How Six Apart's Greed Allied Them With Neo-Nazis REVISED

[stewardess]

Sources added 5:26 a.m PDT, June 2nd, 2007.

In early April, the LiveJournal Abuse Team, which handles all customer complaints, began receiving communications from a group called Warriors For Innocence. The tiny group claimed LiveJournal was harboring pedophiles.

Comments

[almostnever]

That makes way too much sense.

Here's my question. If the "interests" function is potentially harmful, why not just disable it?

To me, the ability to find other LJ users who are interested in "dom's painted toenails" is not worth either hundreds of people losing their LJ accounts, or the possibility that pedophiles will use the interests function to find each other and hang out.

[stewardess]

It would be relatively easy for LiveJournal to block the creation of offensive interests; I have blocked offensive language and usernames in messageboards since 1999. But it would not be effective. If you can't use "fucking," you can use "effing," or dozens of other words. The English language has a rich vocabulary.

Searchable user interests are essential for two reasons. One, they are needed for community building, a main feature of LJ. Two, LiveJournal doesn't have a built-in search engine. It relies on google, which cannot index blogs that block bots. Without searchable user interests, you couldn't find anyone.

[eridanusus]

Finding other journals might not be used by everyone, but finding interesting communities can only be done by a) interest searching, b) word of mouth, or c) stumbling across them in some way. Getting rid of the search would kill a huge amount of the community of LiveJournal.

[almostnever]

To clarify, I don't mean they should take away the interests forever and never replace them with anything else.

But supposedly it was urgent to make sure these evil pedophiles couldn't use the interests to find each other, so urgent that LJ yanked hundreds of accounts without reviewing them. If the interests are the problem, take them offline until an investigation can be done of the journals with problematic interests.

Or why not just deactivate the linking of problematic interests? That might become a game of whack-a-mole after a while, but it couldn't hurt to try.

[lazar_grrl]

I wonder if this should be titled "LJ Purge: Omen or Harbinger?" There's a little bit of cold comfort in the fact that this whole mess may be damaging to LJ, both for the short-term IPO offering and in the long term, when people desert it for more reasonable blogging sites. It doesn't come near to making up for the fact that it'll be destroying some of the communities and friendships that have sprung up here.

[stewardess]

I still cannot update this. I have posted the expanded version here.

http://www.greatestjournal.com/users/stewardess_/683.html

[utbe]

Wow. A+ detective work! Also, thanks for taking the time to present it in a way I could easily understand.

[stewardess]

I still cannot update this. I have posted the expanded version here.

http://www.greatestjournal.com/users/stewardess_/683.html

[cruisedirector]

It's been obvious that a lot of idiocy on LiveJournal was about money from the time of the Breastfeeding Madonnas Are Pornography episode, while Six Apart was still swearing that nothing on LJ was going to change just because they were involved.

I'd love to see some statistics on how many paid/permanent LJ accounts are fan accounts -- what percentage of money coming in at the moment is from fans and fandom. They aren't getting rich off 15-year-old girls with free accounts where they complain about their mothers, nor off knitting communities.

[shrinetolust]

Well, they did try to do something with that here:

http://community.livejournal.com/fandompays/487.html

I don't think it's gotten as much publicity as fandom_counts, though!

[cruisedirector]

Thanks! Have answered...

[bethbethbeth]

I had a post dealing with this very issue the other day. It's here if you'd like to take a look at it.

[mirabile_dictu]

Brilliant, brilliant job. I'm just in awe of the energy you've put into this, clarifying the entire sequence of events and the motivation for them. Thank you so much. You are a treasure to any fandom.

[stewardess]

I still cannot update this. I have posted the expanded version here.

http://www.greatestjournal.com/users/stewardess_/683.html