First post

[ign]

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.

Comments

[zvi]

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.