The Science of Sheep

[owl]

Over on lj_biz, they announced the arrival of more sponsored features, ones that will be visible to paid/perm users; an SMS service and the arrival of sponsored communities. Cue 68 pages, to date, of disgruntled comments. brad does damage control. And so does burr86. And they change the icon and utter soothingly some more. brad continues here.

I'm not concerned about SMS because, like voice posts, it probably won't be available in the UK. I took a look at the first sponsored comm, scienceofsleep. (Note the sponsored comm icon, utterly distinguishable from the normal one if you squint, and unless you happen to be colour-blind).
Its maintainters and members have a suspiciously high proportion of new journals. In typical LJ fashion, the mob have gathered and are calling them on this.

Why on earth did the advertisers not announce who they were up-front, and whatever features (news, exclusive pics, whatever) LJers are supposed to get out of the community? Surely anyone with half a brain could have worked out that making posts in extravagant praise of the film, while pretending be real users, would only put people's backs up? And presumably someone was paid to set up this community.

Comments

[liadnan]

Reading http://brad.livejournal.com/2251980.html, including the comments, you begin to suspect Brad is not entirely happy with lj/sixapart in general.

[owl]

Oh, yes, I was going to link to that, but I forgot. What's that for, so they can target ads at us according to our interests.

However, happily, people who spell 'travelling' correctly can still have it as a non-popular interest.