Dear Livejournal,

[flamingsword]

The advertisements are getting larger, more numerous, more flashy, and the pop-up ads more laggy to load. Please tell your advertisers to DIAF.

Friends, I am thinking of moving to blogger (behold the power of google!) or maybe InsaneJournal and just using this to check my friendslist for everybody who can more easily filter out the increased pace of force-fed consumerism.

Making Livejournal into a high-profit venture has had it's problems with censorship and user unfriendly policies, but the part that's currently killing it for me is the ads. It's not that any of the advertisements are offensive, it's just that there are so many of them and now they are on every page I use.

I don't come here to be sold things to. I come here to relax and connect, and people flickering moving ads at me from my peripheral vision is not relaxing. It interrupts my connection with the posting format. The pop-ups frustrate me with having to wait for them to load the exit button on them because the coding is either clumsy or deliberately slowed to make you more likely to watch the stupid advertising.

Bad job all around, really.

Comments

[elucreh.livejournal.com]

So long as it's RSS-able? JUST DON'T LEAVE ME WITH NO WAY TO FOLLOW YOU

[elucreh.livejournal.com]

Heh. No pun intended. Er.

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

No leaving anybody out in the cold absence of my wonderful self. Got it. ;)

Also, it's okay, you can own up to that pun.

[maeritrae.livejournal.com]

I won't try to dissuade you because, well, it is kind of all made of fail, but (a) are you using Firefox and (b) are you using Ad-Block Plus?

It changes how you feel about the internet. :)

[rens-sanctuary.livejournal.com]

I was going to suggest Stylish and this bit of code:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("livejournal.com")

{
div.adv {display: none !important; visibility: hidden !important;}
div.ljad {display: none !important; visibility: hidden !important;}
div.ljadleaderboard-bottom {display: none !important; visibility: hidden !important;}
div.ljadleaderboard {display: none !important; visibility: hidden !important;}
div.ljadwrapper-journal-after-post-c {display: none !important; visibility: hidden !important;}
div.ljadwrapper-app-home {display: none !important; visibility: hidden !important;}
div.ljadmedrect {display: none !important; visibility: hidden !important;}
}

but I remembered that I too use Firefox and Ad Block Plus. :) :D

[kadairk.livejournal.com]

As I was reading this, I was listening to the audio for an ad I'd already x-ed out of ... but couldn't kill the audio on because of the lag. I hit refresh a lot on LJ to try to get the ads to go away. It works, sometimes.

In better news, it looks like I'm having lunch with Terri on Sunday. Yay!

[rens-sanctuary.livejournal.com]

Link to a bunch of ad removing stuff LJ Ad Wiki:

http://wiki.noljads.com/Hiding_LiveJournal_ads_with_user_stylesheets

There is no shame in ad free pop up free browsing. :D

[daddio914.livejournal.com]

I use FireFox and Adblock Plus. K uses Chrome and an adblock add-on for it. Both seem to be working very well against it. We might even get K to come back and post again after she swore it off...

[jslorentz.livejournal.com]

Dammit, we're just moving some of our political stuff to wordpress. I <3 Google too, but any chance I could convince you to gander at an open source blog with options for site or software? :D

[numb3r-5ev3n.livejournal.com]

You ask me, things haven't been right since the sale to Six Apart in 2005. Things only got worse around the time of the sale to SUP in late 2007/early 2008.

In a way, the explosion of the social media juggernaut is to blame - folks saw that it was profitable after Myspace became popular. And in a capitalist culture, that pretty much spelled the end of a blogging/social media site like LJ as a free, fun entity on the intarwebz.

I joined in 2004 for a Matrix RPG, and never left. Even after repeated marketing manoeuvres, censorship, and generally bullshittery. I tried to take the party to IJ (and I'm _vii_ over there) but I've never been able to tear myself away completely. I just have too much history here. The one thing that would make me go, "that does it, I'm through with LJ" still hasn't fully happened yet.