I don't want to start a panic but...

LiveJournal as a whole might be in trouble.

(Yeah, I'm REALLY glad I didn't buy a permenant account now).

Firstly, I would advise people not to start running around like headless chickens. There are very few actual named sources behind this article. The author is largely making statements based on theories, not facts. All we know for sure is that Sup recently axed a bunch of workers at LJ HQ - which given the current financial climate is not surprising.

But given how much Sup, and Six Apart before it, have been utterly failing to take LJs current users' wants and needs into account, I don't think we can afford to be complacent. These companies have time and again proved that they want LiveJournal to be something it isn't, and in trying to turn it into something they THINK will be profitable they have been losing revenue because the existing LJ-users have felt alienated and either stopped paying for accounts or taken their business elsewhere entirely. These people don't know how to run LiveJournal. They've been trying to run it so it turns them a massive profit, when frankly this just isn't the kind of place that ever will, and all they've got from it is grief from the users. We are not a social networking site - we are a communal blogging service and fandom resource. There's a HUGE difference between us and somewhere like Facebook, and Sup clearly made a mistake in thinking that it could make money out of LJ in the same way when it simply can't.

LiveJournal has never been about big business. This is not the sort of site you can really make a profit from and these businesses seem to have been operating under the dellusion that SOMEHOW they can squeeze a lot more cash out of it. Now the truth of the situation - that some things on the internet just don't adhere to capatilist market structure - has dawned and... well, I have no idea what they might do about that.

I doubt LJ will actually be shut down in the near future - we're not a HUGE profit maker but we are still popular and we still must be making SOME profit given how many users are still here and how much advertising gets done here, chances are we just aren't making as much profit as Sup would have liked. If it IS shut down, I doubt that it will be done without fair warning, and I would suspect that there will be a very large effort to save it on the part of the users. (There was talk, back in the aftermath of the 2007 strikethrough, of a large group banding together and attempting to buy LJ on behalf of the users and running it on a not-for-profit basis, which I think is actually quite feasable).

But like I said, given Sup's history, we can't afford to be complacent. This is a very useful tool for archiving your LJ-posts if you are worried. Given as how nearly three years of my life is recordered here, I'll certainly be backing mine up just in case Sup pulls the plug without any warning.

But like I said, f-listies - don't panic. The sky is vibrating uneasily, but it isn't falling quite yet and it may never come down.

Fic: Seeing

Title: Seeing
Rating: R
Genre: Humour, romance, crossover
Characters/Pairings: Rupert, Mina (Demons) and Morgana (Merlin) predominantly Mina/Morgana; suggested Arthur/Merlin, Morgana/Gwen, Morgana/Arthur, and general OT4ness
Summary: Mina meets an immortal creature infinitely older than herself.

AN: With thanks to my beta, clanne  . The idea for this particular fic was put into my head by eviinsanemonkey  for you can blame thank her for the resulting insanity. XP

 

( Certainly there are things more than human all over the place - and they are all very dangerous. But they aren't all monsters. )