ. LJ is thriving and functional thanks to the developers who put it together and the engineer-types who keep it running day-to-day and the people who keep the money coming in to feed the monster bandwidth and all the rest of it, and the people who make sure that other people know how to use it, and the people who stay here and hang out and talk with friends. The developers work hard to keep things working and keep the site evolving so it doesn't become a great big code dinosaur. Lately it's been seeming that the harder they work to fix things that are broken and update things that are out of code (building code metaphor, not computer code; work with me here), the more they get screamed at for trying to ruin LJ.

In every

news feature-type post where something new and bell/whistle is announced, there is the inevitable complaint that things like virtual gifts are a waste of developer time that would be better spent on problem X, Y, or Z. And when LJ has been having a couple weeks where there are problems, and the problems stay there even though people are complaining about them, and the problems are still there, and still there, and still there -- yes, it does seem illogical that developers would go and do something like make it possible to put a flaming bag of poo on your least favorite serial adder's profile page. But sometimes you have to step away from a problem to get it back in perspective. I'm not in LJ Central, so I'm not there watching them bang their heads into a stubborn problem until headaches ensue, but I trust that they are allocating their time reasonably.

You know what I think the number one biggest waste of developer time is?

Dealing with unaccountably rude and hostile users.

LJ as a culture has the hugest sense of fandom entitlement ever.

LJ users want the same thing they've always had from LJ, namely, a place to put their journals and communicate and be with friends, and a geek-friendly, open, caring, open-source, user-supported, small-town environment.

LJ geeks want pretty much that same thing. Really. Truly.

Somewhere along the line, LJ users as-a-collective got the idea that if the development team did something that they didn't like, the best way of solving this was not to give constructively critical feedback and debate it with vigor and the knowledge that the developers had the good of the site in mind, but to jump on any available surface and flame away.

Imagine the utter fucking joy that the LJ developers must be having, wading through gods know how many hundred comments of flame to find the legitimate kernels of actual problems in between the complaints. Go through one of those posts announcing changes to LJ some time, and pretend that the changes to LJ are a fic that's already been beta-read, and the comments to those posts are comments in response to the fic. Read those comments with an eye to constructive criticism. The analogy doesn't stretch particularly far, because the core site pages of LJ are not a piece of fanfiction, but the principle of effective communication holds true.

Dear users, the way to get the development team to listen to your concerns is not to scream abuse at them and then expect them to abandon their ideas of what is right for the site and adopt yours. The louder you scream, the louder they're going to hit the delete key and say "Na na na can't hear you na na na." I don't actually think they're doing that now, but the temptation is very much there and very much real. LJ is a maverick site in that it has such open forums for user feedback and discussion. Plenty of services do not have anything resembling that. Do you really want to convince the developers and volunteers that an open forum will only collect whining and flames?
Hint: Bantown tried forcing the issue by attacking LJ. We all know how that turned out. Pwned, craxx0rbitches, pwned. In a similar case, visible nipple is still not allowed in the default userpic, and the flaming tantrums thrown at LJ's support staff by assorted self-proclaimed "boob nazis" have assured that visible nipple will never be allowed, on the principle that it's bad precedent to cave when the toddler has a meltdown because they didn't get their little way. Even though there are many people who do love the boob.

Tell them what you like about the shiny new stuff. Let them know what they did right. Sit on your hands for a few hours until you try using it a few times before you flame off at them. If you have to say something immediately, remember what you learned in those sensitivity training sessions and use your "I" statements. "I'm frustrated with this new user interface, and I'd really prefer something with the look and feel of the older version" comes over a whole lot better than "What the fuck did you do to my user interface, you morons? I liked it the way it was! Put it back!"

LJ, even current LJ under 6A management, is capable of recognizing if something goes really badly. The developers actively ask for reports of broken or unusable behavior. Things may not be fixed immediately, but there are little things coming out every here and there to make things better, things that you may not be aware of unless you're watching

lj_releases or

changelog.

LJ really is a group effort. I do not have Super-Secret Inside Information that no one else has. I'm a relatively average occasional Support volunteer. (Very occasional, since Life Attacks.) I put time and effort into making LJ a better place, and I see the results of that effort. Things may not always go my way when LJ policy and I disagree with each other (I wouldn't mind seeing nipples in any boobtacular default user pictures, for example), but at least my technical suggestions are often dead-on, and my social suggestions are at least listened to respectfully.

I really do think it all boils down to three or four questions:

Do you trust the people who are running LJ, including Six Apart core and the developers?
If you do not trust the people running LJ, what can they reasonably do to demonstrate that they're worthy of your trust?
If there is nothing the people running LJ can do to gain your trust, why are you still here?

And you know? I find that I'm never short on database handles after this update. How about you?

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When you say "updates that assume the readers are intelligent", what kind of stylistic/content assumptions are you looking for to demonstrate this? Technical details, adult-to-adult writing style, college-level vocabulary? Formal or informal? Geek writing style, Trained Professional writing style, natural writing style of the poster, or something else?

Most beta testing right now is done by the enthusiastic team of volunteer support people. Anyone can be a Support volunteer. It's become easier and more straightforward to volunteer in recent years, though a lot of people aren't aware of how to get started volunteering and that the volunteers double as beta test crew. (Prizes usually involve appreciation from the admins, though on Serious Big Bug-Hunts like the one last spring, Brad was handing out permanent accounts for first verified finds of security holes. The volunteer community is reasonably tight-knit, but welcoming to anyone who shows signs of wanting to volunteer and stick around.) Support can probably always use more volunteers.

From reading what

rahaeli wrote in that scary-long thread upstream, the idea of a return to system reliability/cleanliness/documentation is a hairy one, and one that the new features are in part aimed at. I know that if she hadn't explained why the features have been added, I'd probably be agreeing with you that there are a lot too many bells and whistles, but after reading what she's said, I think they're trying to do quite a bit of just that. Some of the things that I would see as a new feature or a surface re-design seem to actually be fixes to bugs that I never even knew existed, and changes toward long-term code stability and ease of maintenance and update.

Documentation is another thing that's being done by volunteers as well as developers and other employees.

lj_userdoc is the user-end of the documentation, where people bring up undocumented, underdocumented, or misdocumented things in the FAQ files.

*grin* The Communities support volunteer team is the one who has cookies. Though I think they're mostly virtual.

When you say "updates that assume the readers are intelligent", what kind of stylistic/content assumptions are you looking for to demonstrate this?

Yesterday I spent a long nostalgic hour reading old

news posts from a few years ago, when Brad used to keep users updated on a regular basis. Those were updates that assumed the readers were intelligent. They featured technical details, hard facts and figures, and no discernible "spin".

Heh. I've written and deleted the rest of this comment at least three times now, as I work out for myself just what sort of communication style I think would be better, and why.

I started by assuming that most people are savvy to marketing; they distrust "spin" and the hard-sell. Only teens would be naive enough to be affected by marketing of the "Gee Whiz Look At the Shiny!" type.

And yet, I realized, I have been affected by marketing, perhaps unintentional marketing -- I see myself as "someone who uses LJ" and therefore superior to "someone who uses MySpace" or even "someone who uses TypePad".

I frequently want to call myself an "LJ member" instead of an "LJ user", because I feel as though by supporting LJ I belong to the LJ Club. This is because LiveJournal started as a member-supported, volunteer-run, non-commercial operation. It had no advertisements, no marketing, no evilness. It was the blog-site for people who were intelligent, creative, social activists, idealists, and wise to the ways of technology.

I, and so many other ~~members~~ users, feel fierce loyalty to LJ. We take a proprietary interest in it. We harshly criticize any perceived move away from the original Non-Evil vision of LJ.

We see ourselves as "people who use LiveJournal". Different. Special. And we hate it when something is done to LJ that dilutes that different-specialness.

Big companies spend millions to develop that sort of brand identity. It's the entire marketing basis of brands like Ford trucks and Loreal hair color. And here Live Journal has it already... and is acting as if it doesn't exist.

Agreed. They have what could have been one of the strongest brands out there, and a dedicated userbase who actively promote the site, and they're squandering it. Theoretically, I should've spent some part of Xmas teaching my parents how to read my f-locked entries given I'm moving to the other side of the country. Reality is I'm likely to switch to Wordpress and give them a password.

Because the brand is devalued. However...

I see myself as "someone who uses LJ" and therefore superior to "someone who uses MySpace" or even "someone who uses TypePad".

I actually see 'us' as above MySpace, and 'different but equal' to a TypePad user; different emphasis, different usage, but a very valid tool. Same for WP.com. But I think if

lj2wordpress can work (and my test install starts after I'm online in London, hopefully next weekend), then the different but equal approach would become 'different but slightly better', because I much prefer the idea of my stuff being stored on a server I have control over, in a location of my choice, by a company I choose to give money to.

And specifically not stored on a major faultline, because that still ranks as the daftest thing 6A did.

LJ was a strong brand. In public statements, it's obvious Mena and others didn't get it. I think Anil has now learnt, but it's too late. And Vox? That's the second biggest, although the forthcoming integration is a step in the right direction, it's one that should've been there at the beginning of beta FFS. Ah well.

LJ was a strong brand. In public statements, it's obvious Mena and others didn't get it.

I think the absolute furor over "sponsored communities" should have made it clear even to Mena that loyal LiveJournal users felt that they were being insulted.

People define themselves in part by the brands they use. For example, I drive a Prius, and I know that I love it that it has a distinctive shape and look. I'd like to think that I would have chosen a Prius even if it looked like any other car, but the truth is that other hybrids that look exactly like any other car don't sell nearly as well as the Prius does. When I see other Priuses on the road, I feel a kinship with the driver -- look, there's someone else who cares about the environment! There's someone else who's cool, like me!

When I use LJ, I feel a sense of belonging, a feeling like I'm part of the Cool Group who use LiveJournal. Frankly, I didn't research other blog sites before I got an LJ. I had a roommate who loved her LJ, I read and posted anonymously for about four months, became hooked, loved it, and got my own account. I stay with it because the little I've seen of MySpace and Friendster turns me off. I stay with it because I love the community feeling. But, let's be honest...

I stay with LiveJournal because until reently it validated my sense of myself as computer-literate, intelligent, anti-commercialism -- it had a granola-eating grad-student performance-art hot-tub power-to-the-people vibe that thrilled my babyboom heart.

Now? I hope that that it's not too late to turn it back around, I really do.

In the cases of overmuch "oo look at the shiny" being a bad thing, the posts should probably not be written by the actual developers. The developers, having just built the thing, will be totally about the shiny, since they've just spend gods know how long building it to be shiny, and will be having a geekgasm about it. Someone else who's a little further removed from the project would probably be able to better present "hey we now have X which does Y" in a matter-of-fact way without going OO SHINY so loudly.

Going "oo shiny" over a back-end thing that fixes a technical problem is entirely geekily appropriate, but I could see how the same amount of technical glee over a user-facing feature that's more in demand by teens than long-term LJ users would cause some irritation, even though the amound of technical development might be about equal.

A while ago one of my friends identified one of the basic geek needs -- the need for problem-solving, and the attendant high that comes once you've solved a particularly nasty little problem. It's a very serious high that demands that you go babbling to someone about what you just did, not necessarily so that you can show off or so they will appreciate you, but so that you can share the high. If necessary, if no one around you is sufficiently technical that you can say what you did and they will appreciate it, you will try to give them a mini-training in the topic so they can then appreciate the difficulty of the problem and OMFG IT'S SOLVED WHEE!! It's like that little thrill of accomplishment after putting together a nice complex puzzle, only a lot more so.

From my perspective on the edge where I am, I see the core of LJ divided into two groups.

The first group is LJ staff and volunteers. The division between staff and volunteers does exist, but it's surprisingly small. LJ would still probably not exist if not for the volunteers, and it's not so much that it would be a financial strain to hire people to support LJ, it's that the people who care enough about LJ to volunteer support for it are dedicated and love the site and care about it passionately, and it's damned hard to hire that kind of love.

(Though in one anonymous case, one of the core volunteers announced intent to quit volunteering because there was need for a job to get through school. They were approached in short order by a staff member, who said that X, Y, and Z had said that if this volunteer quit, the three of them would as well, because they needed this volunteer to keep on doing the thing that they did. That volunteer is now staff.)

There's incredible coordination between the development staff and the support volunteer core. It's the kind of coordination and communication that we all wish existed between LJ users as a whole and LJ staff-and-volunteers.

At the same time, I gather that there's the same kind of coordination and communication going on between LJ original people and at least parts of the 6A staff. I do not hear the sort of break room grumblings that would mean a rift between the old and the new, things like "I wanted to X, but Boss said Y, but X makes more seeeeense!" Part of that, of course, is because discussions like that would involve confidential materials, and the sorts of people who would be privy to confidential discussions actually do take the confidentiality seriously. But even with confidentiality, you can certainly whine things like "I thought it would make more sense to code it one way, but that idiot insisted I do it his way, and we'll just see what breaks six months from now because I was right and he was wrong." That sort of generality is what I'd be expecting to hear from the developers who hang out in the same places that I do, if that sort of problem existed. I'm not hearing anything like that. There's frustration over bugs that need to be tracked down, there's frustration over things that depend on other things to get done first before it can be made to work, there's definitely frustration at the broken communications between LJ staff-and-volunteer-core and the userbase, but there's no evil overlord angst.

The second group, of course, is the core userbase, the LJ users who are in LJ for the long haul, but who aren't necessarily involved with or affiliated with or in direct communication with the volunteer-and-staff core. I'd consider you part of the core userbase. Culture of the core userbase is much more diverse than the culture of the staff-and-such core, but there are a lot of things that are very similar. I'm not sure if I'd be able to tell the difference between a meetup between volunteer-and-staff people and userbase people on first glance. If my roommate organized a surprise party made up of either core userbase or staff-and-such core, and didn't tell me which it was, I honestly don't think I'd be able to tell the difference when I walked in the room. There'd be the same kind of general insane everyone-knows-everyone party atmosphere, and there'd be discussion over a lot of the same general world and greater internet topics. It would be only after I got myself sorted out after being generally glomped that I'd be able to identify specific people and realize what crowd it was.

Even though they've got so much in common, core userbase only tends to have communication with LJ staff-and-such core through places like

news. That other entry that I linked to about the root of the bad communication between the userbase and the staff still holds all kinds of true.

It's the sense of community that holds the different-special together. I seriously believe that. It's not the user interface or the features. Granted, ease of use is part of what makes it that way, and if the UI ever became as clunky as MySpace, that wouldn't be there. But if you get a bunch of LJ users together on MySpace, they still act like LJ people. There's a social consciousness of "what are my actions going to do to the people around me" that's missing from most other social networking sites. I think one of the best things that LJ's done that other sites don't do as far as I know is keep the crossed-out names of deleted users in someone's friend list. (OK, that digressed a lot. But it's part of the social consciousness thing.)

I don't think that tacking random bells and whistles onto the site is going to decrease the social consciousness of each other that we have on LJ. Posting bad HTML on your MySpace page won't break anyone else's page. Posting bad HTML on your LJ will get someone inquiring after your health and telling you how bad that HTML is, please use a cut or stop taking memes from that site. Anything that increases the ways that someone can communicate with a friend on LJ (LJTalk, and I heard something about an in-site IM sort of thing) or post to their LJ or read their friends page is strengthening that sense of community.

At this point, LJ core staff-and-volunteers seem to think that the sense of community is taking care of itself, and will probably continue to do so. That may be a dangerous assumption as far as the core userbase is concerned, but that seems to be what the actions are saying. I could see how they could definitely put more energy into communicating with the core userbase in more trivial ways, to increase the sense of community between them and the core userbase. It's harder to think of some faceless admin as a monster if you've seen not just their face, but their new puppy as well. However, staff, devs, and high-level volunteers tend to seriously lock their stuff down due to dogpile effect and trolling.

The primary focus of devs right now seems to be general site usability, fixing bugs (I am privy to locked updates involving bugs, and there's a LOT of action there), adding new features that will enhance the blogging experience (why stay on LJ when that other site over there has not just blog and community, but also integrated image hosting and alerts you every time someone buys something off your Amazon wishlist? LJ has to keep up with the competition to keep the people who aren't devoted like the core userbase from wandering off.), and -- as Rah was saying upthread -- change parts of LJ that the core userbase sees no problems with, in order to become intuitive to new users, especially those who don't have someone mentoring them to figure out how to use LJ.

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I trust the LJ development team. Do you?

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