My blogging muscles are twitchy today because, well, mostly because I’m the contrary type, and today a group of LiveJournal users are having a blogging strike. Or, more accurately, a LiveJournal-using strike. It seems a large number of LiveJournal’s userbase is angry over a couple of recent decisions made by LiveJournal’s new management, the Russian online media company SUP.

One of these decisions was to discontinue creation of “Basic” accounts. To backtrack a bit - LiveJournal, as the name implies, is a blogging site. Users can create blogs, and also join blogging networks by adding other bloggers as “friends”. When the service was created, its founder promised that there would never be advertising on LiveJournal, but since then the company has changed hands twice, and advertising has, inevitably, turned up. When the ads were introduced, there were three levels of account types: Basic, which was free, had no adverts, and had only the most basic of features available; Plus, which was free, had adverts, and had more features available, and Paid, which, er, users had to pay for, had no ads, and had advanced features. The idea was that the new Plus level would be attractive to users because of the additional features, for which they would accept advertising being placed on their blogs. At the time, there was controversy over this decision - but nowhere near as much controversy as the news that the Basic account, as of March 12th, was being discontinued, and all new accounts would have to be either Plus or Paid.

The reasoning behind this move seems fairly obvious - all accounts will now generate revenue for LiveJournal, one way or another. Since existing Basic accounts aren’t being forced to upgrade, you might expect little resistance, except in doing so you’d be overlooking something fairly important: LiveJournal users create new accounts all the time. LiveJournal communities can be created by any user at any time, and these too will presumably now no longer be ad-free (unless someone wants to pay for them), but even setting communities aside, people create new blogs for new interests, or just because they want a fresh start, all the time. It’s not a case of not being able to miss what you’ve never had, because it won’t just be new users who are affected by the loss of a Basic account - existing users will either have to stick with the account they’ve got, accept that they’re going to see advertising, or pony up the cash to get rid of them.

Even so, I know what you’re thinking - so what? Aren’t we all used to advertising nowadays? Well… yeah. But that doesn’t mean anyone actually likes it. Plus, the fact that LiveJournal didn’t actually announce this change via its usual News channel but instead left it to one staff member to leave a comment on an already much-commented-upon News update didn’t go down well with users - if you’re subscribing to a News feed for a service you use, wouldn’t you expect a major change to the terms and conditions of the service to be reported there?

There’s another reason many LiveJournal users are on strike today, too: it recently emerged that SUP was removing certain interests from its reports of its users most popular interests. Mostly, these interests related to either fanfiction or homosexuality - it’s not clear why, exactly, SUP chose to purge those interests from its reports, but it’s being presumed that it’s to appeal to advertisers. Again, that might not seem like a particularly big deal, but you’d be underestimating the fervency with which people actually use LiveJournal - SUP probably never expected anyone other than potential advertisers to even notice that the reports had been doctored, yet outraged posts are popping up all over the blogosphere on the topic. And considering that, last May, several LiveJournal users found their accounts suspended without warning because they had listed interests in these same categories, it’s not surprising that there’s a small scale riot going on.

Actually, that might be overstating the case a bit. What’s actually happening is that many LiveJournal users have decided to boycott the site for the day. They won’t read posts, they won’t post content, and they won’t post comments, in the hope that the drop in traffic will signal to LiveJournal’s owners that their recent conduct has been deemed unacceptable by its users. The argument goes that if people can’t sign up free, ad-free, then they’ll go somewhere else; that SUP has fundamentally failed to understand LiveJournal’s business model, which relies upon a great amount of content being posted, much of it by free users, in order to attract traffic … and without traffic, you can’t serve many adverts.

I’m kind of torn about where I stand on the whole thing. I’ve had a Basic LiveJournal account for years and years, although I occasionally pay for a period of paid time, and I’m quite happy with the basic feature set so long as I don’t have to see adverts. I do see adverts on my Gmail account every day, and on almost every single website I visit, so I’m sure I could cope with seeing them on LiveJournal, but, y’know, I’d rather not. And I certainly don’t agree with the censoring of interests, even if it’s just in annual reports designed to attract advertisers. But I can’t help feeling that a one-day strike - on Good Friday, too, which is bound to be a slow day anyway since most people are off work and probably out and about, away from their computers - probably won’t do much good.

It’s like online petitions, in a way - how much good do those ever do? There must be a more effective way of registering displeasure - but other ways, like sending letters or e-mails, take more time and effort. So I guess I’ll be on strike today. Not that anyone will notice, given that I generally post about five times a month on LiveJournal anyway…