Just trying to make a journal and, well, since I'm a critic, I'll start by criticising this.

The simple mechanism makes it easy to write anything, I mean, it's just a block where you type anything you want. People use it for everything: diary, rants, discussions, advertising, spam, etc. I can understand the first two, everybody likes to talk about their lives and people like to put their noses on them, seems like a fair trade to me, and everybody loves good rants (well, I do, I'm a critic).

The worst part comes with bad rants and discussions, they make no sense but they drag people into the love/hate spiral, they either love the artist and follow him blindly into the well, or they hate the artist and every fan will come flame him into dust. Don't even try to be neutral, they will put a label on you by force.

Hmm, now I'm ranting instead of criticising the journal system, I must stop doing it.

I see a "Journal Entries" tab on my right, it should be good when I have a lot of journals there, that way I can look at the past and reach it with my hand, excuse me, my mouse.

Now the downside options, that seems pretty useless to me, it's just another thing to keep us happy for not having a subscription. Ah well, it can come handy when you want to show people, for example, what are you reading. Instead of saying "Hey, wanna know what I'm reading?", you just show it on that tab and whoever cares about it will sure read it.

DA's journal system is quite simple, too bad you don't have it explaining here the various uses of it. Don't bother saying "There's a help section", nobody reads the FAQ unless they have a problem.

Too bad the quality of the journals depend on the person who writes it.

Edit: The edit seems to work fine too, also the "minor edit" option will save people from useless notifyings.