Dear Mr Nossik...
[Following grayscalewolf's comment: Nossik appears to deny that his comments represented the opinions of LJ management; which is a bit ripe from a Media Evangelist; but, much more significantly, he says that the story was a digest of a two-hour phone conversation. During which anything might have been said. And after re-reading the more charitable translation, I found that a lot of what Nossik said could actually be interpreted fairly charitably. So I retract any implication that I'm boycotting LJ. I'm just taking the day off from drama!]
In the beginning was The Great LiveJournal Strikethrough-not exactly the biggest fuckup in the history of corporate relations, but still an attractive example of knee-jerk decision-making followed by lousy PR. The management were comprehensively screamed at for it, and they appear to have learned from the experience-possibly not the right lessons, but they did seem to make an effort.
The more recent interests-censoring debacle (link thanks to scruff) is frankly a storm in a teacup. Nobody's freedom of speech has been significantly curtailed, nobody's even been made to do more mouse-clicking. But the way it was done, and the odd choice of terms to curtail ('faeries'? huh?) shows a nasty hint of the same attitudes at work: covert suppression, arbitrary targets, no apparent sanity-checking, and a strong whiff of arrant bigotry. So I'm not exactly surprised that people want to protest it.
The latest scandal is that LiveJournal will no longer offer advertisement-free unpaid accounts ("Basic" accounts). You either pay LJ your money or you get ad banners in your blog. Apart from the sad implication that today's emo goth chicks have become too clueless to use AdBlock, this breaks a long-ago promise that LJ would never serve advertisements in its pages. And, even though it's not a promise that was ever made to individual users (either you still have the option of a Basic account, or you weren't signed up in the first place), a lot of people really want to protest it.
So tomorrow, from 00:00 until 24:00 GMT on the 21st March, is an LJ Boycott Day. Users are urged to stay off the site for the whole day-no blogging, no reading, no commenting. Let the site managers watch its traffic drop, they say. And its dirty ad revenue.
This is a pointless protest. The management won't learn from it. LJ will continue to grow anyway. At the worst case, the publicity will dissuade some new users and lower the exponent of LJ's growth. Given the nature of exponential growth, such reductions can eventually lead to stinkingly large losses, but it's an invisible loss-money they'll never know they could have had. So it's no punishment.
But I'm going to do the boycott anyway. Partly because I'm profoundly irked by the reported comments of Anton Nossik, LJ's new proprietor "social media evangelist", who has completely failed to see that people might have genuine grievances here, and classifies all such protesters as industrial saboteurs. Well, Mister Nossik, I protest that.
And partly because, hey, it's Good Friday, and I have a lot of other things I could be doing. Now, where did I leave that handkerchief...?
In the beginning was The Great LiveJournal Strikethrough-not exactly the biggest fuckup in the history of corporate relations, but still an attractive example of knee-jerk decision-making followed by lousy PR. The management were comprehensively screamed at for it, and they appear to have learned from the experience-possibly not the right lessons, but they did seem to make an effort.
The more recent interests-censoring debacle (link thanks to scruff) is frankly a storm in a teacup. Nobody's freedom of speech has been significantly curtailed, nobody's even been made to do more mouse-clicking. But the way it was done, and the odd choice of terms to curtail ('faeries'? huh?) shows a nasty hint of the same attitudes at work: covert suppression, arbitrary targets, no apparent sanity-checking, and a strong whiff of arrant bigotry. So I'm not exactly surprised that people want to protest it.
The latest scandal is that LiveJournal will no longer offer advertisement-free unpaid accounts ("Basic" accounts). You either pay LJ your money or you get ad banners in your blog. Apart from the sad implication that today's emo goth chicks have become too clueless to use AdBlock, this breaks a long-ago promise that LJ would never serve advertisements in its pages. And, even though it's not a promise that was ever made to individual users (either you still have the option of a Basic account, or you weren't signed up in the first place), a lot of people really want to protest it.
So tomorrow, from 00:00 until 24:00 GMT on the 21st March, is an LJ Boycott Day. Users are urged to stay off the site for the whole day-no blogging, no reading, no commenting. Let the site managers watch its traffic drop, they say. And its dirty ad revenue.
This is a pointless protest. The management won't learn from it. LJ will continue to grow anyway. At the worst case, the publicity will dissuade some new users and lower the exponent of LJ's growth. Given the nature of exponential growth, such reductions can eventually lead to stinkingly large losses, but it's an invisible loss-money they'll never know they could have had. So it's no punishment.
But I'm going to do the boycott anyway. Partly because I'm profoundly irked by the reported comments of Anton Nossik, LJ's new proprietor "social media evangelist", who has completely failed to see that people might have genuine grievances here, and classifies all such protesters as industrial saboteurs. Well, Mister Nossik, I protest that.
And partly because, hey, it's Good Friday, and I have a lot of other things I could be doing. Now, where did I leave that handkerchief...?