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One of the best kept secrets about the LiveJournal community is how incredibly generous you all are. It's not just the fact that so many of you volunteer to help LJ out, or are such active participants in communities online. It's what you do to support communities offline that makes us so proud of what LJ is. (A recent example was the way you all
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If people are so worried about LiveJournal's thought policing or whatever, I don't understand why they don't just move to a different service, or blog independently. If they still have paid time, they're entitled to use that. They're also entitled to bitching. But once that's done with, I don't see the point in sticking around just to comment on these posts, because few people who do are taken seriously.
From this conversation, I can tell that you're smart. You're using logic, you're being practical, and you seem altogether sane. I doubt there are a lot of people out there reading this thread and saying "wow, what a retard"- but a lot of these people, particularly in fandom- ARE being laughed at, repeatedly. I just really don't think their bitching and conspiracy theories are doing much to change anything around here.
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While I think pro-ana is horrible, and definitely a danger to impressionable kids, there's not much that can be done about it if LiveJournal wants to allow that content. I don't agree with the reasoning given by LJ staff- I think something regarding free speech would have done just fine- but I'm not LiveJournal and I have no control over what content is considered acceptable. I don't think it's my place to tell people what is and isn't ok. Of course I'll offer my opinions, but I'm not here to legislate my beliefs, I'm here to fucking blog.
Nothing that LiveJournal has done over the past six months has had any effect on my blogging experience whatsoever, and that is all that matters to me in regards to this service.
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Well, that's rather the point. LJ's stated several times in the Strikethrough mess that there's some content it just finds too disgusting to host, regardless of how legal it is. (They used the word " reprehensible": Content that encourages or advocates hate crimes, the abuse of children in any form, or rape, even if the content itself is not illegal and may be protected by the First Amendment. This portion of the policy reflects the especially reprehensible nature of these activities; users who encourage or advocate these acts, regardless of their motivation, are simply not welcome on LiveJournal.
A lot of people think encouragement or support of anorexia is well within "abuse of children in any form," and are wondering how LJ justifies allowing those communities.
In the past, before strikethrough, they'd always answered complaints about the pro-ana communities with "if there's no crime being committed, we can't do anything; we promote free speech." Now, they've specifically said that some content is too objectionable for them.
But apparently, supporting anorexia isn't considered a danger to children by 6A's staff, despite the fact that it kills 20% of seriously afflicted people.
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If the rules are "no advocating activities that harm children," but in practice it's "no advocating sexuality in a context that makes people think of children, but advocating stuff that actually causes physical harm is okay," then they've deceived their users--they've convinced people that LJ is safe for children in a way that it's not.
I sincerely hope some family member of a member of pro_anorexia sues them for not following their own TOS after numerous notifications. Hopefully, for the full set of medical bills, plus pain & suffering.
Changing the terms of service without notifying the membership is a crime. And that includes changing the actual conduct expected from the customers, not just changing the words on the TOS page... no court is going to accept "the TOS says we can do anything we want and therefore we never broke our side of the bargain." That logic's been found faulty in court before--you can't have a contract that says, "You pay us for service, which will be anything we decide it is, and we can change or shut it off at any time, and you have to agree to anything else we think is required."
If that were legal, 6A could change the TOS to say "all Free members must give blowjobs to the staff on request." Or they could say, "we own full copyrights of everything posted on LJ, and can republish any of it we want in any venue.
A contract has to have terms, for both sides, and "we can change them to whatever we want, whenever we want" is not legally acceptable.
(I'm in the process of leaving. I've set up at IJ. I bought a perm account there. Before this happened, I'd been planning to buy one here. I've dropped my account from Paid to Basic, and shut off v-gifts; no money to LJ from me.)
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I know there's a lot of wank going on (and I'm slinging some of it; I love wankfests), but at the core, there's a real sense of being violated--of having the rules yanked out from under us, and being fed a line of hype that's supposed to be soothing.
We could tolerate "no sexual content on LJ." We'd bitch like hell, because that's not what the rule was a year ago, but we'd deal. But this idea of "the rules are whatever we say they are today, and tomorrow we can change them, and we'll say who is and is not breaking them and not tell you why," followed by "it's all to PROTECT THE CHILDREN!!!" is not sitting well with people.
There's a lot of nit-picky demanding of details, because we can't sort out what the standards are. "No harm to children," but it's okay to call a group pro-anorexia, and allow minors to join?! WTF?
Combine that with the multiple promises to get back to people about their questions (including the "we'll post updates on our progress" in the August 13 LJ-Biz post), and the increasing number of advertisements being inflicted even on paid users... and we no longer trust LJ/6A; we look for attempts to lie or cheat the customers in every post, 'cos we're firmly convinced they've no longer got any dedication to the original goal of providing a place to speak freely.
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If all the people who were commenting on this were calm, rational, and had some basis for their claims (like you do), I don't think people would be "bitching about the bitching" nearly as much. I believe that most of the people on LiveJournal value diversity and freedom of speech as much as anyone. The problem is that a lot of the commenters are really just aggravating the situation by not expressing themselves in a mature and rational way that would make the observer say "hey, this person is worth acknowledging!".
People who are so angry at LJ but maintain paid/plus accounts and continue to use the service aren't really doing anything to create change, you know?
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A lot of people started out calm and rational, and as we continued to receive no response, and as lj staff and abuse members said one thing and then did another thing entirely, people slowly lost their cool. People have lost their tempers, and it's really hard to give the benefit of he doubt at this point.
It's really easy to assume the worst, however.
I've been here for years, I'm a part of this community, and just like you and everyone else with an LJ account, I am allowed to speak up and speak out on what I think 6A needs to do to make the community better. Even if you don't like what I have to say.
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Because that's what community is all about.
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I also think it's kind of a hopeless situation, but then that's just me.
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