Age != wisdom: Why does Livejournal keep getting it wrong?

Anyone who knows me well knows that two websites are responsible for almost all of my “social life”: Livejournal (LJ) and Yelp. I have an especially long history with LJ as I’ve been an LJ user for almost eight years now. Livejournal is a blogging tool, while Yelp is devoted mainly to business reviews. Through osmosis or design, they’ve both fostered rather strong social networks as well.

Some recent (unpopular and controversial) events on LJ got me thinking of both sites for something of a compare-and-contrast, as both sites play a rather significant role in my life.

As with most successful websites, the strength of LJ lies in the devotion of its userbase. Up until recently, the “management” of LJ was rather hands-off and the site grew organically. The previous owner, SixApart, recently unloaded LJ onto a new buyer, a Russian company called SUP, and, well, things are changing quickly on LJ to the dismay of many. (Put briefly: Worries about censorship. Just to be clear: I’m in no way affiliated with any of the Harry Potter folks!)

To be fair, some of these changes were happening while LJ was still owned by SixApart. Still, considering that SUP’s recent moves to monetize LJ have shaken the confidence of many users, we’re in the thick of a large-scale problem in LJ-land. It remains to be seen what will happen with the userbase long-term; many are threatening to abandon LJ completely for greener pastures. Who knows.

But while Livejournal slowly implodes, Yelp’s doing pretty darn well. The review site is much younger than Livejournal, but it’s still doing a lot of things right from the get-go. It has a small but very devoted following in most of the major cities. There’s a healthy contingent of Boston Yelpers—I’m one of them. Yelp not only exemplifies the Ultimate Web 2.0 Ethos of transparency and interactivity (putting the users in control), it also provides a fascinating model of how to turn that into money. And, as we all well know, that’s something a lot of people are scrambling to figure out.

It’s somewhat ironic that one of Yelp’s big draws online, in Boston anyway, is that it throws and sponsors some of the best events in the city. Often these events will be co-sponsored by a local business looking to strengthen its brand recognition, but not always. Yelp members get to network and attend a fun event, the co-sponsor gets word-of-mouth advertising—it seems everybody wins.

The two common threads with both LJ and Yelp are the empowerment of the userbase AND the face-to-face human element. But the moment that LJ’s new ownership started to wrest the bottom-up ownership from the userbase, there’s been a slow-boil revolt. That’s no small threat when people pull their paid subscriptions.

If things progress as they are now, Yelp will exemplify how to foster AND monetize a healthy userbase, whereas LJ will be a cautionary tale of how to hemorrhage users from one of the largest and oldest online communities in the world.