I have a paid account for the infinite pins of stalking, not for removing ads: as you say, Adblock can do that.
You can remove userpics completely by Adblocking the userpic.livejournal.com server. I do this at work.
Don't care about dodgy images, as I only check my friends page from work and my friends don't post dodgy images outside a cut.
Threaded comments are a good thing, not a bad thing, and one significant way that LJ wins over other blogging software. I think LJ should be Usenet but prettier, more or less.
Adblock snapshot: yep, obviously. Has the bonus side-effect of getting rid of the wretched thing from other sites, too.
Don't care about getting vgifts, nudged or private messaged. I'm struggling to see a significant downside to these things. With the possible exception of private messages, they're useless to me but not actively evil.
What I've done on top of what's mentioned above is install the following userscripts: LJ thread unfolder (which doesn't flatten threads, but allows you to see the remainder of a thread when LJ stops showing comment bodies), Anonymous posting warning (for when I forget to log in), LJ New Comments (as it's my baby and useful for big discussion threads) and Quick Track (lets you use pins of stalking with a single click rather than getting the page asking you how you want the notifications: I always want them in the Message Centre). I'm working on something to make RSS feeds of the comments on my public posts, but LJ's recent comment editing upgrade broke their own comment download protocol in such a way that it might now be unfriendly to LJ's servers to keep up to date with edited comments. Hoping they fix that.
no subject
You can remove userpics completely by Adblocking the userpic.livejournal.com server. I do this at work.
Don't care about dodgy images, as I only check my friends page from work and my friends don't post dodgy images outside a cut.
Threaded comments are a good thing, not a bad thing, and one significant way that LJ wins over other blogging software. I think LJ should be Usenet but prettier, more or less.
Adblock snapshot: yep, obviously. Has the bonus side-effect of getting rid of the wretched thing from other sites, too.
Don't care about getting vgifts, nudged or private messaged. I'm struggling to see a significant downside to these things. With the possible exception of private messages, they're useless to me but not actively evil.
What I've done on top of what's mentioned above is install the following userscripts: LJ thread unfolder (which doesn't flatten threads, but allows you to see the remainder of a thread when LJ stops showing comment bodies), Anonymous posting warning (for when I forget to log in), LJ New Comments (as it's my baby and useful for big discussion threads) and Quick Track (lets you use pins of stalking with a single click rather than getting the page asking you how you want the notifications: I always want them in the Message Centre). I'm working on something to make RSS feeds of the comments on my public posts, but LJ's recent comment editing upgrade broke their own comment download protocol in such a way that it might now be unfriendly to LJ's servers to keep up to date with edited comments. Hoping they fix that.