some velvet morning

UPDATED 2: "darkrosetiger" at LJ has a rough translation from Russian of an interview with Sup's Anton Nosik. She also links to a less inflammatory translation here. Even with the difference, and a quick read, I find Nosik to be more than a little dismissive.

UPDATED: With link to original boycott post.

Crossposted as is from LJ and a hat tip to "dargie" at LJ for letting me know about this.

On Friday, March 21, from midnight to midnight GMT, there's a one day LJ boycott. Which for me works out to 5 p.m. Thursday to 5 p.m. Friday allowing for PDT.

I don't know that even if LJ takes note they would care and I'm a little skeptical if one day will make a difference or how the effectiveness will be measured. Not posting isn't going to work if people still reply to comments, etc. A page click is still going to be site traffic.

That said, I'm still going to honor the boycott and anything of pith I might think of to say will be posted at InsaneJournal, Some Velvet Morning where I'm pretty much crossposting everything these days anyway and pouting because I don't see many people there.

Also, "stewardess" at InsaneJournal has been noting some interesting omissions/removals in what LiveJournal was listing as top interests and did a bit of digging via caches. E.g. at one point "fanfiction" was disappeared as a top interest but "slash" remained, probably because they didn't know wtf it meant. Check out her timeline post. As of Monday, March 17, the top interests appeared to be back to what they had been previously. There's been lots of not so tinfoil-y speculation in the past about LJ's wish to have a clean shiny market to present to advertisers, so this tinkering could be related to that.

CNews covers No free accounts on LiveJournal. I've yet to "parse" the Sup position and any changes to LJ these days require a fair amount of figuring what they're up to in the long run. Though the last paragraph might hold a clue.

No free accounts on LiveJournal

One of the most popular subjects discussed by LiveJournal’s subscribers is closing the option to register new basic accounts. That is the first type of accounts at LiveJournal, whose owners do not pay for the services and no advertising is posted in their blogs. An alternative to such blogs are paid accounts (for $25 a year a user is provided with a full range of additional services, no advertising posted in his blog) and improved accounts that were launched two year ago (some additional service… full text

Source: CNews

Holy crap! As of yesterday, all new Basic LJ accounts will have to be Paid or have ads. Bad news here

Basic Accounts
Basic Account is an option available to accounts which were created before March 12, 2008. No account created after this date can be turned into a Basic Account. Basic Accounts will not have any advertising displayed on their accounts, but will have fewer benefits and features. A Basic Account includes the following:

* Upload up to 6 userpics

* 25 subscriptions for notification of new posts, friends, comments, or events

Brad Fitzpatrick doesn't sound happy about it. Hmmm, wasn't he welcoming SUP as our new overlords a few months back? Indeed.

Crossposted from my LJ where I'm trying to switch over to Firefox with Rich Text and making a hash of it