Striking on again

[threeplusfire]

I don't even have words to express my irritation and frustration with the latest LJ debacle. What gets me is the repreated refrain that punting a chunk of code live for over a week was some kind of "mistake" and not company policy. Yes, because codes magically write and breed and decide to censor the user base on topics previously of great controversy on LJ. Please also allow me to sell you this lovely waterfront property...

Yes, Livejournal (Livejournal Inc/SUP owned) is a business. But even a business can maintain some ethics and standards. I also fail to see how alienating a large portion of paying customers as they abolish free accounts is good business sense. Unless they really do hate all the depressed faeries and queers and boys and girls who read fanfiction.

A reasonable, profit oriented business might also choose to communicate with their clients, hire an actual PR representative and not talk down to their users as if they were children. But what do I know? I've only been here since 2000.

The one-day content strike is on for this Friday, March 21, from midnight GMT to midnight GMT.

For 24 hours, we will not post or comment to LJ. Not in our own journals, not in communities. Not publicly, privately, or under friends-lock.

This is a protest that will have long-lasting effects, showing up forever in the daily posting statistics.

This is a protest that will not harm LJ in the long run, as leaving LJ might do.

This is a protest that will demonstrate the power of community, as all users unite to support Basic users, the concept of adfree space, and our right to enjoy any interests we choose.

This is a protest that will educate the new owners that LJ is driven by user-created content.

How Can You Help?

DO post about this in your own LJ.
DO post and comment about it in appropriate communities.
DO turn off LoudTwitter and your RSS feeds for 24 hours.
DO feel free to friend me for updates, and defriend when the strike is over.

DON'T forget to get permission from community mods before making an off-topic post or comment about the strike.
DON'T be spammy with your posts or comments about the strike.
DON'T forget to turn your LoudTwitter and RSS feeds back on when the strike is over.

Appropriate Times

The 24-hour strike will begin at the following times for the following locations:

Thursday, March 20, 2:00 PM -- Honolulu
Thursday, March 20, 4:00 PM -- Anchorage
Thursday, March 20, 5:00 PM -- San Francisco; Los Angeles
Thursday, March 20, 6:00 PM -- Mexico City; Denver
Thursday, March 20, 7:00 PM -- Chicago
Thursday, March 20, 8:00 PM -- Montreal; New York
Thursday, March 20, 9:00 PM -- Buenos Aires
Midnight -- London
Friday, March 21, 1:00 AM -- Paris
Friday, March 21, 2:00 AM -- Istanbul
Friday, March 21, 3:00 AM -- Moscow
Friday, March 21, 4:00 AM -- Dubai
Friday, March 21, 5:00 AM -- Islamabad
Friday, March 21, 6:00 AM -- Bangladesh


Why Are We Striking?

We are holding the Content Strike because we want the new owners of LiveJournal to better understand the power and resolve of the LJ Community of Users.

We are holding the Content Strike because all of us, Paid, Permanent and Plus users as well as Basic, want to demonstrate our solidarity as a Community of Users. We do not consider Basic users to be freeloaders, we consider them to be valuable content-providers and Friends.

We are holding the Content Strike because we ache to do something to show our displeasure, and commenting on the news post -- even with cat macros -- just isn't powerful enough!

The strike has four terms:

1. Restore basic accounts for new account creation.

2. Inform users before any change to the site that affects how we use the site or demands on our resources.

3. Run change proposals by the Advisory Board and take their advice into account before implementation of any change.

4. Homophobia, misogyny, and racism must not be a part of the decision making processes about appropriate content of the site, including what user interests are deemed appropriate.

NOTE: We are aware that there may be good business decisions for eliminating Basic accounts. If Basic accounts are to be eliminated, though, that action should be taken only after approval of the Advisory Board and consultation with the LJ Community of Users.

Will This Make Any Difference?

The protests are making a difference. Within the last three hours (as of 3pm March 17, '08), the censored interests have been restored! If you look at the Popular Interests page, you will once again see the formerly filtered "fanfiction", "depression", "bisexuality" -- even "faeries". LiveJournal is once again presenting its true face to the world, not a sanitized blandness.

Please continue to spread the word about the Content Strike. We are not merely consumers. We are a Community of Users, and we will be heard.

LiveJournal Content Strike, Friday, March 21, midnight to midnight GMT.
No posts. No comments. No content.

Comments

[delchi.livejournal.com]

Interesting concept - I think that it should go one step fruther though and not only give no content but do not access LJ at all for that 24h period. That will give them a hit in ad revenue.

I do have some questions about the overall statement though ... please steer me where I might go astray :

It mentions censorship several times, but as far as I know the only thing that was censored was specific words from the popular interests list. No actual entries or people were censored. This might get blown out of size, or it could be a slippery slope that leads to real censorship.

I can't see forcing a company to give away free accounts, advisory board or not. I know that I started out on LJ back in 2000 as a free account, but I upgraded later on. Free accounts have ruined other on line services ( Second Life went to hell after free accounts were introduced ) and in the current financial situation we are all in I can understand being hesitant to give something for nothing. Perhaps advertising supported free accounts are not enough to cover expenses. The golden age of things for free on the net are gone just as sure as the google pledge of " do no evil " is gone. I don't see how getting rid of free accounts alienates paying customers. As a paying customer, part of what I'm paying goes towards supporting free accounts. Why am I doing that?

I believe that it's possible that the latest debacle could be a byproduct of internal miscommunication, zealotry gone awry, a code error, human error with politics as a chaser , or even something that was never to see the light of day that did. An example I gave is that what if someone higher up asked the dev team to come up with the filter, just in case they needed it - say because of a lawsuit or a possible future TOS change. Before it could be decided it was rolled out by accident, or maybe on purpose to expose that they were considering it. I just think that there are more possibilities out there than the ones that are being brought forward - and by the looks of the replies that are coming from the dev people and from LJ itself there is something more going on. I don't think it's as simple as censorship or just making specific interests disappear because they are looked down upon.

I want this run to ground, believe me I do - but I don't want it to turn into a witch hunt , and I can see how that could happen. I don't want to defend them for doing such a thing, but I also don't want to play the guilty until proven less guilty game. If there is hard evidence that they deliberately took a stance against specific interests for no other reason than censorship then I will stand in line with everyone else and make my voice known in anger. However if they are under the gun of a lawsuit, a victim of a zealot within their ranks, or of some internal political wrangling that got out of hand ... or even just a dev team mistake hell I've been there before. I've comitted bad code by accident, I've let things slip that were developed ' just in case ' into live production before ( and it wasn't my fault oddly enough ) and you know ... shit happens.

I just think that there is more to this than is publically available , and I don't want to see LJ torn asunder by assumptions, an underinformed/misinformed angry mob, or by people who are just looking for an axe to grind.

The best thing they could do is complete disclosure of the entire situation.

All this is IMHO. Reasonable debate welcome.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Regarding the free accounts, I can see how this is a financial decision for them. However, they have stated repeatedly they wouldn't undermine the culture of LJ and they would take input from the LJ Advisory Board. They ignored both of these things emphatically by removing the free account option. Free accounts create a majority of the content on LJ. Just because a user has a free account though, doesn't mean they aren't spending money in other ways (extra icon space, egifts, upgading etc)

I would give credence to the "mistakes happen" excuse if that hadn't been the same bullshit provided every other time something has failboated at LJ in the past year. I don't buy it anymore, because my suspension of disbelief is nil here.

The concern about concealing interests is tied into the impression we've received in the past year about the company is ashamed of the userbase and would gladly see them disappear. If this was some kind of "mistake" I think we would have seen other inane interests like cheese, stamp collecting and Coldplay censored. But the depressive, queer, faery loving boys and girls reading fanfiction? There's also some concern that the filter was designed to also conceal user names, though you would have to read through Stewardess and others chronicling the story for the full scoop.

[delchi.livejournal.com]

This all makes good sense.

The thing about the free accounts though, just because they went against the wishes of the advisory board and of the people who have free accounts doesn't mean that they didn't take it into consideration. While they may spend money in other ways, it might not be enough to offset free accounts ( upgrading to a paid account excepted ). Bandwidth, rack space, and colo space is not cheap, and it's not as cheap as it used to be say 10 years ago. In the end more money has to come in than go out in order for LJ to continue to exist. If it was a choice between free accounts going away or LJ going away, well so long as the cost does not go into a greed spiral I would ( and have ) paid up.

I also think that LJ is bowing to pressure both legal and public from external sources that dislike specific groups. If the targeted groups disappear then the legal / public threats disappear and that's a small price to pay to keep an inventment alive. Is it right? Not at all. Should they fight against that to teh bitter end? Absolutely. However those are my ethics, and possibly not theirs. Business is business.

This could be a start of competition for LJ. The basic software behind LJ is open source, and anyone with the time and resources could put up something competitive.

[alteredhistory.livejournal.com]

What about a compromise position -- have free accounts, but have the posts in those accounts disappear after a month or so. And after six months have the whole account evaporate. That let's people use the service, explore it, and decide that there's enough of a community here to be worth financial support.

[delchi.livejournal.com]

It seem solid, but would people use it? WOuld you blog to a system where what you blog will vanish in 30 days?

[alteredhistory.livejournal.com]

I think many people who use the LJ primarily as a form of mass e-mail might. In the last several years, I have perhaps 10 to 20 "major posts" that I would want to retain. It would be easy enough for me to save those on my harddrive somewhere. Years from now, the smaller daily posts might be nice to have, I don't know. I know that I used the free version for several years before upgrading my account, and without search capabilities, my posts were effectively gone, so I think there might be some use for it. The compromise would mean that the service doesn't have to have so much storage space but still gets the advertising revenue for eyeball counts.

I'm still thinking about this issue.

[n-o-m-i-c.livejournal.com]

Can you post a couple of relevant links to what's going on? Lazy, I know, but I figure they're probably at your fingertips.

Part of the problem for me is that I'm not interested in financially supporting a Russian company. I'd rather host my own blog for about what a paid account costs, and not have to bow to the kind of censorship we're seeing.

Honestly, I'm not really interested in the long-term viability of LJ as a platform or as a company if they continue to make policy decisions like this. If jumping ship harms them, then so be it.

I don't know what delchi's background is, but bandwidth is cheap in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, none of us have access to LJ's financials, so far as I know.

Some links

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

http://stewardess.insanejournal.com/228035.html

http://news.livejournal.com/106909.html?thread=70124701#t70124701

(Accounting of all the events chronicled by stewardess)
http://stewardess.insanejournal.com/tag/lj:+censorship

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Velvetsun's comment links to a Russian news article of great relevance...

http://news.livejournal.com/106909.html?page=66#comments

[delchi.livejournal.com]

My backround is about 20 years in the IT business, including running large scale colocation houses, ISPs and owning a web radio station ( and paying for the bandwidth / colocation ) for the last 8 years. I've watched the number of free services dwindle to services overlaoded with ads, or jsut outright disappear over the years. I've paid out of pocket for hosting, and I've watched the rates for a dedicated T1 to dedicated OC48 stifle companies. i've also watched colo companies go under from the expenses, but not before watchign people pull out of their service contracts because of price increases. The company I work for now , I oversee multiple T3s - and I'm glad it's not coming out of my pocket.