Oh, *now* I remember

[hummingwolf]

One of the things that kept me busy on Saturday and a small part of Sunday was watching lj_biz, specifically this post about sponsored content on LJ followed by Brad's valiant attempt at damage control, both posts of course followed by umpteen zillion comments about how much people hate the idea of sponsored content. As bad as LJ's introduction of the change may have been, Making Light points out (link via supergee) that the real problem is what the publicists for The Science of Sleep did with the sponsored "community" they got for their money.

Unlike a lot of people, I don't hate advertising. In fact, I think it provides a valuable service (along with much entertainment) as long as it's informative (or at least entertaining) and not deceptive. The problem here is the erosion of trust created by a bunch of sock puppets pretending to be a community of genuine fans. I'm a big fan of real community. Fake "sponsored community" just makes me want to claw somebody's eyes out.

Comments

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Quoting from one of the posts:

In the coming weeks and months, we'll be launching some new offerings, including:

Sponsored communities: LiveJournal communities run by companies who are looking for a way to connect and interact with people who are interested in finding out more about their products and getting special deals and exclusive content.

...

We launched our first sponsored community, the Science of Sleep movie community (scienceofsleep) a few weeks ago, and there'll be more content from different sponsors in the future.

Basically, someone involved with the movie bought a special new kind of LJ account to advertise. There's a big uproar over how LJ is handling things, and also over how the runners of the new "sponsored community" are doing things. It's kind of a big mess.