Current mood:

annoyed

Why delete journals?
The goal of the strike is to put a dent into the Livejournal Statistics that SixApart cannot ignore.

I think there are probably half a million active users on livejournal. On average, as far as I can tell, over any 24 hour period about 250 000 posts or comments get made.

What SixApart is selling isn't account space - it's targetted advertising space. Deleting journals wouldn't have done a thing to send a message under Brad's business model, where free accounts were not a source of revenue, but under SixApart's business model, free account holders are a pool of advert-targets that SixApart can use as a resource - a pool that has already given information about age, gender, locale, and interests. The significant change to the TOS since SixApart bought lj was that you are not legally *allowed* to have software installed to block ads on livejournal.

We could do this just as well by not commenting for a day. There are two reasons for deleting. One is that a deleted account has a line through it wherever the account-holder made comments or posts on other journals or communities, so that it's visible that the account-holder is on strike: the other is - well, I don't know about you, but I'm going to find it HARD to stay off livejournal for a day! (In fact, I'm planning to strike for 48 hours - from the beginning of Tuesday at the International Date Line, to the end of Tuesday at the IDL.) And it will be easier to remember that I'm doing it if my account is deleted.

Livejournal statistics

The stats for the previous 24 hours are:

Total accounts: 10336342
... active in some way: 1853359
... that have ever updated: 6953213
... updating in last 30 days: 1197567
... updating in last 7 days: 710839
... updating in past 24 hours: 257041

The stats for the past 24 hours (they seem to be updated at midnight Pacific Time) are:

Total accounts: 10343538
... active in some way: 1852649
... that have ever updated: 6957300
... updating in last 30 days: 1196089
... updating in last 7 days: 711324
... updating in past 24 hours: 253545

The figure people have been pointing at and saying "we can't possibly change that" is Total accounts: 10.3M. True, we can't: but a lifetime acquaintance with How To Lie With Statistics tells me why. This figure is said to be (on the front page) the total number of accounts created since 1999. What that says to me is that it includes accounts since deleted or suspended - and it certainly includes just over 3.3M accounts that have never once even updated, because their own stats say so.

Breaking this down: 10.3M accounts created is a figure that will only ever go up, not down, no matter how many people leave the site. Only 6.95M of these accounts have ever been updated. Listed as "active in some way": 1.85M. No definition of what that means.

The real information is: updated in the past 30 days - 1.2M (just under). Given that any time one person comments on a community, that's two accounts updated, my guess is that's probably around half a million people.

Updated in the past seven days: 711 324. To put a dent in this figure we would have to go on strike for a week, and I don't see that happening.

Updated in the past 24 hours: 253545. (In the previous 48 hours, 257 041 / 236 681.) That figure I think we can put a dent in, if enough people join us, and that - and the publicity being created by other means (see press release) - is a message to SixApart and their advertisers: don't piss off the people you plan to make money out of. It's rude, and it's counterproductive.