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Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 06:07
Many thanks to the kind developers and testers of the Dreamwidth, I've got my "invite code" and is finally able to reserve my favorite username!

Overall, this does seem like a very nice job porting basic Livejournal features and UI (I regret that being a programmer, I didn't have sufficient free time to contribute, but perhaps I will) while making it easy to use and more consistent in the process.

I regret though that development team has decided against making localized UI version available (I believe that this capability has substantially contributed to Livejournal original success, especially in non-English-speaking communities). Yes, making any sort of user-provided content publicly available as site UI can and will backfire, but it is important to strike a right balance.

What I don't really understand is how business managers are planning to attract paid-account users in any substantial numbers. Comparison table between different account levels does not give any incentive whatsoever to ever want to upgrade to paid account, other than an obvious desire to support a good work by dedicated people. Who the hell would need more than 1000 tags, anyway (other than some automated publishing system, but that's a totally different issue)? Or, let's say, post via e-mail - I can trivially write a script which would make it possible via XML-RPC, should I ever need it, but I never used this option with Livejournal and not going to.

OK, granted, some people love dozens of userpics user icons and possibility to edit your comments is nice, but I am not sure how this could justify $25 per year.

That said though, "premium paid" account is a total mystery to me. 2000 tags instead of 1500 for twice the money? Well....

Speaking of Livejournal, historically in the early days of the service paid accounts attracted people because:
  1. They wanted to support the service - OK, this reason does equally apply to the Dreamwidth;
  2. This was the only way to get an invite code, and this way people who would not otherwise consider this were lured into paying - OK, Dreamwidth does use invite codes;
  3. Free users only had 3 userpics, and that not a lot. Dreamwidth gives 6.
  4. Free users could not customize styles, but rather only select from few pre-defined ones. Dreamwidth never mentions "styles" in the comparison table;
  5. Livejournal also promised faster access to paid users, not that I think it ever delivered, but still, it sounded nice. Dreamwidth does not mention anything similar to that;
  6. Ability to use "short" journal name like <user>.livejournal.com; this is now a default address in both Livejournal and Dreamwidth.
Currently, Livejournal users purchase paid accounts because of:
  1. Ads-free access to Livejournal; this is not applicable to Dreamwidth;
  2. Bigger and ads-free photo hosting; Dreamwidth is unclear on this;
  3. Styles (reason #4 above)..
Anyway, I sure hope this new platform and community will succeed and attract attention beyond some dissatisfied LJ users, but we will see.
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 12:56 (UTC)
/wanders in.

Actually, I think you underestimate the desire for icons. Look how many people go into news post after news post demanding more icons, and how the extra icons add-on was popular enough for LJ to even code in the option. Icons are probably one of the top reasons people buy accounts.
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 13:10 (UTC)
This.

Paid users will have the "jump the server queue" thing here, too, and there'll be some styles and themes that are only available to paid users, and there are a bunch of other little tiny paid user features, but the overwhelming #1 reason people paid for their accounts on LJ was more icons. (Well, until ads came along.)

When we were designing our account levels, we erred on the side of giving more things to free users in a bunch of places, because we thought they were silly to have as paid features or because they were part of what we wanted to include in the site culture (for instance, all users can create syndicated feeds, because we want to be really interoperable with other sites). We do have one paid user feature that LJ doesn't -- Google Analytics integration -- that isn't on the comparison on the Wiki yet (but will be on the site by open beta launch), and many of the features we develop in our first year will be paid account features or significantly enhanced for paid users. But for the first few months at least, the major reasons to pay for an account will be to support the project and icons.

(Photo hosting -- we don't have it yet, but we're hoping to get it done by the end of this year or around the beginning of next year. LiveJournal's photo hosting is both an administrative and usability nightmare.)
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 13:39 (UTC)
We don't know yet! That's why we haven't said anything -- the specs are still totally up in the air, and will depend on what a). the community wants and b). we think we can support. So, we'll have to look at the traffic and usage patterns, along with the paid account percentages, and see what kind of stuff we can deliver. I can pretty comfortably say that we won't be able to offer it until we move from dedicated-server hosting (we're with Slicehost right now) to colocation, which we hope to be able to do quickly, but we don't have a firm date on.

The reason we haven't specced photo hosting yet is because we actually want to use that as our first example of how we're going to design major changes or major new features. The way it will work will be:

* We post somewhere outlining the broad summary of the project -- "We want to add photo hosting" -- and ask the community what they would want to see in that feature, what they would find really useful, what they would find not useful, etc;

* We take all of that feedback and design a functional spec, then post it and say "here's the spec; what are we missing, what did we get wrong, what do you really love?"

* We take that feedback and revise the spec, incorporating what we can and explaining why we can't/won't incorporate the rest;

* We turn the spec over to whoever will be doing the frontend design and have them do mockups of the pages involved;

* We post those, and ask people "okay, what do you find confusing about this, what do you hate, what do you think would be hard to use," etc;

* We revise the mockups based on that feedback, incorporating what we can and explaining why we can't/won't incorporate the rest;

* We turn specs & mockups over to the programmer who'll be working on it.

That's the right balance between incorporating user feedback and the hell of something that is designed-by-committee, I think. We won't be including everything that everyone wants, because many bits of feedback will be mutually exclusive, but we need to be able to at least explain why we won't include something, or justify our choices for which of the two mutually exclusive options we pick.
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 13:12 (UTC)
I get the impression they like the idea of translation, but a large chunk of the problem is the current translation system, which is horribly broken, and is less urgent than several other big development projects.

I think some RPG communities and some other specialised uses want more than 1000 tags, though obviously this will be a small proportion of the userbase.

Editing comments and getting emailed your own comments is worth $25 a year for me, even without the userpics. I think "Premium Paid" is aimed a lot more at those who do want to support the site financially as well, hence the larger jump in price. Also userpics cost disproportionately more compared to other paid benefits.
Thursday, April 9th, 2009 00:30 (UTC)
yes, that bothers me too, and it's why i rarely edit comments, though i have been seduced. one thing that's already making this easier for me to avoid is that the quickreply has a "preview" button, and i don't have to click "more options" first.

i am not sure how one can avoid the multiple emails. one way would be to only allow the editing for a limited number of seconds, such as some forum software does, and only send the email at the end of that time. but that is only useful for people who see typos right after they posted, not for people who actually had additional thoughts. or for those who see the typos on their next visit to the post. i don't know whether there is a good solution.
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 13:25 (UTC)
hey there --

you underestimate several things:

"some" people on LJ like icons -- "some" is a number in the tens of thousands. same for highly customized styles. this is a major attraction -- it still boggles my mind, but there it is.

the tag limit on LJ was instituted because quite a number of people (and comms especially) slowed the servers down because they had so many tags. well-organized comms, such as [livejournal.com profile] free_manga can use thousands of tags. if you categorize books by genre, author, original title, translated title, you're gonna be there real quick.

you and i may be able to throw together a quick script for anything we want to do, but the vast majority of users can't. they like their bells and whistles, and they like them served up pretty.

localization might come later; the groundwork is being laid now. i think it is a good idea to put it off, because LJ's translation system is a mess. if you end up finding some free time and joining the effort you'll get to see the code intimately up close -- might as well brace yourself now. :)

photo hosting is on the list of things to come within the year.

in any case, welcome to dreamwidth, and i hope you enjoy it here!
Thursday, April 9th, 2009 00:46 (UTC)
i don't want to mislead you (and i definitely don't speak for the site owners); i think the translation option is very far in the distance. the door isn't completely closed, but frankly, i find it more likely that somebody not-dreamwidth in another country will take up the code and build their own. it is a huge effort, not just to create a good translation, but also to maintain it on a day-to-day basis. and LJ's translation into other languages, frankly, leaves much to be desired; it's an illusion that it is LJ fully translated. maybe the russian is close by now. but i've played with the code on my own server in the languages i know, and it wasn't anywhere complete.

ah, that's what you meant about "post-by-email" -- yes, possibly so. i haven't thought about it much. i've never even used it outside of testing. i just know that apparently lots of people like it.

icons, *heh*. i had an LJ for more than a year and only used 1 icon. when i got a paid account, it was to support the site; i didn't use more than 6 icons. now i have nearly 50 that i made myself -- and i still don't use them often, only when i really want to underline a specific point, or express my association with a specific group. generally i like the single "avatar" association. but i know i am in a minority. and the site needs to serve all of us, and deliver for a wide variety of tastes.
zvi: self-portrait: short, fat, black dyke in bunny slippers (Default)
[personal profile] zvi
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 16:00 (UTC)
I am not [staff profile] denise, but occasionally I play her on the internets. I think that localization, as a volunteer effort, is highly improbable. If, at some point, the community decides they want to vote their share of the improvement money towards professional ongoing localization (or if, in the fullness of time, it turns out that sufficiently substantial numbers of people from some other linguistic group join DW that it makes business sense for Mark and Denise to hire a service to do ongoing professional localization, like apparently in Brazil you must use Orkut), then it might happen. But a volunteer effort like LJ's won't happen because it is (a) labor intensive for the paid person in charge and (b) unlikely to produce a business-quality result.

ETA: fix markup
Edited 2009-04-08 16:01 (UTC)
zvi: self-portrait: short, fat, black dyke in bunny slippers (Default)
[personal profile] zvi
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 17:13 (UTC)
But that's why they're creating an actually usable open source version of the software. If some French person really wants to use DW, but they don't want to deal with an English website, they will be able to take the software and set up bandedureves.fr and tell all of their friends.

The other thing you're not considering is, Denise and Mark think they can build a sustainable business with people who are willing to use the site in English. In addition, the language translation was never good on LJ except for 2 or 3 of the most popular languages, and even those hovered at around 85% of documents translated, (that is to say, a translation existed of any version of a page, not necessarily the current version.)

The LJ approach to translation was, tbh, a lie. Just looking at how many pages our docs team had to English-strip (that is to say, rewrite the pages so that it was technologically possible to translate them) shows that in many, many, many places, LJ wasn't even pretending to translate.