I found out that Livejournal is no longer offering free accounts. This makes me incredibly sad. What makes it even worse is that brad, the founder, advised against this move. I really hate it when companies ask people their opinions and then just completely ignore it. It doesn't make sense to me.

What I also dislike are companies who try to maximize their profits so much that in the process they lose their userbase because of the change in how the company is run. The whole entire point of free (with no ads) accounts is that they bring in all of the content that the paying customers want to see/use. With no free accounts anymore without ads, I'm willing to bet that less people will come to the site, and in the process, a whole bunch of people that are already here are pissed about it. I'm seriously considering moving my journal now because of this. I'm worried that my protected and private entries are no longer safe from being looked at by the staff.

It's a slippery slope, and nothing I've seen from Livejournal since Brad has been gone has been going in the right direction. I don't see any more cool, bad-ass projects like memcache, openid, or any of the other millions of projects he's created and worked on coming down the pipeline. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong spot now, but it seems like a lot of people are leaving or just don't work on livejournal anymore that I think can steer the ship in the right direction.

Kind of sad, especially since I bought a permanent account a while back. I remember sending an e-mail to Brad telling him why I purchased it and how I hoped his open source, do the right thing, method would continue. Looks like this may not be the case for long anymore :(.

Tags: livejournal, sad