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LJ fails at business, but your fail at business helps
Added to my list of ingenious ideas that no one is making, such as music-playing software that allows me to make playlists via tagging, is:
A fricking LJ killer already.
Seriously, only momentum and the total suck of its competitors is keeping this place going. They have not made a good PR decision in two years or more -- every time I hear about them, my reaction is, What the fuck?
But it keeps on chugging and they never get the message because they keep getting new members. (Well, HAH, now that you can't make basic accounts anymore, that might stop.)
And the reason they keep getting new members -- the reason most people don't really leave, even though the vast majority of its users all hate LJ by now -- is because every alternative to LJ sucks.
Let's review the sites based on LJ's open source code:
What is so hard about this? Why do none of these sites follow the very basic rules of making websites? I know that it's hard to ramp up the amount of features and bandwidth LJ has, but -- how do you all fail this badly? There are only a few things I demand in my journal website:
--Search function. This is important.
--Not hideous; neat.
--Let me find things; usable.
--No stupid fucking theme. I am a user, not an inmate, and you are a website, not a morgue.
--Give me the ability to pay you to get a fricking ton of userpics.
If you do all of these things, you will have created a simple, professional service that can devour LJ's no-longer-loyal userbase and generate the bucks for you. I pay LJ and I think they're assholes.
The big problem, for me, is that I am extremely reluctant to move because I am in this journal thing for the community, not the exercise in writing. I have an LJ because there are communities for my fandoms and interests where people post routinely and share their thoughts and fanworks and discuss things that are on their mind; from these forums I make friends and create a social network. And so far none of these rival-wannabes have anything like cohesive communities, and so I will never join them.
The key to getting a community is to stop alienating people. Don't isolate your users by not letting them search for other users or communities. Don't be so ugly or unintuitive that no one can look at/bear to use your site. Don't call your users names or insult their intelligence or jeer at them with stupid omnipresent mascots. Let people have a variety of userpics right off the bat and you'll own the RP crowd.
Then people will join your site. And maybe you'll get a community. And maybe I'll join.
I swear, if I had any business sense, I'd make a fortune... A, anyone wanna help?? D:
A fricking LJ killer already.
Seriously, only momentum and the total suck of its competitors is keeping this place going. They have not made a good PR decision in two years or more -- every time I hear about them, my reaction is, What the fuck?
But it keeps on chugging and they never get the message because they keep getting new members. (Well, HAH, now that you can't make basic accounts anymore, that might stop.)
And the reason they keep getting new members -- the reason most people don't really leave, even though the vast majority of its users all hate LJ by now -- is because every alternative to LJ sucks.
Let's review the sites based on LJ's open source code:
GreatestJournal. One of the oldest. This place used to be decent, if hideously ugly and not user-friendly. It was the choice of extra-LJ journal RP for its hordes of icons. Now it's hideously ugly, unreliable, and hates icons. Worthless.
DeadJournal. This is another pretty old service. It's pretty much a theme version of LJ targeted at goth kids. Unfortunately, the theme makes it difficult to use --maladaptive and I spent several minutes staring at the menu, wondering what "Obituary" is and what "Survived by..." means and what "Eulogy" does. Not just not user-friendly, user-malevolent. You need an account code to join this place now and they offer a whopping five icons to basic users (the maximum is 50). Fail.
InsaneJournal. This is a newer? service. Also a theme version of LJ, this time targeted at teens who think psychological disorders are cool, people with no dignity, or people with such desperate desire to escape LJ that they will pretend that being an "inmate" in an "asylum" is a totally mature way to go about journaling. Ugly layout, somewhat user-friendly, good userpics; but thanks to the theme, this site is impossible to take seriously, and it will always be amateurish. Sigh.
Journalfen. This site is clean and simple and professional but somehow terribly non-intuitive when it comes to finding things. I can't for the life of me figure out how to use this place. I have a journal here, but they are extremely limited in functionality unless you pay them. They apparently can't perform a simple search to replace "LiveJournal" everywhere it appears in their code. A basic account is 10 userpics, which is mostly fail, but hey, it beats LJ's nonexistent basic accounts. This website will never, ever generate the kind of community LJ has.
What is so hard about this? Why do none of these sites follow the very basic rules of making websites? I know that it's hard to ramp up the amount of features and bandwidth LJ has, but -- how do you all fail this badly? There are only a few things I demand in my journal website:
--Search function. This is important.
--Not hideous; neat.
--Let me find things; usable.
--No stupid fucking theme. I am a user, not an inmate, and you are a website, not a morgue.
--Give me the ability to pay you to get a fricking ton of userpics.
If you do all of these things, you will have created a simple, professional service that can devour LJ's no-longer-loyal userbase and generate the bucks for you. I pay LJ and I think they're assholes.
The big problem, for me, is that I am extremely reluctant to move because I am in this journal thing for the community, not the exercise in writing. I have an LJ because there are communities for my fandoms and interests where people post routinely and share their thoughts and fanworks and discuss things that are on their mind; from these forums I make friends and create a social network. And so far none of these rival-wannabes have anything like cohesive communities, and so I will never join them.
The key to getting a community is to stop alienating people. Don't isolate your users by not letting them search for other users or communities. Don't be so ugly or unintuitive that no one can look at/bear to use your site. Don't call your users names or insult their intelligence or jeer at them with stupid omnipresent mascots. Let people have a variety of userpics right off the bat and you'll own the RP crowd.
Then people will join your site. And maybe you'll get a community. And maybe I'll join.
I swear, if I had any business sense, I'd make a fortune... A, anyone wanna help?? D:
no subject
Agreed 1000x with your points. As for web services...I barely have experience with that. Otherwise I would help you. :/