I’d been on the fence about whether to participate in the LiveJournal content strike, but after reading this post about it by sunspiral, I will be participating. Since I don’t post every day anyway, you wouldn’t know unless I told you, so I’m telling you.

I’m unhappy with a lot of changes at LiveJournal (slowly snowballing through each successive sale of the company), but since the value of LiveJournal is the community it creates and provides it’s very hard to up stakes and go someplace else — that would only work if everybody I cared about upped stakes and went to the same someplace else. But at least I can be part of a little blip in the usage stats, which will help the company (and its competitors) figure out what proportion of the user base (and the content provider base) is content and what proportion is not, and if they are good businesspeople that will drive their decisions about policy. Many of the changes are clearly made because SUP hope they will make more money this way. They may well be right, but I’m not convinced, and maybe the “strike” will give them more accurate data to help make that determination.

(Apologies to all of you who don’t follow the minutiae of LJ politics. Feel free to ask questions, which I will answer after midnight GMT tomorrow, 8pm EST.)