i was busy that day but popped in a couple times briefly. both times it seemed like business as usual for the chatroom except with an admin in the user list sidebar. apparently the performance had dipped tremendously during times when many users were trying to get in, though to be fair complaints about the room's performance and quirks are common even when hardly anyone is in there.
being frank, those of us who actually spend time in the chatrooms were surprised when an event was announced to be held there, as we're all quite familiar with its many limitations and weren't hopeful that it would make a strong impression on newcomers. (i would have also been surprised had it been announced to be in the other room.) i'm still not entirely sure what the organizers were hoping to achieve with this, or just how aware they are of these shortcomings.
i'm bad-mouthing the chatroom a bit -- why is it, then, that i spend time there? it's a question i increasingly ask myself, but the answer is simple and hasn't changed from the days when it was consistently popping: though the numbers have dwindled tremendously since the site dropped the ball on the loss of the old flash chatroom, some absolutely INCREDIBLE people still show up, shoot the shit and show off in the chatrooms, and getting the chance to see and appreciate them makes it all worth it. given the state of the chatroom and other "community" features lpsg occasionally claims to care about, the site should consider itself VERY lucky that these people still show up and that these corners of the site are not entirely moribund.
lpsg should be happy about what they've achieved in recent years. i actually hear people mention the site elsewhere sometimes, something that i never used to hear. it seems, though, that the site is perceived by most as the place to go when you want to ogle at a public figure's leaked nudes or drool over influencers' thirst traps, especially once they're no longer readily viewable elsewhere. of course the website is a business and you folks do work hard to maintain the #engagement you do have, but at times i do wish you all would focus more on some of the things that made this place unique instead of just doing sex toy promos and aiming to be an seo'd horny-twitter understudy. in a perfect world, lpsg would be strong in its current strengths while also being the sort of place that the amateur "stars" of the day would come to get exposure rather than just to posts links to their other pages and to make requests to have their unauthorized "content" removed. some of these folks are still here, but it's clear as day that this is far from the most important place for them to be.
some time ago now, control of the site was handed off to someone new who made some happy-sounding posts pretending to be buddy-buddy with everyone before almost immediately making enormous changes to the user experience of the site with little prior notice or solicitation of feedback; predictably, it went absolutely disastrously. some of these changes may have been necessary in the long run, but the implementation was hasty and sloppy to put it kindly, and engagement for actual user-generated #content promptly cratered immediately. the folks who flipped the switch then began profusely apologizing and vaguely blaming random engineers who did the hard work of the implementation for "not being true LPSGers" (ironic) before soliciting endless feedback from angry users. some remediation of the problems seems to have occurred, but many others that we were once told were on the queue remain -- the "solution" seems to have been to wait for people to stop caring or to just forget what the site used to be like.
so while it is nice to occasionally hear about how lpsg has plans to expand or develop features facilitating connection between users, possibly to include better chat functionality, it is also hard to get one's hopes up. the two current half-solution chatrooms that exist -- and even calling them half-solutions sometimes seems generous -- are inadequate, and it seems the site recognizes that to an extent. some of the same folks at the site, however, have claimed multiple times that the chat feature was "never particularly popular" and seemed to have no understanding of why anyone actually wants this feature. perhaps a chatroom won't bring the engagement that a section of threads about onlyfans stars, noah beck or shawn mendes deepfakes will, but some people have actually made genuine friends thanks to these features! that's an experience that cannot be replaced by ANY volume of social media #content aggregation, and i am not hopeful that the site will remain a viable place for that kind of "connection," as you all put it, going forward.
there is still a lot of potential! for god's sake, people are always going to be horny. zoom is an absolutely ATROCIOUS platform to watch people stroke their dicks and have horny-chat, and yet the zoom events you all hold seem to be consistently quite well attended. that's great! if you are serious about enhancing the "community" features of your platform, you should at least recognize that gatherings of that size WERE once the norm on your very own hosted chatroom and that the experience that provided is part of the reason that a good chunk of your users still come here today. you SHOULD try to rebuild the positive aspects of that experience again. will you? i don't know, but i hope so!
i know this has been a bit of a ramble and is almost uniformly negative, but i do really like this site and treasure the "connections" i've made here. i want to see that continue -- not just for me, but new users too! so i wish you all the best of luck.
tl;dr: the event was just a normal day in the chatroom, except even laggier and glitchier than usual. who knows what was expected then, and who knows what's expected for the future
