What LJ Actually Did
[NOTE: I wrote this post at the suggestion of tiggy, after I explained to her why I left LJ. This is a list of some of Livejoural's screwups. It's not all of them; for a more complete (but less detailed) list, see this post bystewardess. Also, I may edit the content of this post later for completeness; if that happens I'll stick a note up here.]
"What did LJ actually do?"
This is a question I've been seeing more often now that Friday's strike has come and gone. I imagine many Livejournal users were perplexed by the strike, or even actively against it, because they didn't understand why people were doing it. This might be because they haven't been seeking out information, or else they've been getting it secondhand, in bits and pieces from their friend's list, and perhaps dismissed it as something that doesn't affect them.
Well, I have been paying attention. And in the process I've collected lots of links relating to "what LJ did", for my own personal reference. I've decided to make a post out of some of them so that people can be better informed of the reasons why people are protesting and leaving. So that the next time someone asks you why they should leave LJ, you can point them over here.
I'll begin with something that you probably already know about: the 2007 Strikethrough. For those of you who don't know: An internet watchdog group called "Warriors for Innocence" reported a number of journals to Livejournal Abuse, on the grounds that their interest lists contained terms relating to pedophilia or child abuse. The result was that over 500 journals were suspended without warning.
CNET: Mass deletion sparks Livejournal revolt This article makes it clear just how haphazard the deletions were: fanfiction communities, journals of abuse survivors, and a community for discussion of the novel "Lolita" were suspended along with the journals that were actually violating the law.
stewardess@LJ: Ponderosa Is The Latest Victim of 6A's greed-driven Pedophile Hysteria As this post will show you, the content-related suspensions continued into August, this time related to a piece of fanart. The art in question, while certainly adult in nature, could not be remotely construed as depicting or encouraging child abuse, and it doesn't violate the "Illegal and Harmful Content" policy. stewardess also points out that similarly-graphic fanfiction which did contain illegal or questionably-legal activity was reported and allowed to remain, making it look as though the decisions to delete or not were being made almost arbitrarily.
Firefox News: SixApart At It Again This blog post comments on the Boldthrough, a second wave of deletions and suspensions. The difference is that this time, SixApart rewrote the Livejournal code so that links to deleted journals appeared in bold rather than struck through. There was no practical reason for this change, and some people have speculated that SixApart was trying to avoid drawing attention to the deletions. (FYI; if you're using Firefox there's a Greasemonkey script which makes usernames of deleted/suspended accounts display the old way.)
Firefox News: Livejournal Employee Publicly Mocks Fandom The post that this editorial refers to has been deleted, but that's not why I'm including it here. I've heard LJ-supporters point out that the Livejournal ToS says they can "terminate your password, journal, or account... for any reason" ans thus LJ/6A didn't break any rules. The author of this editorial says that regardless of whether it was allowed, it was the wrong thing to do, and I agree with her. "Legal" is not the same as "ethical", and just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
stewardess@LJ: How SixApart's Greed Allied Them With Neo-Nazis The title seems a bit dramatic, but this is a pretty thought-provoking post. It draws information from the Warriors for Innocence website (specifically, their open letters to Livejournal) and follows the timeline of the Strikethrough from when WfI first contacted LJ abuse to LJ's apology for the whole ordeal. stewardess also speculates that SixApart had planned to "go public" from the moment they bought Livejournal, and the mass deletion was a last-minute attempt to "clean up" the place and make it look more attractive for potential stockholders or even buyers.
The last item on that list leads rather nicely into the next topic, the sale of Livejournal to the SUP corporation, and I don't think that's a coincidence. This was the event that made me decide to leave Livejournal. Although SUP had not yet implemented any policies that affected American users directly, the sale of Livejournal to a Russian company had some very unsettling political implications. Notice that some of these links are not to blogs, but the websites of major newspapers and business magazines... this one made the real news.
WashingtonPost.Com: Kremlin Seeks To Extend Its Reach in Cyberspace An article on the lack of media freedom in Russia, which is now spreading to the internet. The sale of Livejournal is mentioned near the end. A quote: "'Mr. Rykov is pro-Kremlin. Mamut and Sup are pro-Kremlin. The social networks are all being bought by pro-Kremlin people,' Ruslan Paushu, 30, a popular blogger who works for Rykov, said in an interview. 'Everything's okay.'" Yeah... and as long as everyone else supports the Kremlin, they'll be okay too.
Forbes.com: Choking the Russian Voice "SUP's ownership structure... provides little reassurance for Russians who are concerned that the Kremlin may have engineered SUP's acquisition of LiveJournal. Indeed, Alexander Mamut--majority owner of the quickly expanding SUP... told journalists in the late 1990s that he had friends in the Yeltsin family. Mamut, who was mentioned in connection to the Bank of New York money-laundering scandal of the late-1990s, has become wealthy with astonishing speed. Forbes Russia estimates that Mamut is worth nearly $1 billion..."
Robert Amsterdam: Russian Blogger Faces Jail - Kommersant Translation This link does go to a blog, but it contains a translation of an article in the Russian newspaper "Kommersant" (№ 143(3719) OF 13.08.2007) dealing with a Russian Livejournal user who was arrested for "arousing hatred or enmity” after Russian law enforcement saw some of his political writing on Livejournal. This happened in August '07, when SUP was only in charge of the Livejournal.ru, and at that time Russian bloggers could at least use the English Livejournal to better protect their identities. Needless to say, this is no longer an option.
no_lj_ads: More gifts from SUP This post explains how the Kommersant.ru website changed its forum authorization to accept Livejournal usernames in a way that's similar to OpenID. The problem is that the Kommersant site doesn't warn you that it's logging you in from LJ; it collects your username and password automatically. It might seem like simple data-mining for the purpose of targeting ads or something, but the post points out at the end that "Kommersant's server is located on the territory of Russian Federation ... every person that writes there is subject to russian laws. But they are using LJ authorization. Hence if US citizen writes something illegal by russian law standards on Kommersant website using LJ authorization... he/she is a subject to extradiction request from Russian authorities." I would like to add that this system makes it more difficult for users to leave anonymous comments at the Kommersant website... so if a Russian were to accidentally write something which "aroused hatred or enmity" under their Livejournal username, they could end up in the same situation described in the previous article.
Russia Info-Centre: Russian Federal Security Service gives Green Light to BlackBerry In case anyone's thinking I'm some conspiracy nut, take a look at this. The Russian Federal Security Service has the encryption keys for every BlackBerry PDA device that's imported to Russia; it was the only was they would allow BlackBerries to be imported at all. This means they have access to all BlackBerry communications within Russia, and anyone who wants to protect their privacy would probably have to import one illegally. Compared to this, buying up a blogging service to keep track of political dissidents seems almost tame.
In short: it was not something that SUP did that made me leave Livejournal, it was simply what they were: a very shady corporation with dubious motives. But not long after I left, I began to hear about things which indicated that SUP was no different - and no better - than SixApart had been.
news@LJ: Introducing the New Explore Area This was the first indicator that SUP was not any more concerned with the needs of its userbase than 6A was. The Explore area collected public posts and sorted them into various categories based on content. Like other previously-introduced features that no one asked for, the Explore area was opt-out. And on top of that, it doesn't work very well: the posts are sorted automatically rather than by the poster, resulting in posts about roleplay appearing under "Entertainment"and things like this appearing under "News".
Livejournal Abuse Policies and Procedures SUP finally releases a policy update, clarifying what kinds of content Livejournal would not allow. non-photographic images of minors is particularly noteworthy; they finally admit that they're going to censor content that's "highly controversial", even if it's not illegal.
news@LJ: The 100th Day: This is the post in which Livejournal "announced" that they were getting rid of basic accounts. What they actually said was that they "streamlined and simplified things so that now it’s faster and easier than ever to create a LiveJournal account."
Livejournal: FAQ #36 This was the real announcement; a change to the FAQ explaining that "Basic Account is an option available to accounts which were created before March 12, 2008. No account created after this date can be turned into a Basic Account." Of course they apologized later on for doing it in such an underhanded way... in other words, they were only sorry that they got caught. It makes one wonder what else they might try to sneak by the users later on.
stewardess@IJ: Circle the one that doesn't belong Explanation of SUP's editing of the top 100 interests to exclude terms suchs as yaoi, porn, sex, and fanfiction. The terms were laster added back... but why was it necessary to remove them in the first place?
furiosity@Livejournal A translation of the Anton Nosik interview, in which he refers to the content strikers as "people are trying to blackmail and intimidate us, threatening to destroy our business", and says that people who loudly criticize LJ's business decisions are trying to "harm LJ and its creators, to bankrupt them, to ruin their reputation."
For the tl; dr folks: Ever since SixApart bought Livejournal, the people who were in charge at any given time have been making incredibly poor policy decisions. These decisions have demonstrated an ignorance of the needs and wants of the userbase, it has violated the users' privacy, and infringed on their freedom to express themselves. I know some people are still hoping that they'll change, and that's fine. But I've noticed that every time they make one of these mistakes, the same thing happens: LJ tries to be sneaky about it, people take a while to notice, there's an uproar, people threaten to leave, LJ makes a lame apology, and the users renew their paid accounts. It's happened before, it will happen again, and doing one-day content strikes will only show them that they can keeps doing it because we'll keep coming back for more.
ETA 25/03/08: It's been pointed out to me that the title of this post was poorly-worded, making it sound as if I was telling people what to think or how they should feel. This was not my intention and I've edited it accordingly. I'm trying to inform and help people, not be divisive, and I apologize if I upset anyone.