I'm actually surprised everyone is so shocked by doing away with free accounts without ads. Even if the advisory board recommended not to do that, it's ultimately the decision of the owners, and they're a business. They're in it to make money and if too many just have a free account and have the option to not see ads as well, they're not making money.

LJ has the communication skills of a snail, but that is, unfortunately, not all that unusual with business these days. I don't like how they didn't announce it, but I don't really see a reason to be up-in-arms about it either -- there's no free lunch online. During Strikethrough, I created a new account elsewhere. So did everyone else apparently. Their servers couldn't handle the load and all the neato stuff they were offering was quickly taken away. From what I understand, it's all but dead, because everyone wanted free accounts and that's not going to pay for servers and programming updates.

From what I understand, all of the missing interests are now back, and from what I can tell it was fixed in about a day, so that's not all that bad. There are people watching the code (there's a comm for it) and they are sort of like a citizen's patrol looking out for these sort of things and letting the rest of us know even if LJ doesn't. I think we're all just too likely to attribute it to malice, when I think it's just plain, old-fashioned, stupidity. And/or just lack of communication between departments about when things should be implemented and when they should be announced to the users.

I keep an eye on the_lj_herald for news. They're not an official LJ group, but they keep an eye on all of those and then explain it in basic English instead of computer code.