They're Not Even Trying Anymore, Are They?

[danalwyn]

Every once in a while I worry that I'll lose my job, and that I won't have the skills to manage to get another one. After all, the world is full of talented and experienced people, many of whom seem to be in my field.

Then I visit LJ. Honestly, if people are getting paid to roll out changes like that, then I've got no worries at all, do I?

Comments

[quicksilver_ink]

Yeah, really. I have to wonder if they looked at how people use their site at all when they planned these changes.

[danalwyn]

I wonder if they remember they have users period. I have no evidence to support that hypothesis at this point.

[quicksilver_ink]

Rumor has it they gave advance warning to their Russian userbase, and may or may not ave discussed the changes before they happened and gotten feedback. I would not be surprised to hear the Russian userbase gets more attention, but I have difficulty believing that the Russian userbase as a whole has such terrible aesthetic sense.

[danalwyn]

I doubt they listen to feedback, because I bet by the time they wrote down the feedback, the code was already in the final stages. The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any particular way in which they're planning these things - they just happen at random. It's like they actually pick their next code to be released by picking plans out of a hat.

[silverjackal]

Heh. What have they done *this* time? :D


I'm sorry, I've had a stressful day and so I'm busy savoring the Schadenfreude. All of the people who exclaimed "you're dumb for leaving/you'll be baaack..." when I left a year ago, because if they were pants at security I couldn't stay. Granted, there are still some communities over there that I read, but hopefully they'll move over and/or mirror, and then I'll be able to not have to deal with LJ at all.

[danalwyn]

Moving over may be a smart thing - I'm beginning to entertain notions that they want a fairly large part of their userbase (the freeloaders) to move off. The fact that they've screwed everything else in the process is...amusing to say the least.

LJ just seems to no longer have any knowledge of how to do software development. If something ain't broke, you shouldn't try and fix it, and if you do "fix" it, you should make sure that your fix does everything the previous code does...which this does not. It leaves me seriously wondering what they think they're doing.

[silverjackal]

I'm beginning to entertain notions that they want a fairly large part of their userbase (the freeloaders) to move off.

They are presumably trying to emulate Facebook, but what they don't seem to grasp is that most of Facebook's user base consists precisely of "freeloaders". They're the source to be datamined and sold advertising *to*. So yes, they're not paying directly, but without them there is no business. Then again, LJ's grasp of customer service is rather amusingly retrograde. Still, people validate that by staying with the service, so... *shrugs*.