Why, LJ?

[owlmoose]

Why? Why why why why? Why take away the ONE THING that made you better than other community sites?

I. Don't. Get. It.

Edit: And you know the really SHITTY thing? They only made the announcement on a Russian language community, a couple of weeks ago. The latest news post, from 12/14, makes mention of "changes to comments coming soon!" with no details. It's like they knew they were going to have to sneak it by the user base. Feh.

The change: taking away subject lines from comments. Which is vital for users like fic memes. It makes them impossible to read or track. Disaster for fandom, and you all know I don't use that word lightly.

Son of edit: Looking to leave feedback? This seems to be the best place.

Comments

Gratuitous use of subject line

[owlmoose]

Use it or lose it? ;) I don't see DW changing this any time soon, though. Especially not now!

At least according to that Russian post, the claim was that fewer than 1% of LJ comments included a subject line, which was supposedly the justification for taking it away. (My source for that piece of data is commenters on failfandom_anon, so take that as you will.)

I do wonder about the timing of these open DW signups... Clever strategy, if so.

Nope, don't think it would ever change now :D

[liri]

I'd seen that claim as well, and it's probably true, but the 1% of comments that did have them NEEDED them... I also loved the fail_fandomanon thread that translated a comment on it, including the gem of a detail "the new commenting system in default styles, that was beta-ed for more than a week" (emphasis mine.) More than a week!

Shortly before they announced the open signups I offered up a bunch of my invite codes, during one of the DDOS attacks, and I was surprised how many of the resulting journals had Cyrillic in their test entries. I think LJ's starting to lose some of their core audience, even if fandom's still clinging to it.

Re: Nope, don't think it would ever change now :D

[fiatal]

(this is penrynsdreams from lj)

Not to mention that if one percent of comments used subject lines, WAY MORE THAN ONE PERCENT OF USERS have used subject lines. But really, since when do we take away features that people regularly use? Why is this a thing?

Re: Nope, don't think it would ever change now :D

[owlmoose]

Hey, welcome aboard!

But really, since when do we take away features that people regularly use? Why is this a thing?

I don't know, but we've seen it again and again this year -- Google Reader, Delicious, now this. So frustrating.

Re: Nope, don't think it would ever change now :D

[fiatal]

Hey, thanks! I figured why not, with the open sign-ups.