on LJ ads and promises

[desh]

Sooo, when was the LJ Guiding Principles page changed again?

When I first joined the site, this page was called a "social contract", and had the following paragraph: (search the page for ".promise.ads")

Stay advertisement free

It may be because it's one of our biggest pet peeves, or it may be because they don't
garner a lot of money, but nonetheless, we promise to never offer advertising space in our
service or on our pages.

When 6A bought LJ in January 2005, the "social contract" was changed to "guiding principles", and this paragraph was changed:

Avoid banner advertisements

As it's one of our larger pet peeves, we have avoided putting banner
advertisements on the site. Although our Terms of Service permits us to
change our policy in the future, we've found throughout the past few years
that our "paid accounts" business model has, so far, made banners ads
unnecessary.

Of course I'm not going to hold anyone to a promise made by a former owner (though it would've been nice). But now, at some point, even this changed paragraph was removed. The change wasn't made in CVS; it was just removed from the live site. [This was technically true, but misleading. See comments.]

It's starting to look like pleonastic was right about this sale from the beginning. Gradually, and with the best intentions of those behind it, this site is letting all of the good principles it was build on erode away, as it becomes just another site.

Watch lj_ads and news to see when the ads go live. I bet that when they do, there will be a lot of complaining in comments. But I'm less worried about the form ads take in the upcoming days and weeks, and more worried about the long-term implications of all of this. What's the next Guiding Principle to go?

Comments

[burr86.livejournal.com]

No, it was made in CVS (well, SVN), and the commit was there in changelog where all our other commits are recorded; tt was removed from the live site when we pushed code today. And yes, we're removing the paragraph because it would be really lame for us to have a paragraph that says "avoid ads, except where we serve them", and even more people would call us out on the lameness of that.

[desh]

Fair enough. (I find changelog impossible to read since the switch to SVN, but maybe I just need to practice more.) (And thanks for the changelog link.)

And yeah, it would have been lame to leave the paragraph in as it was and still serve ads. I just think that changing social contracts unilaterally is a really really big deal. And the time put into the ads process, and the requests for community feedback, while very much appreciated, don't quite negate that.

[burr86.livejournal.com]

It would have been a trainwreck to ask for feedback, because this change in the business model really kind of comes from knowing enough about how LJ's finances are and what LJ's long-term plans are, and that's just stuff that can't be shared publically. So asking for "feedback" despite the fact that the decision had been made would be lame and rude of us -- this change is coming, like it or not. :P