Latest news
I'd like to point everyone to the latest news post.
It's the latest installment in a series of post made to address the recent LJ account purge karfunkel. In case you have no idea why Six Apart (which bought LJ in 2005) CEO barakb25 has been posting so much in LJ's news community lately, here's a Firefox news article about the whole incident. [Disclaimer on this article: to the best of my knowledge, no LJ rape/incest survivor communities were actually suspended, only personal journals of survivors.]
All things considered, I'm a bit wary of all the "changes" and "new ideas" that 6A is coming up with. I still remember the "no ads ever!" faux-promise a couple of years back, and look how many ads are littered throughout LJ now! The fact that countless journals were suspended without 1) LJ/6A notifying the journal owners, and 2) seemingly a smidgen of investigation done to find out whether a journal was actually purge-worthy, reeked of lazy autocracy to me.
But rehashing why tens of thousands of LJ users were up in arms against the LJ purge isn't the point of this post.
So in the latest news post, Barak mentions that he and the team are looking into introducing a voting process as a way to get grassroots participation in patrolling LJ content. At first glance, this sounds innocent enough. Voting = you get a say; so why not? Except that at second thought, and third thought, and every thought afterward, I'm feeling very iffy about the whole concept. If the law doesn't deem illegal a journal of a rape survivor talking about "explicit content" for the purpose of, say, public education, then why should it be put on trial a second time by the jury of its peers? What if 51% of those who vote finds this person's journal content "objectionable"? How much potential outreach work would then be lost if LJ/6A takes the voice of the majority and suspends something that's not illegal? And how long will it take before LJ -- currently a place of great diversity of everything imaginable -- morphs into the likeness of what the popular opinion du jour happens to be?
There are logic and definition flaws, as well as inconsistency between the ideal and what the reality is most likely going to be, in barakb25's reasoning. I don't know if the comment I made to the post makes a dime's worth of difference, but for once I'm concerned enough about an LJ issue to speak up, because I never want to see LJ turn into a place of "all users are equal, but some are more equal than others."
It's the latest installment in a series of post made to address the recent LJ account purge karfunkel. In case you have no idea why Six Apart (which bought LJ in 2005) CEO barakb25 has been posting so much in LJ's news community lately, here's a Firefox news article about the whole incident. [Disclaimer on this article: to the best of my knowledge, no LJ rape/incest survivor communities were actually suspended, only personal journals of survivors.]
All things considered, I'm a bit wary of all the "changes" and "new ideas" that 6A is coming up with. I still remember the "no ads ever!" faux-promise a couple of years back, and look how many ads are littered throughout LJ now! The fact that countless journals were suspended without 1) LJ/6A notifying the journal owners, and 2) seemingly a smidgen of investigation done to find out whether a journal was actually purge-worthy, reeked of lazy autocracy to me.
But rehashing why tens of thousands of LJ users were up in arms against the LJ purge isn't the point of this post.
So in the latest news post, Barak mentions that he and the team are looking into introducing a voting process as a way to get grassroots participation in patrolling LJ content. At first glance, this sounds innocent enough. Voting = you get a say; so why not? Except that at second thought, and third thought, and every thought afterward, I'm feeling very iffy about the whole concept. If the law doesn't deem illegal a journal of a rape survivor talking about "explicit content" for the purpose of, say, public education, then why should it be put on trial a second time by the jury of its peers? What if 51% of those who vote finds this person's journal content "objectionable"? How much potential outreach work would then be lost if LJ/6A takes the voice of the majority and suspends something that's not illegal? And how long will it take before LJ -- currently a place of great diversity of everything imaginable -- morphs into the likeness of what the popular opinion du jour happens to be?
There are logic and definition flaws, as well as inconsistency between the ideal and what the reality is most likely going to be, in barakb25's reasoning. I don't know if the comment I made to the post makes a dime's worth of difference, but for once I'm concerned enough about an LJ issue to speak up, because I never want to see LJ turn into a place of "all users are equal, but some are more equal than others."