Things that LiveJournal keeps reminding me of, all of which I already know, and none of which I care about:
What I DO have in my LJ account is spam from the LJ management, and a bunch of posts from random strangers (”highlights”) with no resemblance to my interests that were automatically added to my friends list in aggressive effort to make me an empowered and informed member of LJ society.
I don’t use LiveJournal as a community management tool, web 2.0 portal, social networking hub, start page, chat service, a news feed, a community heartbeat, or a message board. In fact, I don’t even use LJ as a journal, but a handful of my friends do, and I like to keep an account to be able to follow them, including their private posts.
There’s no way to have an account, though, without having a journal, a profile, and everything short of an entire social networking presence. And after a solid year of ignoring these features, they still beg me to upload a user picture, and then upgrade to a paid account so that I can hold more user pictures. I’m even reminded that my current friends list isn’t big enough for their satisfaction yet.
And this is why I dislike LJ, and so many other established web services. Instead of accepting that they’ve found a way to be useful and simple tool for me, they won’t stop selling themselves to me.
But can’t I just ignore these things? Of course I can, but why should I have to? There are few things more patronizing and aggravating than a machine repeatedly telling you “You’re doing it wrong!”, and then explaining why, when you’re doing nothing more or less than what you want.
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