FandomSecrets moving to DW

[youronewish]

Yet more unwelcome changes to LJ's commenting system, which has resulted in FandomSecrets moving to DW.

As with the previous unwanted, largely protested change, it doesn't appear to be affecting custom S2 comment pages. But unfortunately for communities, S2 comment pages have proven to be detrimental for many of them, and workarounds are getting more and more ridiculous and painful for moderators. And now this latest change is all but forcing communities to either change over to a comment system that still hasn't shaken off its beta bugs but doesn't take several minutes to load -- if loads at all -- or put up with it if they want to remain on LJ.

Did LJ's developers fail to predict that this particular change would be the final straw, or they were hoping for that reaction? As technophile pointed out, LJ has been outright hostile to fandom for not months, but years. It might very well be that the only communities that are desired by LJ's owners are non-fandom ones like ontd. Truthfully, I don't believe it's a deliberate push, merely a serendipitous outcome for them in their self-image, if not their ledgers.

In any case, with FS moving, will this be the necessary push to start fandom moving off LJ?

Comments

[youronewish]

ONTD is one of the communities SUP seems to actually care about, and not just for the ad revenue. It's seen (at least by SUP) as a trendy, hip community that isn't attached to fandom per se. I think SUP is attempting to reinvent LJ as a trendy hipster site, at least as far as their users outside Russia are concerned. Unlike fandom, ONTD doesn't hurt the new image they want to project, so while they aren't actively chasing fandom away, they'll never bend over backwards the same way for a community dedicated to a single fandom. (Except for Twilight, possibly. I don't think even a juggernaut like Supernatural would have the same pull)

However, fandom in general moving over will still hurt LJ in the long run. Doubly so if SUP's hopes to reinvent LJ into a trendy social media site pan out about as well as I expect they will. (i.e., end up turning LJ into Friendster rather than a Facebook for hipsters)

[majorshipper]

You're totally right, which is why I said ONTD would never move. I'm really involved in SPN fandom and I know we have zero pull with LJ. I want to move my little corner of fandom over to LJ, but we already had to move once, and it cut our numbers in half, so we really can't afford to move to DW. Yet.

I'm pretty sure this "reinvention" of LJ is gonna fail. They're driving away their good userbase and they're not gonna get more if they try to compete with those other massive social networking platforms.