(no subject)

[tinyjo]

Pulled from a bunch of people:

These stats show that the average LJ user is an 18-year-old girl. I have nothing against 18-year-old girls. But there are certain assumptions about teenaged girls, and what they want, and how to market to them. If you're worried about the potential MySpace-ization of LJ and concerned that Six Apart is ignoring the more mature portion of its userbase, here's what you can do:

1) Go here and specify your full date of birth, including your year of birth. If you don't want everyone to see how old you are, make sure the box that says "show your birthday to other users" is unchecked. The important thing is to get yourself into the database. Do this for any and all LJ accounts you have.

2) Re-post this.

Worth a shot...

Comments

[mr-snips.livejournal.com]

Presumably the average paying customer is somewhat older, though? (I assume, perhaps unfairly, that LJ would rather attract paying customers than non paying ones :))

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

I think that the stats for paying people suffer from the same skewing as the general stats, unfortunatly. Also, generally, new features are aimed at getting people who don't currently pay to pay - it is presumed that people who're already paying will just ignore them if they don't like them, I think.

[shepline.livejournal.com]

Are there any statistics for how long people keep their LJs going for? I would have thought that the age distribution would ripple down as the the kids of today become the students of tomorrow, and the students now become the cynics later on...

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I mean, I know the data is there, although it might be a bit of a strain on the db to get the approximate lenght of activity and so on but I don't know if they use that.

Two factors to consider:

[dotty.livejournal.com]

- Paying for membership: surely NOT in the average age range they are specifying, youngsters spend it on other stuff, or Greater Journal/Dead Journal (for goths).

- Date of Birth being specified: surely, being older means that you are more aware of privacy, at least online, so under this idea, I think that older people are NOT represented in this survey/stats. All they did was to pull numbers from everyone who has specified their d.o.b. in their user page, *which is a completely false data to start with*.

Re: Two factors to consider:

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's exactly the problem but there seems no way to convince 6a of that so the only way we can influence it is to try to get the stats to be a bit closer to the actual situation.

Re: Two factors to consider:

[shepline.livejournal.com]

Is there a way that LiveJournal/SixApart could address this by having two date of births. One mandatory that you have to fill in to prove who the user is but is in no way used for anything other than the creation of stats, and another that you can set according to what you want to display or not display on your userinfo?

[jinty]

The link you posted to wasn't very clear about what is really expected to happen, if at all. (It sounded a bit overly excited, to my mind.)

* What exactly is or might be the possible 'MySpace-isation' of LJ?
* Is there anything that might force LJ users over to Vox or other blogging sites, other than the threat of this possible MySpace-isation?

[jinty]

Sorry, I see now it was dotty who posted the link...

[jinty]

damn, I mean tenderhooligan. Got it right finally...

But in any case I assume you are in a good place to know what might actually be in the wind. Do you have any more details?

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Ah, friends only entry, I assume - can you tell me what the link was? People do seem to get overly excited about nearly everything on LJ so who knows :)

I don't know a huge amount about what's in the wind atm other than the profile page redesign (possibly - see lj_design but what I'm worried about is the increasing feeling that LJ are going for style over substance. Instead of improving the features they have they're focusing on adding options to styles to encourage people to switch over to S+ and playing around with the GUIs for things. I'm more at the level of general uneasiness than some folk I know but enough that I figured it was worth passing this on.

[jinty]

this is the link that she had:
http://mother.livejournal.com/962238.html

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Goodness me! I had heard mention of that but hadn't seen it. Even if it was more moderately phrased, I think that part of the problem atm is that what will happen is that that petition will presumably get sent to feedback@. I know some of the people who staff that and they're already well aware there's a problem but when they pass the feedback on the higher-ups just say "oh, that's just a very small minority of vocal users" and go ahead with focusing on what they think will appeal to LJ's primary demographic as they see it. I think that's probably where this meme started - I guess somebody figured maybe fixing the data would be easier than getting the higher-ups to see sense.

I think that petition is rather too strongly worded but it is that kind of trend that I'm worried about. The problem tends to be that when something becomes marketing driven, there is a tendancy to copy the bad bits from the sucessful companies. All the hype at the moment is that mySpace is the big thing with the teenage crowd and I'm sure there are lessons we can learn from mySpace but design isn't one of them! Actually, I can't think what they are at the moment but then I'm not a mySpace person anyway. So yeah, my fear is that a lot of the running on the direction of LJ at the moment is being made by the marketing department at 6A and this is the only suggestion I've seen that might actually have a shot at influencing them.

[jc.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the "show your birthday to other users" option didn't exist before, but regardless I'm glad you brought my attention to it with the new profile management pages. Thanks.

[asciident]

Actually, it did, in the form of "hide your birthday".

'Til your daddy took your T-bird away...

[vinaigrettegirl.livejournal.com]

I have entered my details for the sake of the stats. But now I have a Beach Boys earworm about the statistically valid LJ Girlie...