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threeplusfireI received a call from SixApart this afternoon. They have a new consumer support division, and their manager was returning one of my phone messages. I have to say, I do appreciate someone doing that. I know I would be scared as hell to call back upset customers in a situation like this. Gods only know what kind of verbal abuse might get unloaded on you.
She was very willing to discuss concerns with me. There was no answer to the question as why LJ Abuse said the offending image was deleted due to lack of artistic merit and LJ biz said it was kiddie porn. There was also no answer to the question about how it could be considered child porn if it was an illustration of a story in which the younger character was 22 years old. I tried a couple times, but couldn't get her to say something direct.
The most interesting thing she mentioned was that corporate has a fear that posting explicit standards wouold encourage people to post borderline child pornography. WTF? I totally don't get this. I replied that I felt users would be comfortable with exact standards and that a large part of the issue was vagueness and fear that images might or might not get people banned. Can anyone explain to me how posting standards of content will encourage people to post child porn? I don't know.
She did take full responsibility for the lack of communication of staff. That was a brave thing to do, and I appreciated that. She explained that she felt her staff had been working so much and having long hours on the issue beforehand, so she didn't want anyone to do anything without sleep and more information. She said she did have a big new collection of cat macros from reading comment pages all weekend. They do intend to have a better response time, and not leave users adrift for long periods in the future, which I think is a good step. We talked about the need for a degree of transparency in the practice. She did state that the group evaluting information does include several different types of people with different experience, which was good to know. It does include a couple volunteer workers.
The funniest part of the call was when she stated she wanted to reach out to leaders in fandom. I was thinking to myself "Oops, I am so totally a non-entity in fandom!" But maybe she was talking about my friends, who are much more awesome in fandom than me. Hah. But she talked a lot about wanting to make it clear that the team would not target populations, that they could only refer to the law as their guideline, etc.
So. I'm not completely satisfied. I still think there are huge, worrisome issues. I'm concerned we may never have stark, clear standards. I'm concerned that corporate interests may trump ours in the end. But I am appreciative that this employee did take thirty minutes to talk to me today. Since one of my big complaints was a total lack of customer service, that was a huge improvement. For someone who has to toe the corporate line, she did do a very good job of answering to the best of her ability and being sincere on the phone. One can only hope it is the first of more.
She was very willing to discuss concerns with me. There was no answer to the question as why LJ Abuse said the offending image was deleted due to lack of artistic merit and LJ biz said it was kiddie porn. There was also no answer to the question about how it could be considered child porn if it was an illustration of a story in which the younger character was 22 years old. I tried a couple times, but couldn't get her to say something direct.
The most interesting thing she mentioned was that corporate has a fear that posting explicit standards wouold encourage people to post borderline child pornography. WTF? I totally don't get this. I replied that I felt users would be comfortable with exact standards and that a large part of the issue was vagueness and fear that images might or might not get people banned. Can anyone explain to me how posting standards of content will encourage people to post child porn? I don't know.
She did take full responsibility for the lack of communication of staff. That was a brave thing to do, and I appreciated that. She explained that she felt her staff had been working so much and having long hours on the issue beforehand, so she didn't want anyone to do anything without sleep and more information. She said she did have a big new collection of cat macros from reading comment pages all weekend. They do intend to have a better response time, and not leave users adrift for long periods in the future, which I think is a good step. We talked about the need for a degree of transparency in the practice. She did state that the group evaluting information does include several different types of people with different experience, which was good to know. It does include a couple volunteer workers.
The funniest part of the call was when she stated she wanted to reach out to leaders in fandom. I was thinking to myself "Oops, I am so totally a non-entity in fandom!" But maybe she was talking about my friends, who are much more awesome in fandom than me. Hah. But she talked a lot about wanting to make it clear that the team would not target populations, that they could only refer to the law as their guideline, etc.
So. I'm not completely satisfied. I still think there are huge, worrisome issues. I'm concerned we may never have stark, clear standards. I'm concerned that corporate interests may trump ours in the end. But I am appreciative that this employee did take thirty minutes to talk to me today. Since one of my big complaints was a total lack of customer service, that was a huge improvement. For someone who has to toe the corporate line, she did do a very good job of answering to the best of her ability and being sincere on the phone. One can only hope it is the first of more.
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no subject
Date: 2007-08-09 04:07 am (UTC)I still think that they need to learn a lot about how the user base reacts: the spamming was kind of fun but it could have been almost completely avoided if they'd just posted a short message on Saturday saying, "look folks, we are reading, we are listening, but everyone is exhausted right now and we want to be awake enough to deal with your issues properly so we're going to post a response on X day". Most people would respect that, I think and they should really have known that after Strikethrough.
They seem to have a bit of a perfectionism problem too, with a whole lot of 'we were waiting until we knew exactly what to say' after the fact, when a far better response would be a timely, 'we're trying to work it out, please be patient because this is a big and complex issue'.
A lot of the anger is about this constant lack of communication and repeated breaking of promises; if you say you're going to post at X time then you really need to post at X time even if it's just another holding post. I believe that most people would be sympathetic, I for one can certainly see that this is a huge, contentious minefield for all concerned.
I also think it would be smart if they had informed people ahead of time with something along the lines of 'look, due to the political climate we're coming under increasing pressure and we're worried that we're going to get shut down completely so there are going to have to be some changes and here's what they're going to be." I can see why they might not want to give exact guidelines since being vague might give them a bit more protection under the law but there must be a way to balance individual and group needs. I think if they'd done this ahead of time, people would have been supportive and rallied round and the anger would have been focused where it really belongs, on those political groups who are trying to make things more repressive. They really need to be better at getting the users on their side.
I just don't know how many times they need to learn this lesson about communication before it sinks in but it's encouraging to hear that there's a new communications division since that suggests that they've been listening to all the calls for better customer support and PR.
I strongly suspect that there's a real internal problem going on, with branches of 6A/LJ not listening to each other or even actively overriding another. It's probably a really horrible place to work right now and I do feel sorry for the low level people who are probably copping most of the shit. I suspect that what's happening is that they're being hobbled from above or something similar. There does seem to be a huge amount of confusion, if the contradictory comments from various staff members are anything to go by.
"She said she did have a big new collection of cat macros from reading comment pages all weekend."
Ha, that made me laugh, I'm glad that someone at LJ got something useful out of it!