RP emigration thoughts

[opusculus]

Okay, I admit it. I find the whole RP mass migration over to DW absolutely fascinating to watch and want to tl;dr about it to work out my own thoughts on it. Mostly to get it out of my head! I like business shit and mass social changes, okay. This is kind of the other side of my earlier tl;dr, as it's focusing on RP rather than LJ.

What immediately caught my attention about it is - okay, DW's been around for a couple years now. For most that time, the rhetoric about moving has been about the morality of it. LJ sucks, DW is the promised land of fannishness run by fans yadda yadda. It's been entirely about a theoretical ethical thing, and that's...pretty easy to ignore if LJ hasn't actually done anything that significantly inconvenienced you, and also all your friends don't really want to move and yadda yadda yadda. LJ has the advantage of the incumbent, and frankly, even with basically the entire RP community moving off it it's still got a lot more fucking up to do if it's going to lose that.

But why the RP segment was the first non-moral group to mass emigrate is pretty obvious, I think? I mean, DW seems to have historically disproportionately attracted the loud people, the social justice people, the people who like the room to be really private, etc. And none of that's a bad thing, but it's a very narrow segment that basically reflects the people most likely to have loudly hated LJ enough that they felt morally obligated to put their money where their mouth was. RPers, on the other hand, haven't really historically been about that, and are emigrating to DW for different reasons.

1. Most RPers no longer use their personal journals - most OOC communication is done via plurk, with a side of Tumblr/Twitter. It's been a massive cultural shift over the last couple years that can probably be traced back to the fact that in general, short-form communication is easier for most people to maintain, and Plurk's the one short form communication that has talking with people built into its concept. Maintaining a journal's a lot more effort, and for a lot of people that's just not what they want.
   
   I think the ideal system for RPers would be something like plurk that threw out the karma system, accommodated slightly longer posts while still being set up around really short ones, and generally had better usability and more ability to organize who you plurk to. Because I like plurk for what it is, but the timeline thing is STUPID. But that's a digression from my point, which is to say that for most RPers, LJ was no longer their internet home. It was their playground. That's a really significant change, IMO.



2. RPers are a large community of power users who all use similar features for the same goals, basically. I used features that I'd've never bothered with on my own - mostly custom filters for CFUW, but also subject lines and giant icon sets and scrapbook (oh god fuck scrapbook). It's the difference between a bunch of people all doing what they feel like, and being part of a goal-oriented community where tips for how to make it easiest are shared. If LJ had removed features that only some members of a community used, that would get a very different reception than removing features that everyone in a community uses. Communities balance out attitudes towards a norm, and a community where only a few people are really upset is going to have a very different response than a community where everyone's upset over generally the same issues.



3. RPers are not only paying customers, but they're well-aware that they're paying massively more than even most paying customers. I have entirely different standards towards plurk, where I'm a free user, than I do with something that I am a well-paying customer. If I'm giving substantial sums of money, I expect to be getting service out of it that's worth that money. I was getting the icons I was paying LJ for. I was getting nothing else whatsoever out of LJ that made me otherwise happy to pay. My impression is that RPers in general were fairly disenchanted with LJ, but willing to keep paying as long as their games were there just because that was what they were on LJ for. Give people like that a chance for a better experience, and they'll jump ship with glee



4. In a sense, RPer's RP journals belong to a community much more closely than a personal journal generally does? Obviously, they belong to their players first and foremost, but... RP communities have much more power to decide "okay, we're moving" and enforce it on the people who might not particularly want to move than other communities, because people's RP journals were frequently created just for that community. You're not telling people you've moved homes and they should too, you're telling people that everyone else has decided that this playground isn't being well-maintained enough, so everyone's agreed to move to this other playground.



5. I think the straw that ensured this would be almost a universal move is turning on automatic payments. Because adding actual financial threats to general dissatisfaction and people not being able to get on and a buggy release is a really bad idea. I think if automatic payments hadn't been found to have turned on for some people at around the same time, there still would have been a move but it wouldn't have reached the same kind of critical mass of basically every moderately large game moving.



6. DW doesn't have all the features that LJ does (mostly Scrapbook seems to be what people miss?), but it's also added really subtly useful features (thread from start is something I've long regretted the hell out of not having on LJ in order to refresh my memory on the thread's mood before responding), and in general it's been adding features that are actively useful for RP at the same time that LJ's been adding features that are completely irrelevant to harmful for RP. When patterns like that are brought up, they make people think.



7. Which leads into: DW's been around long enough now that it doesn't feel like a risky startup to most people, and people have been RPing on it long enough that conversations generally had a couple people with experience with it speaking up. I mean, there were still plenty of people who thought that DW was too risky, but in general people found that silly? I mean, the type of money that CFUD alone brings to the table is enough to support a fifth of DW's entire maintenance costs, which really only leaves DW being incompetent. And that I think is where the whole transparent business model really came to the fore, because anyone who's been paying attention to DW at all doesn't think that it's incompetent.

So I don't think this is something that's going to be replicated anywhere else on LJ? There's a lot of factors that made it particularly easy for RPers to get up and move, and inclined to do so when given reasons to that don't apply to the rest of LJ. But I find it an interesting case study in what can lead to a mass movement to switch services.

Comments

[branchandroot]

*nods* I think it's been obvious for a while that ethical considerations only move a very small number of people from any product or service. And even blatant censorship doesn't move that many, not once the critical energy has been siphoned off into another project (eg AO3). Taking away significant functionality from paying customers, however, that's business kryptonite.

(DW a risk? Really? *chuckles*)

[existence]

re: parenthetical:
LJRP, in a sense, has seen a number of LJ-clone sites come and go, and historically, the ones with the best toys tend to be the ones that disappear first. The fact that DW is very loudly committed to sustainable growth is reassuring to the user, and makes it more likely they'll be less skeptical about having to move on, then off the site.

[branchandroot]

Oh, I know; I surfed a few of the RP waves out to IJ and GJ, only to see the sites founder. But as Opusculus says, the financial transparency and stability of DW, and Denise and Mark's care for scalability, are so deeply ingrained and so high profile here I can't help a bit of a disbelieving chuckle.

[opusculus]

Yeah, exactly. It's hard moving away from a service that people have invested years of time on, and people learn to route around most problems pretty quickly. Look at how ff.net's M rating has become effectively NC-17 after it banned NC-17, while on the topic of that. But eventually it slowly drives people away from services, and occasionally it reaches the critical point for entire large communities.

[inarticulate]

I like to think it's also helped that there are a few RP communities that exist solely on DW-- granted, some of them closed shortly after opening, but there are more people who are able to say, specifically, "This works, we're welcome here." Which is nice for me, after having been burned by LJ's policies and Inksome's lack of sustainability.

That said, I'm probably biased because I've been here for a nice long while and, while I may use plurk more, this is definitely home. I'm comfy here. ♥

[opusculus]

Oh, I definitely think that helped! If there hadn't been any, then I think the move would have seemed a lot more risky. It's always safer to take a jump when people in the water are waving at you going "Don't worry, the water's fine!" XD

[arabesque]

Yeaaaaaaah, I also think that if LJ hadn't messed with the comment posts (and made it inaccessible to a huge chunk of people for technical and/or accessibility issues), it might not have been such a huge deal. Also Igrick. SERIOUSLY, GUYS, GOOD JOB.

[opusculus]

Oh yeah. It's amazing how much making the primary use of the site a pain in the ass and then being a douche about it can hurt a site! It's shocking, really.

[arabesque]

WHO WOULDA THUNK, that's such a novel concept.

[moextispicy]

I for one am completely shocked!

[arabesque]

Utterly and completely!! It would have taken a GENIUS to predict that outcome.

[moextispicy]

Or maybe they just lack psychic powers! We can't blame them, really.

[inthetatras]

My impression is that RPers in general were fairly disenchanted with LJ, but willing to keep paying as long as their games were there just because that was what they were on LJ for.

Preeeeetty much. My personal LJ is a Permanent Account, and most of the people on my friends list don't update that often anymore (or at all). It got to the point where I no longer cared about checking my f-list that often. Because I didn't use LJ much for personal reasons (just the occasional f-locked entry about real life, usually), CFUD and another game became the only things keeping me on LJ. It helped that my LJ had finally paid for itself. Those Perms are expensive.

[opusculus]

Yeah, my flist has been a ghost town for years. It made moving over here a lot easier, at least! Though I'm glad you managed to hang out there long enough for your Permanent Account to pay for itself at least.

[inthetatras]

I'm definitely glad about that. I'd been an LJ user since Dec 2001, but didn't upgrade it to Perm until the sale in 2007. The timing is also too perfect; it pays for itself right before LJ goes down the complete shitter. xD

[opusculus]

It is pretty great timing XD

Hey, quick question. Does Sunday work for the game start for you?

[inthetatras]

Yeah, it does. The only thing I have going on this weekend is that I'll be hanging out at my friend Joan's place for a few days. She has internet :Db