Pandering, and selling, to jerks

The whole virtual gift thing seems pretty pointless to me. Spend real money to send someone a standard-issue bunch of pixels? Why bother? And after the Pepsi-Max fiasco one might expect a certain hesitance and maybe even some thinking things through. One might. One would be overestimating the folks at LJ. There is a new set of virtual gifts that seems designed to result in drama.

the_lj_herald has a post about upcoming changes and one them is a new set of virtual gifts. Many of them are signs: Ban Me, De-Friend Me, Kick Me, and Troll Me. Virtual gifts can be sent anonymously. With all the people LJ has ticked off, is this really a good move? Or has LJ realized that they no longer have to be concerned about anyone and might as well sell stuff to jerks?

There is a setting to disable receiving virtual gifts. It's near the bottom of this page. The settings are limited: Do not disable, disable all, disable sponsored. There's no 'disable anonymous' or 'allow friends only' so I've just turned the works off. I had only disabled the sponsored (advertizing) stuff, but with this crap coming I'm not taking any chances.

LJ sure does a dandy job of making IJ look good.