Migrants to IJ, 2007

There's nothing up here specifically about the pro-ana comment threads yet, so

My post about it, if you can wade through the emotive language enough to get the gist of it. ;)


ETA: No point making a new post for this. On LJ, aura218 is doing a list of links to the threads on the latest lj_biz post in which staffers comment. It's sort of depressing clicking through them and watching them dance around questions and then completely stop talking without ever giving a straight answer.

Illegal and Harmful Content Policy Clarifications posted in lj_biz by a new LJ username: "theljstaff."

In case no one's come across this yet - an article from Der Spiegel which I'm informed is sort of like Time Magazine. And for those of us who don't speak German, napiers_bones on GJ translated it.

...still worth the read.

Brad Fitzpatrick is leaving LJ (courtesy of liz_marcs links)

Fandom vs LJ made CNet news again.

From Pictishqueen over on Greatest Journal:


This post at Valleywag may be of interest. Six Apart's problems seem to go far deeper than mishandling fans. Live Journal founder Brad Fitzpatrick may be about to jump ship because of their problems and they may be looking for a buyer for the company. Apparently it's not only their users they wont communicate with.

Perhaps the most telling bit of this story is this comment

Six Apart is in two separate businesses -- selling blog software and services to big companies, and managing social networks LiveJournal and Vox. The two don't mesh well, and it shows. CEO Barak Berkowitz's corporate-running-dog background has not prepared him at all for dealing with feisty online users, and his ineptness was on display in the recent fan-fiction censorship scandal.

More at the link below. If it's of interest then please pass it around and digg it.




read more | digg story

Reason number eleventy-billion why buying a perm account was a dumb idea:

Three of the four charity organizations LJ members were donating to has strong ties to the venture capitalist looking to buy Six Apart. Yup, that's right, they basically got LJers to dump money into the pockets of the corporate entities LJ is trying so desperately to please. More moderate heads have pointed out that this is probably a point in this guy's favor

Vote Oulangi! Hat-tip to oulangi for the excellent detective work.

Hmmm... maybe we should suggest to the not entirely insane fandom people who are insistent on staying on LJ that they should write this guy and point out that Six Apart is having some censorship issues, since he turns out to be pretty cool after all? And that, like, it wouldn't be cool to hand them money?

(Edited 8/5/07, later that day)

In which Burr86 has time to make fun of Strikethrough '07 and LJers, but no time to answer questions.

Burr86 being, among other things, a Six Apart executive who frequently addresses LJers and their questions.

I'm just incredulous. I can't believe that any so-called professional businessman would act like this toward his customers. Even after he was called on it, he still continued to make fun of people.

I think that we can safely say that this is LJ's attitude toward its customers.

They do not like their customers.

They do not respect their customers.

They think nothing of mocking their customers and their concerns publicly.

Isn't that CHARMING?

Questions? Comments? Suggestions?

One of the things I see coming up over the latest pedophile witch-hunt by Livejournal is reference to a United States law that really does make completely fictional visual and text representations of "minors" illegal.

( That law does really exist, but it is a bad law that I believe Livejournal could be interepreting in a fashion to be on the side of the users. Instead, they're interpreting it to either protect their pocketbook, or even worse... they're using it as an excuse to remove material they simply don't like. )

The bottom line is this; Livejournal has become an enemy of free expression. You can scream and rant at them all you want, and you can even hit them in the balls by no longer supporting them financially, but that won't change how they've reacted. Just as in everything else they've done up until this point, if they'd conducted themselves differently, reacted differently, and approached the user base differently, it could be said otherwise. But based on their conduct and treatment of their users thus far, they demonstrate that they are now allies of the racist, sexist, homophobic religious zealots that are the true enemies of free speech and free expression.

This isn't to suggest that you shouldn't scream and rant at them, or refuse to give them any more money. 6A is run by humans, and it's certainly possible they could be guilt-tripped (or given the financial pinch) into doing the right thing again. The question is... can we trust them to stay that way if and when they ever come back to our side?

STOP THE PRESSES! Six Apart may be breaking the law!

In short: Recently, a federal court ruled that companies on the Internet must inform their userbase when they change the contract that the users agreed to. The ruling explicitly says that keeping an up-to-date copy of the contract on the site is not good enough-- companies must actually send out the friggin' e-mail in order to let consumers know.

Not that this probably impacts anyone's bottom line, but if you happen to have a lot of free time/money and saved before/after versions of the LJ TOS.. go to town, man. Six Apart is now open to class-action lawsuits over it according to Uncle Sam.

Yeah, I got nothing else.

Fan artists' journals are being suspended.

So, how do we let LJ know that this is not something we want to see happening?

ETA: Ack, sorry about this, for some reason I ended up posting this here instead of in my own journal. *facepalms*

Fandomtossed over on Greatest Journal reports that ponderosa121 and elaboration have both been suspended from LJ; anyone here have any more news on that?

ETA: In comments on GJ, muskrit reports that Pondy's suspension may have been over a Snape/Harry piece on pornish_pixies (more info from blue_soaring, here), and shaggirl has added nebulaean to the list of suspensions nebulaean appears to be a self-deletion.

ETA2: Thanks to shusu, a link to imaginarycircus's post on the subject.

But since this comm deals with "ex LJ people," some of whom are still current LJ people, I figured I'd post.

There's a massive power outage in downtown San Francisco (where I work). 6A is located in downtown SF.

Outage of LJ is probably unrelated to politics or online drama. PG&E expects power to be restored in another half an hour or so.

fandom_wank coverage of what's shaping up to be Strikethrough 07.1

Basically, 6A continues to fail at trying to clarify their position on inappropriate content, issuing several blatantly contradictory statements (in the same paragaphs, in a lot of cases) and mis-interpreting the laws they're supposedly basing their policy trainwreck on.

Linked to the F_W coverage since there are spoilers for HP7 in the actual posts to lj_biz, and F_W has been keeping things spoiler-free. (the wank report does have all the relevant links, though)

Not sure if everyone hasn't already read this one by now, but it certainly sums up my feelings about LJ/strikethrough rather nicely so I thought I'd pass it along. :D

Now that the "dust" has settled and it seems LiveJournal has learned a few important things about customer service...it seems to be becoming fashionable and cool to write off Strikethrough 07 as "silly internet drama" and to even look down on anyone who participated in opposing LJ's policy of banning fiction journals...

love,
J--

Just in case anybody isn't aware, burr86 has put a new post in lj_biz of 'detailed clarifications' of the guidelines from Barak's previous post. I've quoted the post in its entirety behind the cut for anybody who wishes to read it.

ETA - Addendum below cut

( Read more... )

ETA2 - Harry Potter spoilers for book 7 have been posted in the comments on page 7. There's a comment just before them pointing it out, but now people have been warned in case you (like myself) don't want to be spoiled for the book. It looks like a list, so if you want to quickly go past it you might be able to.

ETA 3 - A bit late, sorry. There's now another post up in lj_biz, some sort of 'clarifying the clarifications' thing.

A very honest and interesting post-Strikethough07 assessment of the ultimate non-reaction of most LJ fen to the deletions (taken from metafandom's del.i.cious links):

Life After Strikethough 07 by laguara25.

For those of you who haven't been observing LJ for a while, they finally announced the sale of permanent accounts, which ran from the 21st to the 28th. Out of curiosity, I've started a poll to see how many people actually bought them, and how Strikethrough affected that. Since I know a whole heck of a lot of people simply left Livejournal, and I'm really interested in tracking those numbers, too, I thought I'd mention the poll here so that people who want to weigh in can do so.

This is the link. Thank you for helping if you participate, and pass the word on to other refugees, please. :)

Two (count 'em!) posts to lj_biz tonight in the promised clarification of policies.

First up, burr86 is called out to once again not answer questions about what happened in the first place and repeat the litany of "I'm sorry's" that have floated around in every official post. Denial of reality abounds, considering that several of the "misconceptions" most LJers are supposed to have about the mess... really aren't. More of that whole ignoring the man behind the curtain talk.

Second, Barak is back and continuing to sound like an ass. There's no real clarification at all, because it seems the corporate guys have opted for the "stick fingers in ears and go LALALALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU!" method of dealing with the questions people have. I might be strange for saying this, but the bit about advocating hate crimes makes me nervous. There are too many insane right-wingers without lives who would probably gladly report places like dark_christian as perpetrating hate crimes against Christians. (Don't laugh-- years ago Scientology subverted a hate crime reporting organization and to this day reports Scientology's critics as perpetuating religious hate crimes.)

Still no word about this proposed changed abuse report system. (Only one person brought up the fact that it's too easy to abuse-- if enough nutball fundies troll enough times, will they get all the GLBT people kicked off LJ?)

And why is offensive content suddenly grounds for reporting to abuse (last line of the post)? Talk to five different people and they'll give you five different descriptions of what's offensive. Offensive content isn't illegal and shouldn't be reported-- it's called a back button. : /

As far as reaction-- most of the people who were vocally "I dun think so" still don't buy it and want a completely explicit list of what is and isn't appropriate. But a lot of other people are starting up the refrain of "Why can't you leave LJ alone?"

After reading teh_kittykat's post about the continuing LJ debacle, I read through some of the earlier lj_biz entries and damned if I didn't find something that made my head spin. ><#

SCROLL A LITTLE OVER HALFWAY DOWN, RIGHT BEFORE THE REASSURANCE TO FANDOMS BIT

_{http://community.livejournal.com/lj_biz/239351.html}

_{Abe Hassan}

_{answers to your questions about sponsored communities}

* Anti-advertiser content One of our core principles is that of free expression. We're privately held, and so we don't have to offer a great deal of freedom, but it's something that every single one of us believes very strongly in. If a company wants to promote something on LJ, they don't get the privilege of "censoring" anything they don't agree with. [emphasis mine] However -- just like any other community -- they're welcome to run their communities as they wish. This does mean that they can delete comments or entries that they don't want in their sponsored community. (This is no different than the maintainer of a community about bundt cakes deleting entries that describe how to knit sweaters for gerbils or deleting entries that talk about how awful bundt cakes are; that's at his or her discretion.)

To be clear: Unless an account is already in violation of our Terms of Service, we will not take down journals, communities, or content that is offensive or objectionable to a sponsor. They are aware (and still want to advertise here) that users can write anything that they want. What's permissible on this site is governed by the policies we've had for years, not our advertisers. Their position as a sponsor doesn't give them extra "clout" in that respect.

[quoted direct from source]

written by burr86  in lj_biz 
@ 2006-10-03 18:19:00

EDIT: sorry about the delete and repost, the html thing was bugging me. ^^;

Barak continues to eat his leg to the thigh in regards to Strikethrough PR moves over in lj_biz. Just in case any of you cool kids missed it.

Highlights (with some editorial commentary) include:

• The permanent account sale is going on as scheduled. Otherwise known as mistake #1.
• People who rush in and buy perm accounts within the first 36 hours will see $25 of their $150 go to some free speech/survivor organizations. The power of math gives us a guesstimate that this will result in a whole 3.57% of profits will go to these charities. Wow. What a great sacrifice.
• They're still clarifying their policies. Only, you know, without actually soliciting any user opinions despite promises to do so.
• Did we mention they're now explicitly going to ban stuff they just aren't willing to host?
• Automated abuse reporting is supposedly coming down the line. I see where this is going. : /
• "Clarifying the differences in policies between public and private content, and making commitments about how you can expect us to protect your private content and resist intrusions into your privacy." Um, as several people mentioned, what's going on there and why wasn't anyone informed?
• Reputation engine? Does that mean if I kill enough ogres I can be exaulted with LJ and get an epic mount? Screw that, man.

Thoughts? Comments? Gloating? Rabid weasels? It looks like the majority of posters are sane people who have been repeating the refrain of policy first, payment maybe. But who wants to bet that only a fraction of people actually friended lj_biz and learned about it all in the first place?

Icon directed at Barak and his handlers. Unless you would like Ms. von Karma to think you suck. Then, by all means, continue to think so. :D