LiveJournal's Failure Is Complete
Jon has the dirt on the latest LJ scandals, including the resignation of
Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator of LJ.
On the one hand, I'm really tired of hearing overentitled whiny psuedo-pederast Potter Porn proponents bitch about how they're being oppressed and crushed by the Evil Six Apart Hand Of Doom. As
Jim can tell you, bitching about Potter spoilers and general bratty entitlement, combined with LJ's hair-trigger deletion reflex, often has uncool consequences for people who aren't deserving of them.
I know I'm probably going to piss off
Little Dupont and half my friends list here, and I don't mean to--your love of HP and all that it entails is as important to you as, say, my love of all things "Battlestar Galactica." But there's a peculiar sense of implied ownership and demanded privilege I see among HP fans that I don't see among other fandoms--not even comic book fans ;)--and after spending a weekend dealing with the end of the Fourth Amendment as we know it, I have a hard time getting up in arms over whether it's cool to post crappy Photoshopped pictures of Severus Snape slobbing Harry Potter's knob.
On the other hand, Six Apart has apparently learned nothing from its previous heavy-handed attempts to police its user base, and the resultant responses. Evidently 6A CEO
Barak Berkowitz is still more terrified of creepy anti-pedo vigilante groups scaring away his advertisers than he is of his customers, and the end result is just more bad publicity that makes the whole of LJ look like the freakiest examples of fandom.
It's a tremendously bad way to run a business and a sure-fire way to run said business into the ground. Maybe that's Berkowitz' aim--driving away so many users that LJ will fold and 6A can sell the technology to whomever they want. It's not like Brad will be using it anymore. Conspiratorial ideas aside, this is just another example of what is making me increasingly disenchanted with LJ, and is giving me more cause to not renew my account when it ends in February. I've already got a Wordpress account, my LinkedIn account is going strong, and I may give Facebook a whirl as well. But (and this is a BIG "but") LJ is quite literally the only way I can keep up with the lives of many of my friends. If I give this up, that will be the end of my only connection to many of them, and I'll be even more isolated than I am now.
It's a tough row to hoe--stick with a business that is actively mistreating its customers or give up the only window you have into the lives of your friends, and a service you've been using to chronicle your life for six years--so I'm still mulling it over. But if shit like this keeps going down, I can't see that I'll choose much else.