When I got a paid LJ account (and, later, bought a permanent account), the lure was twofold: helping to support what was then a small non-profit venture, and access to the faster servers. It used to be that you got better performance if you had a paid account, and when LJ was small and poor and couldn't afford as much infrastructure as there was demand for, that was a good way to do it. It wasn't that they were throttling the free accounts; they were just providing a level of "express service" for the paying customers.
Most of that doesn't really apply any more, so they resorted to features that most of us don't care about. Apparently I am now permitted 142 userpics; err, what? I use voice posting maybe once or twice a year if that, and text-messaging not at all. Polls? Also rare. RSS feeds? I've created a few and it's nice not to have to worry about it, but if I couldn't create feeds my world would not end.
I'm kind of surprised that ad-supported sites are still profitable, between AdBlock and learned behavior modification. (By the latter I mean: AdBlock doesn't kill, for example, Google ads on search-result pages, but I just plain don't see them -- my eyes just automatically avoid that part of the page.)
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When I got a paid LJ account (and, later, bought a permanent account), the lure was twofold: helping to support what was then a small non-profit venture, and access to the faster servers. It used to be that you got better performance if you had a paid account, and when LJ was small and poor and couldn't afford as much infrastructure as there was demand for, that was a good way to do it. It wasn't that they were throttling the free accounts; they were just providing a level of "express service" for the paying customers.
Most of that doesn't really apply any more, so they resorted to features that most of us don't care about. Apparently I am now permitted 142 userpics; err, what? I use voice posting maybe once or twice a year if that, and text-messaging not at all. Polls? Also rare. RSS feeds? I've created a few and it's nice not to have to worry about it, but if I couldn't create feeds my world would not end.
I'm kind of surprised that ad-supported sites are still profitable, between AdBlock and learned behavior modification. (By the latter I mean: AdBlock doesn't kill, for example, Google ads on search-result pages, but I just plain don't see them -- my eyes just automatically avoid that part of the page.)