Other times, things give me hope. The very existence of Imaan gives me hope, for example. YAY tolerance!

Also, the very existence of innerbrat gives me hope, because while she's around making wise and thoughtful and thought-provoking posts like this one (see here for background), the world is a better place for just having her in it.

Ever been raped?
Know someone who has been raped?
Ever voiced an opinion on the topic of rape?

Read that post. If it were up to me it'd be put in the national curriculum.

In completely non-political news, my friend Imogen has signed up for LJ, but she can't work out how to add me to her f-list (you know, silly me, having a comm for my public blog and all) so this paragraph is just to say OI! IMOGEN! COMMENT ON THIS POST!! because once you do that I can friend you and it's all good ;)

I am posting today in defiance of the planned strike to say thank you to Sup for listening to the concerns of its users.

It's encouraging that Sup have listened on this, although I think they probably listened to brad rather than the user base in general, because ad free accounts are a USP for LJ. Everyone who has said "ads are inevitable, blah blah blah" misses that point. If LJ becomes entirely ad-supported it WILL lose a lot of it's user base who came here BECAUSE it was ad free, and got paid accounts because they supported it being ad free. Myself included. The fact that they are haemorrhaging paid accounts at an exceedingly fast rate since 6Apart commercialised the site should be a big clue. Advertisers may well be worth more money than paid users, but if there are no users, advertisers won't pay, and paid users tend to be both hubs for big communities of friends AND recruiters of new users.

Yes, LJ is a business, and yes, it exists to make money. But there's more than one way to skin a cat than starting at it's arsehole, and there's more than one way to make money than annoying your userbase with ads.

Anyway, I think, at this point, adhering to the strike would be counterproductive because it would show Sup that although they have listened to us, and taken on board our concerns, we don't listen to them.

That would be silly.

The concern of all of us, users and Sup, is, right now, to stop LJ dying on it's arse. What we need to do is work out how we can get it across to Sup that if they make us happy, we will tell people how fab LJ is and recruit extra users for them. And LJ is fab; it's by far the best blogging platform, and it's full of communities that have introduced me to friends I wouldn't want to be without. Mat, for starters. Then we need to recruit those extra users. Because at the current rate of entropy, LJ is going to last maybe a couple of years more, and that would be a waste of money for my buddies out there with permanent accounts, as well as for our new Russian Overlords.