Further thoughts on users and representation, LJ, and a few impossible possibilities
If you've got any friends in fandom on your friends' list, you've probably heard that something's going on, again. If you haven’t heard about this yet, please read these two CNet articles for brief background, read the official lj_biz post and see this collection of official responses from LJ. Firefox News has a good editorial on some of it, and Fandomtossed remains a good often-updated source of information.
Some of you have read my post from the last round of strikethroughs, on "'User Generated Content' & Ownership: The User as Citizen." This is in many ways a follow-up to that, though it can be read on its own. I'm not going into as much depth as I'd like to on alternative economic models here, because there's so much else to say about the current LJ situation. So expect more from me later, and please do keep sharing your ideas both on the original post and here, whatever suits you.
I say a lot here about possibilities for fixing LJ, some of which are real long-shots. Humor me and think of it as a mental exercise :D. A lot of that discussion can also be extended and applied to thinking about a future brand-new home for communal blogging, which is an ultimate goal regardless of the fate of Livejournal.
1. This isn't about fandom. It’s about caring about your users.
This isn't a fandom issue. It’s not about porn, or copyright, or protecting the children, or even enforcement of the law. The real issue at hand, and the one we need not to lose sight of as we agitate, is that this is a "how you treat your users" issue.
It's an issue of corporate responsibility, and more, because until recently corporations didn't have our kind of customer. When part of your product is selling your users the perceived experience of citizenship, you fail at selling your product when you fail at responsiveness and consistency in your behavior to your users.
Please don't think this doesn't affect you because you're not a pornographer / fan / artist / writer / perv. This is about whether you can continue to trust and expect consistency in terms of service and their enforcement from a company that you have trusted with personal information and intellectual content that presumably has at least some importance and/or emotional significance to you. This is about whether you can continue to invest your community building energy in a company that has shown a lack of respect for the communities created on its site, even though community is its selling strength. As my friend Ethan said last time around, users are the geese that lay the golden eggs.
The Livejournal of 2007 is a wholly different entity than the Livejournal pre-Six Apart on which many of us imprinted and formed fierce loyalties. It’s not anti-Livejournal to be upset at what’s going on right now.
If you think this doesn't affect you, you may be right... for a time. And by the time it does affect you, if things continue unchecked, a good portion of the folks who'd have stood up for you in a fight - and who've helped make Livejournal the vibrant and wonderful and diverse place it is - will be long gone. If that saddens you, then this affects you.
2. Greener pastures look so green only because we haven't spent enough time there
None of the other journaling sites are guaranteed to be any better in the long term on the true core issues, because none of them have any actual protections for the users' voices and "rights" apart from leader benevolence. And as we should know, because we saw it happen with Livejournal, that benevolence can shift. Every company has to negotiate how it balances its legal obligations and its users' needs. None of these other sites have ever been pushed by external forces to the degree that LJ has. There's no guarantee another place will do any better job of dealing with it than LJ.
I know this one site, it's fantastic. It has all the features we're used to and the guy who runs it is totally awesome and he says he will always protect his users' speech and... it's Livejournal, circa 2000, or really almost anytime before Brad sold LJ to Six Apart.
We’ve been down this road before. Moving to another service - ANY existing other service that is hosted by any company or any individual - is just postponing the inevitable. Eventually there will be legal challenges, eventually someone will get bored or get sued or decide it’s time for that journal site they own to make them rich.
Livejournal is no longer safe for certain aspects of fandom, and for that matter, other erotica communities, bdsm communities, possibly even some sex ed. That’s not something I’m arguing.
But Livejournal remains the safest place, in the middle term, for the bulk of journal activity that I see my friends list creating. I do not have faith that the clone services or even ScribbLit can make more than unfounded promises about our safety, and I'm unwilling to leave LJ without a fight, it turns out, after all.
3. What matters most in building a new long-term home is respect for users
The only way we can move en masse to another site is if it's something with what we need built right in to the way it's structured. And oddly enough, the main thing we need is NOT "freedom of speech" or assurances that the site is fan-owned or pro-fan. What we need is a site that is designed with user needs taking explicit priority over profit, and with a user voice built in and guaranteed from the ground up.
What I mean by users over profit is not that the site can't make money. What I mean is that the goal of the people running the site shouldn't be making the site look good - ie, be "monetizable" - with the primary purpose of eventually selling to a bigger company or holding an IPO that will make the original financers of the project rich.
This needs to be a site created for the public good, and the public good ain't ever made folks rich.
Luckily, it's possible to run a small company without the need for insane growth and glittering visions of IPOs - provided you can get past the initial investment period and then get and keep enough regular customers to pay your bills and salaries. Even better, if the site were part of a nonprofit, there'd be a built in prohibition on IPOs and sellouts (though being a nonprofit is not a guarantee an organization will be well-run). Nonprofit doesn't have to mean financially struggling, or even poorly-paying for employees. It just means, not driven by the desire for exponentially maximized profit made on the backs of an uncompensated and unrepresented user base. It means, operating a public good.
So one possible long-term way out is the fanarchive model, whether or not a blogging service would be part of the fanarchive project. Another is some of what’s being discussed over at fandom_flies. I lean right now to thinking it oughtn't be quite exactly either, because fans are better protected when intermingled with non-fen, and because, heck, I want to take all my Livejournal community with me, not just the fandom part of LJ. This journal isn't even a very fandomish journal. I want this site for a lot more than fandom, and I think other people would too.
A lot of comments to my User as Citizen post mentioned modeling after a credit union. I like that idea (it's the core of my stakeholder model for reforming existing sites, mentioned later). There are a lot of options when you're starting fresh and you want to be user-owned. As a company, you can choose a stakeholder/shareholder route; as a nonprofit, you can choose various types of membership; there are possibilities for combining in odd and exciting ways, with some legal consultation of course. I'd love to see these ideas built in from the ground up to fandom_flies.
4. We've got to stay on message if we're going to get anywhere here at LJ
Building something new is going to take time. In the middle term, at least some of us are planning to stay on LJ. Staying on LJ doesn’t need to mean sucking it up and backing down. We can fight for a better LJ experience, even as we explore the possibility of a new home.
To be effective, we need to get ourselves straight on what LJ did wrong that we should hold them to the fire for, and what they had little or no choice about. And we need to focus on the core issue at hand - treatment of users.
Not everything LJ says they had no choice about is actually something they had no choice about - but the lawyers 6A was listening to may have said differently, because lawyers like to be on the cautious side. It's their job. I personally don't think LJ determining that the two art posts that caused the suspensions were something it did not want to host was a wrong thing. Yes, it sucks. Yes, the one pic I saw looked to me like two adults, albeit one of them young. Yes, US laws around sexuality suck. But LJ is within its rights there, and the legal specter of child porn is scary for web hosts.
The issue we need to stick them with is HOW they enforced their policies, and how they communicated - and didn't communicate - those policies clearly to users. I see a lot of folks speaking about this in talking to LJ, but I also still see a lot of us focusing on tangential arguments. I get the outrage, I really do, because I feel it myself. But what we need to focus on is the cluelessness and contempt LJ and 6A have demonstrated for their customer base throughout this entire summer.
The bonus is, when we focus on this part of the issue, we win. We get a lot more support from the non-fen when we know how to explain to them that our concern is about online companies that specialize in hosting communities and they way they treat their users.
You already know all this. But this issue - the whole summer - has us really pissed off, and sometimes we forget. I lost perspective myself, and for pretty much the first time ever posted an angry public LJ entry in the heat of the moment. I spent last Friday night and Saturday morning grieving for the Livejournal that was and the people who are leaving and relationships I'm afraid may never be quite the same, because what we have here on LJ is special. So yeah, I'm pissed off, too.
But we need to claim the moral high ground. We simply can't afford to waste our time, or the precious first impressions for new folks who are starting to tune in, on personal recriminations for LJ staffers who behaved poorly. We can't afford to get sidetracked too deeply into debates about pro-anorexia communities, no matter how much pro-ana repels us. We need to make sure people hear the real issue that matters, the core issue underlying everything else.
Our message is: Six Apart doesn't care about its users, and we're not shutting up until we see real change. We want clarity, we want transparency, we want consistency, and we want to be treated with respect.
5. For those of us who don't want to give up Livejournal (yet) without a fight, what can we do?
Livejournal and Six Apart are in a bit of a rocky place right now. It may not be anything major, but they're probably feeling a bit fragile. Brad just left. Rahaeli had already left, and 6A may have underestimated the kind of trust and loyalty she inspired. ValleyWag called 6A a “sinking ship." All these wanks this summer that have hit us so hard have also put 6A in a pretty uncomfortable PR position.
Good!
Ok, now that that little moment of immaturity is past, no seriously, good. The management of Six Apart has to live in the world, and the world they live in is filled with the digerati and with folks who love online freedoms. 6A is based in San Francisco, home of the EFF and Creative Commons. These people see each other at conferences and other events. They also see venture capitalists and A-list bloggers and other folks who help shape the buzz around a company and its products. The opinion of folks in the world of online applications, blogs, and social media is currency for a pre-IPO company like Six Apart.
Which means 6A may be more receptive to change now than they ever have been, but the window may be brief.
Write to 6A. Follow synecdochic's excellent advice. bubble_blunder has an open letter.
I'm a member of the EFF. I'm writing to them. As a member of the EFF, I'm concerned that they may have given the impression of endorsing Livejournal when they publicized its permanent account sale donations. Some folks who bought permanent accounts may have been swayed by their participation into thinking that they could take seriously the assurances we were hearing from Barak Berkowitz and others on news and lj_biz. I imagine the folks at the EFF thought they could take it seriously too. But the DMCA “three strikes and you’re a repeat copyright offender" termination of mightygodking over his Archie remix comics, his Deathly Hallows pre-release review, and his Archie comics again is exactly the sort of thing I would hope the EFF abhors.
If you're a member of the EFF, write to them and let them know you're upset at what's going on. Ask the EFF to put pressure on LJ to commit to greater transparency and consistency. Ask the EFF to officially express its dismay in a letter to Livejournal.
Think hard about people you know who have influence. Know a popular blogger? Send them the links to the CNET articles and ask them to blog about the issue. Know an internet lawyer? Ask for their off-the-record opinion. Know an expert in user relations? Send them to Six Apart HQ! *g*
Seriously, this is in large part a battle of public opinion. Like it or not, no matter how vocal we are on LJ itself, we're just a tiny fraction. Even if half of the 35,000-odd fandom_counts accounts are active, fandom is still only a tenth of a percent or so of all active accounts. The percentage of actual human beings represented by fandom_counts could be much smaller, since fans are more likely to own multiple accounts. We need to help make this issue relevant to other LJ communities, and we need to take the issue to people outside LJ.
A couple years back, the huge Russian population on LJ was upset because LJ outsourced its Russian-language support and abuse. Does anyone know what happened with that? If it's still outsourced, the Russian community on LJ may be good potential allies, having also been burned. LJ is the most popular blog host in Russia.
I co-run a weekly weblog discussion salon. Nearly every week for the past couple of years, at least one person has asked me to recommend a good mainstream blog host. I've almost always highly recommended TypePad, and lately also Vox. Until I see changes from 6A, I'm not going to risk my professional credibility by recommending their products anymore. Have you ever recommended a Six Apart product? Tell the person you recommended it to about what’s happening and ask them to send 6A feedback.
Remember, this isn't about "Livejournal, that diary site a lot of teenage girls use." This is about "Six Apart, the company that makes the highly popular blog hosting software TypePad, as well as Movable Type, Vox, and Livejournal." Tell your story that way. It's not a Livejournal-only issue.
6. Come on, Erica, I expected you to propose something radical here! What gives? (Or, Four Possible Impossibilities)
Well, actually...
There are some options kicking around in my head that intrigue me despite their apparent impossibility. Hey, I rode here on the Harry Potter fandom express as an H/D shipper; I have a soft spot for the impossible.
Option 1: The Big Sell
Six Apart is weaker than usual. It's becoming clear that they're less well equipped to manage community sites like LJ and Vox, and perhaps should have stuck to their core products in Movable Type and TypePad. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to sell? Not the whole company, but LJ alone.
This option has many of the pitfalls of switching to new LJ clone sites, etc. Who knows who the new company would be, how they'd be run, etc. Best case scenario? A socialist worker-owned cooperative based in, say, Sweden, with accompanying server move. Yeah, and I'd also like a pony and a seaside villa in France...
For a sale-of-LJ option to work well for us users, 6A would have to sell only to a company they and we felt would be better capable of honoring the user base. They'd need to agree to sell and agree to let user representatives from a few large subcommunities sit in on the discussions and hold veto power. And the buying company would have to agree to a much clearer TOS and to explicit commitments via the TOS to incorporate meaningful official channels for user feedback. Companies don’t do these sorts of things, but this is a new era, and LJ has always been a groundbreaker, so I allow myself to think the impossible.
Option 2: Stakeholder Accounts
In one version of this, we see LJ sold, with some tiny stakeholder interest going to the aggregate of a bunch of user-purchased small-value stakes.
In another, we see LJ sold entirely to a nonprofit collaborative of stakeholders, for a sum exponentially smaller than it's worth, so it's not likely to happen. But, impossible allowed here.
If you assume 5,000 active fandom members who'd also be willing and able to kick in money - well, you'd be overestimating by a lot, I think, but let’s pretend and let's also presume that they're joined by 5,000 other ordinary LJ users. 10,000 users. A teeny little piece. At $250 each, we'd raise a total of $2,500,000. Small change in the world of buying social websites, but if you allow for the possibility of that many stakeholders willing and able to invest that much, it might have some meaning as a small portion of a buyout.
If users owned just one percent, we’d have a shot at a seat at shareholder meetings in a publicly owned company. Could, perhaps, a private company allot one percent as a stake to sell to its users, with part of the sale including a contract that allowed the users to elect a representative to an annual meeting?
In another version of this, the fantasy version, LJ profitability tanks and 6A, rather than simply shutting us down, decides to sell to stakeholders. We raise that 2.5 million and have a nonprofit business and it's lurvely.
Option 3. The Membership Model
You’re probably a member of an organization on two. You pay some sort of annual dues, and in exchange you get some element of voice within an organization, even if you don’t get to have any actual power in terms of its governance.
What would the membership model of a for-profit, privately-owned social website be like?
Members would pay for a membership, but that money would be supplemental, rather than critical, to the website’s core financial needs.
In turn, members receive a say in how things are run. Not a controlling say, and not a micromanaging say, but members have an institutionally recognized voice. Members might have a voice by electing representatives to a corporate governing body, such as a policy committee. There might be contractual guidelines about what kinds of decisions should be put to the membership for a vote, even if that vote is nonbinding. There might be contractual obligations for the person in the role of chief user ombudsperson in terms of how frequently or in what ways they need to consult with the user base as a whole or in random representative sample focus groups.
There could even be a member-elected advisory body that would operate as a sort of shadow-government, privy to some of the harder policy decisions faced by the corporation, and providing a user perspective for questions that cannot be shared publicly. This advisory body could even be put in charge of polling and interviewing the membership to keep the pulse of the users. They could ensure that problems are worked out together from the beginning, rather than decisions being made in the dark.
Membership would not imply, necessarily, an extra level of service in terms of the things people pay for, though it would be good if it did. Often, membership organizations give their members discounts on use of their services. If Livejournal were a membership organization, members could perhaps expect perks like free extra userpics or special members-only layouts and other features, but a membership might not mean you don’t also need to be a paid user to get the best services. (Example: Maybe you could be a basic account holding member and pay for membership alone, and perhaps, get the privileges of a plus account.) A site could choose to bundle paid usership and membership as a one-larger-payment package, offer lifetime memberships as a fundraiser, etc., and still retain its basic yearly revenue streams for paid services.
(Note: I don’t actually consider the membership model impossible, if we can also win at Option 4 first. And if not here on LJ, let’s work on having membership at minimum for the fandom_flies project(s).)
Option 4. Six Apart gets its head together and makes real and valuable changes
There are ways 6A could choose to better incorporate user voice. There are ways 6A could steeply increase user trust by even starting to seriously consider what they could do better. It doesn’t take a genius to come up with a list more than a page long of things Six Apart could do to demonstrate a solid commitment to its user base, and to increase user confidence. And most of these things are not ridiculously radical, not difficult under the law, not even necessarily all that expensive - apart from the person-power required to implement them.
It’s up to us to help 6A reach the point where they see the sacrifices they’d have to make to bring those changes about as worth it.
7. Livejournal is worth saving - whether or not Six Apart is along for the ride
I’ve always been proud to be a Livejournal user. Frequently, in interacting with people who’ve only been exposed to the “mainstream" blogosphere, I hear about things other folks think are new, that we’ve had going on at Livejournal for years. We were using feeds before they were cool, we just called them friends lists. We were an online social network back before venture capital had figured out that social was cool. Heck, we’ve even already had all the old standby wanks and flamewars. Even now, at my blog salon meetings, I often find that the features folks are building as websites of their own have already been enriching our lives at LJ for some time. I hear about “new" things that we’ve had here since the previous millennium. We’re a community on the cutting edge.
I noticed one LJ representative say that LJ is “Web 1.0" instead of “Web 2.0." They’re wrong. Web 1.0 is the static web, the web of publishing one to many. Web 2.0 is the living web, the web of interpersonal connection and interactivity. Livejournal was Web 2.0 before anyone else had even imagined the term or knew what it might mean. (But does Livejournal know that?)
I look at the mainstream blogosphere, and honestly, I think we have something better here. Something healthier. We may have some big names, but our networked structure makes it easier to be inclusive. I feel that I’m more likely to hear about things that will matter to me, to meet people who will be interesting to me, here. I know the code is available elsewhere, but Livejournal is the place with the largest and most diverse network.
The community here is much much broader than fandom. For a time, I even kept two separate journals, one “fandom" and one “regular life," because so many of my local friends, friends from activist or Jewish or queer or cooking or dancing communities, were here. The LJ community davis_square is, after email and my work-related websites, the single place I go every day I’m online. There are a whole lot of wonderful and diverse communities here, and unless and until we can offer something truly better, they’re not going to leave to follow us, and it’ll be a hard sell even then.
Lastly, we’ve got history here. We have history we can’t replicate elsewhere. Accounts of friends who have passed away whose journals here have memorial status. LJ phoneposts and projects (remember the hpreadaloud project?) built around them. Memories. Archival roleplaying games (nocturne_alley!). It’s not impossible for us to migrate, certainly, but a migration is never going to be as complete or as smooth as we’d like. And the more times we have to move, the more we’ll fray around the edges.
I resent the idea of needing to leave a place that I was part of building. I didn’t help make the code and I never volunteered in support or abuse, but I am part of building this community, and I have been for the past 5 ½ years. We, the users, have built the value that is Livejournal. A social website’s main currency is the size and engagement of its userbase. We made that value for Livejournal. Do we want to walk away without fighting to keep our ability to enjoy the site we’ve helped build?
I want to keep being proud of Livejournal. I want to be able to recommend it to my friends and colleagues and blog salon compatriots again. And if the way to save Livejournal so that I can do that is to break it apart from Six Apart, I’d be fine with that. But I’d rather see Six Apart make the serious changes needed to make things good here again.
8. Love is all we need
Apparently, I love this place too much to give up. It's ours, because we made it, we the users - definitely not fandom alone - because you can have all the code and servers and staff you want and without the user base it's worthless.
Our love is what keeps this ship afloat.
Love can't be quantified in currency, love can't be sold, and love needs a lot more nourishment than you might think.
Six Apart, nevermind the IPO or what you paid to buy LJ. This place isn't even worth the hardware and the software and the salaries if there's no love. Love is nourished on trust. Trust is earned through transparency, clarity, consistency, and respect.
Give us that, 6A, and at least some of these geese just may keep laying the golden eggs.
Some of you have read my post from the last round of strikethroughs, on "'User Generated Content' & Ownership: The User as Citizen." This is in many ways a follow-up to that, though it can be read on its own. I'm not going into as much depth as I'd like to on alternative economic models here, because there's so much else to say about the current LJ situation. So expect more from me later, and please do keep sharing your ideas both on the original post and here, whatever suits you.
I say a lot here about possibilities for fixing LJ, some of which are real long-shots. Humor me and think of it as a mental exercise :D. A lot of that discussion can also be extended and applied to thinking about a future brand-new home for communal blogging, which is an ultimate goal regardless of the fate of Livejournal.
1. This isn't about fandom. It’s about caring about your users.
This isn't a fandom issue. It’s not about porn, or copyright, or protecting the children, or even enforcement of the law. The real issue at hand, and the one we need not to lose sight of as we agitate, is that this is a "how you treat your users" issue.
It's an issue of corporate responsibility, and more, because until recently corporations didn't have our kind of customer. When part of your product is selling your users the perceived experience of citizenship, you fail at selling your product when you fail at responsiveness and consistency in your behavior to your users.
Please don't think this doesn't affect you because you're not a pornographer / fan / artist / writer / perv. This is about whether you can continue to trust and expect consistency in terms of service and their enforcement from a company that you have trusted with personal information and intellectual content that presumably has at least some importance and/or emotional significance to you. This is about whether you can continue to invest your community building energy in a company that has shown a lack of respect for the communities created on its site, even though community is its selling strength. As my friend Ethan said last time around, users are the geese that lay the golden eggs.
The Livejournal of 2007 is a wholly different entity than the Livejournal pre-Six Apart on which many of us imprinted and formed fierce loyalties. It’s not anti-Livejournal to be upset at what’s going on right now.
If you think this doesn't affect you, you may be right... for a time. And by the time it does affect you, if things continue unchecked, a good portion of the folks who'd have stood up for you in a fight - and who've helped make Livejournal the vibrant and wonderful and diverse place it is - will be long gone. If that saddens you, then this affects you.
2. Greener pastures look so green only because we haven't spent enough time there
None of the other journaling sites are guaranteed to be any better in the long term on the true core issues, because none of them have any actual protections for the users' voices and "rights" apart from leader benevolence. And as we should know, because we saw it happen with Livejournal, that benevolence can shift. Every company has to negotiate how it balances its legal obligations and its users' needs. None of these other sites have ever been pushed by external forces to the degree that LJ has. There's no guarantee another place will do any better job of dealing with it than LJ.
I know this one site, it's fantastic. It has all the features we're used to and the guy who runs it is totally awesome and he says he will always protect his users' speech and... it's Livejournal, circa 2000, or really almost anytime before Brad sold LJ to Six Apart.
We’ve been down this road before. Moving to another service - ANY existing other service that is hosted by any company or any individual - is just postponing the inevitable. Eventually there will be legal challenges, eventually someone will get bored or get sued or decide it’s time for that journal site they own to make them rich.
Livejournal is no longer safe for certain aspects of fandom, and for that matter, other erotica communities, bdsm communities, possibly even some sex ed. That’s not something I’m arguing.
But Livejournal remains the safest place, in the middle term, for the bulk of journal activity that I see my friends list creating. I do not have faith that the clone services or even ScribbLit can make more than unfounded promises about our safety, and I'm unwilling to leave LJ without a fight, it turns out, after all.
3. What matters most in building a new long-term home is respect for users
The only way we can move en masse to another site is if it's something with what we need built right in to the way it's structured. And oddly enough, the main thing we need is NOT "freedom of speech" or assurances that the site is fan-owned or pro-fan. What we need is a site that is designed with user needs taking explicit priority over profit, and with a user voice built in and guaranteed from the ground up.
What I mean by users over profit is not that the site can't make money. What I mean is that the goal of the people running the site shouldn't be making the site look good - ie, be "monetizable" - with the primary purpose of eventually selling to a bigger company or holding an IPO that will make the original financers of the project rich.
This needs to be a site created for the public good, and the public good ain't ever made folks rich.
Luckily, it's possible to run a small company without the need for insane growth and glittering visions of IPOs - provided you can get past the initial investment period and then get and keep enough regular customers to pay your bills and salaries. Even better, if the site were part of a nonprofit, there'd be a built in prohibition on IPOs and sellouts (though being a nonprofit is not a guarantee an organization will be well-run). Nonprofit doesn't have to mean financially struggling, or even poorly-paying for employees. It just means, not driven by the desire for exponentially maximized profit made on the backs of an uncompensated and unrepresented user base. It means, operating a public good.
So one possible long-term way out is the fanarchive model, whether or not a blogging service would be part of the fanarchive project. Another is some of what’s being discussed over at fandom_flies. I lean right now to thinking it oughtn't be quite exactly either, because fans are better protected when intermingled with non-fen, and because, heck, I want to take all my Livejournal community with me, not just the fandom part of LJ. This journal isn't even a very fandomish journal. I want this site for a lot more than fandom, and I think other people would too.
A lot of comments to my User as Citizen post mentioned modeling after a credit union. I like that idea (it's the core of my stakeholder model for reforming existing sites, mentioned later). There are a lot of options when you're starting fresh and you want to be user-owned. As a company, you can choose a stakeholder/shareholder route; as a nonprofit, you can choose various types of membership; there are possibilities for combining in odd and exciting ways, with some legal consultation of course. I'd love to see these ideas built in from the ground up to fandom_flies.
4. We've got to stay on message if we're going to get anywhere here at LJ
Building something new is going to take time. In the middle term, at least some of us are planning to stay on LJ. Staying on LJ doesn’t need to mean sucking it up and backing down. We can fight for a better LJ experience, even as we explore the possibility of a new home.
To be effective, we need to get ourselves straight on what LJ did wrong that we should hold them to the fire for, and what they had little or no choice about. And we need to focus on the core issue at hand - treatment of users.
Not everything LJ says they had no choice about is actually something they had no choice about - but the lawyers 6A was listening to may have said differently, because lawyers like to be on the cautious side. It's their job. I personally don't think LJ determining that the two art posts that caused the suspensions were something it did not want to host was a wrong thing. Yes, it sucks. Yes, the one pic I saw looked to me like two adults, albeit one of them young. Yes, US laws around sexuality suck. But LJ is within its rights there, and the legal specter of child porn is scary for web hosts.
The issue we need to stick them with is HOW they enforced their policies, and how they communicated - and didn't communicate - those policies clearly to users. I see a lot of folks speaking about this in talking to LJ, but I also still see a lot of us focusing on tangential arguments. I get the outrage, I really do, because I feel it myself. But what we need to focus on is the cluelessness and contempt LJ and 6A have demonstrated for their customer base throughout this entire summer.
The bonus is, when we focus on this part of the issue, we win. We get a lot more support from the non-fen when we know how to explain to them that our concern is about online companies that specialize in hosting communities and they way they treat their users.
You already know all this. But this issue - the whole summer - has us really pissed off, and sometimes we forget. I lost perspective myself, and for pretty much the first time ever posted an angry public LJ entry in the heat of the moment. I spent last Friday night and Saturday morning grieving for the Livejournal that was and the people who are leaving and relationships I'm afraid may never be quite the same, because what we have here on LJ is special. So yeah, I'm pissed off, too.
But we need to claim the moral high ground. We simply can't afford to waste our time, or the precious first impressions for new folks who are starting to tune in, on personal recriminations for LJ staffers who behaved poorly. We can't afford to get sidetracked too deeply into debates about pro-anorexia communities, no matter how much pro-ana repels us. We need to make sure people hear the real issue that matters, the core issue underlying everything else.
Our message is: Six Apart doesn't care about its users, and we're not shutting up until we see real change. We want clarity, we want transparency, we want consistency, and we want to be treated with respect.
5. For those of us who don't want to give up Livejournal (yet) without a fight, what can we do?
Livejournal and Six Apart are in a bit of a rocky place right now. It may not be anything major, but they're probably feeling a bit fragile. Brad just left. Rahaeli had already left, and 6A may have underestimated the kind of trust and loyalty she inspired. ValleyWag called 6A a “sinking ship." All these wanks this summer that have hit us so hard have also put 6A in a pretty uncomfortable PR position.
Good!
Ok, now that that little moment of immaturity is past, no seriously, good. The management of Six Apart has to live in the world, and the world they live in is filled with the digerati and with folks who love online freedoms. 6A is based in San Francisco, home of the EFF and Creative Commons. These people see each other at conferences and other events. They also see venture capitalists and A-list bloggers and other folks who help shape the buzz around a company and its products. The opinion of folks in the world of online applications, blogs, and social media is currency for a pre-IPO company like Six Apart.
Which means 6A may be more receptive to change now than they ever have been, but the window may be brief.
Write to 6A. Follow synecdochic's excellent advice. bubble_blunder has an open letter.
I'm a member of the EFF. I'm writing to them. As a member of the EFF, I'm concerned that they may have given the impression of endorsing Livejournal when they publicized its permanent account sale donations. Some folks who bought permanent accounts may have been swayed by their participation into thinking that they could take seriously the assurances we were hearing from Barak Berkowitz and others on news and lj_biz. I imagine the folks at the EFF thought they could take it seriously too. But the DMCA “three strikes and you’re a repeat copyright offender" termination of mightygodking over his Archie remix comics, his Deathly Hallows pre-release review, and his Archie comics again is exactly the sort of thing I would hope the EFF abhors.
If you're a member of the EFF, write to them and let them know you're upset at what's going on. Ask the EFF to put pressure on LJ to commit to greater transparency and consistency. Ask the EFF to officially express its dismay in a letter to Livejournal.
Think hard about people you know who have influence. Know a popular blogger? Send them the links to the CNET articles and ask them to blog about the issue. Know an internet lawyer? Ask for their off-the-record opinion. Know an expert in user relations? Send them to Six Apart HQ! *g*
Seriously, this is in large part a battle of public opinion. Like it or not, no matter how vocal we are on LJ itself, we're just a tiny fraction. Even if half of the 35,000-odd fandom_counts accounts are active, fandom is still only a tenth of a percent or so of all active accounts. The percentage of actual human beings represented by fandom_counts could be much smaller, since fans are more likely to own multiple accounts. We need to help make this issue relevant to other LJ communities, and we need to take the issue to people outside LJ.
A couple years back, the huge Russian population on LJ was upset because LJ outsourced its Russian-language support and abuse. Does anyone know what happened with that? If it's still outsourced, the Russian community on LJ may be good potential allies, having also been burned. LJ is the most popular blog host in Russia.
I co-run a weekly weblog discussion salon. Nearly every week for the past couple of years, at least one person has asked me to recommend a good mainstream blog host. I've almost always highly recommended TypePad, and lately also Vox. Until I see changes from 6A, I'm not going to risk my professional credibility by recommending their products anymore. Have you ever recommended a Six Apart product? Tell the person you recommended it to about what’s happening and ask them to send 6A feedback.
Remember, this isn't about "Livejournal, that diary site a lot of teenage girls use." This is about "Six Apart, the company that makes the highly popular blog hosting software TypePad, as well as Movable Type, Vox, and Livejournal." Tell your story that way. It's not a Livejournal-only issue.
6. Come on, Erica, I expected you to propose something radical here! What gives? (Or, Four Possible Impossibilities)
Well, actually...
There are some options kicking around in my head that intrigue me despite their apparent impossibility. Hey, I rode here on the Harry Potter fandom express as an H/D shipper; I have a soft spot for the impossible.
Option 1: The Big Sell
Six Apart is weaker than usual. It's becoming clear that they're less well equipped to manage community sites like LJ and Vox, and perhaps should have stuck to their core products in Movable Type and TypePad. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to sell? Not the whole company, but LJ alone.
This option has many of the pitfalls of switching to new LJ clone sites, etc. Who knows who the new company would be, how they'd be run, etc. Best case scenario? A socialist worker-owned cooperative based in, say, Sweden, with accompanying server move. Yeah, and I'd also like a pony and a seaside villa in France...
For a sale-of-LJ option to work well for us users, 6A would have to sell only to a company they and we felt would be better capable of honoring the user base. They'd need to agree to sell and agree to let user representatives from a few large subcommunities sit in on the discussions and hold veto power. And the buying company would have to agree to a much clearer TOS and to explicit commitments via the TOS to incorporate meaningful official channels for user feedback. Companies don’t do these sorts of things, but this is a new era, and LJ has always been a groundbreaker, so I allow myself to think the impossible.
Option 2: Stakeholder Accounts
In one version of this, we see LJ sold, with some tiny stakeholder interest going to the aggregate of a bunch of user-purchased small-value stakes.
In another, we see LJ sold entirely to a nonprofit collaborative of stakeholders, for a sum exponentially smaller than it's worth, so it's not likely to happen. But, impossible allowed here.
If you assume 5,000 active fandom members who'd also be willing and able to kick in money - well, you'd be overestimating by a lot, I think, but let’s pretend and let's also presume that they're joined by 5,000 other ordinary LJ users. 10,000 users. A teeny little piece. At $250 each, we'd raise a total of $2,500,000. Small change in the world of buying social websites, but if you allow for the possibility of that many stakeholders willing and able to invest that much, it might have some meaning as a small portion of a buyout.
If users owned just one percent, we’d have a shot at a seat at shareholder meetings in a publicly owned company. Could, perhaps, a private company allot one percent as a stake to sell to its users, with part of the sale including a contract that allowed the users to elect a representative to an annual meeting?
In another version of this, the fantasy version, LJ profitability tanks and 6A, rather than simply shutting us down, decides to sell to stakeholders. We raise that 2.5 million and have a nonprofit business and it's lurvely.
Option 3. The Membership Model
You’re probably a member of an organization on two. You pay some sort of annual dues, and in exchange you get some element of voice within an organization, even if you don’t get to have any actual power in terms of its governance.
What would the membership model of a for-profit, privately-owned social website be like?
Members would pay for a membership, but that money would be supplemental, rather than critical, to the website’s core financial needs.
In turn, members receive a say in how things are run. Not a controlling say, and not a micromanaging say, but members have an institutionally recognized voice. Members might have a voice by electing representatives to a corporate governing body, such as a policy committee. There might be contractual guidelines about what kinds of decisions should be put to the membership for a vote, even if that vote is nonbinding. There might be contractual obligations for the person in the role of chief user ombudsperson in terms of how frequently or in what ways they need to consult with the user base as a whole or in random representative sample focus groups.
There could even be a member-elected advisory body that would operate as a sort of shadow-government, privy to some of the harder policy decisions faced by the corporation, and providing a user perspective for questions that cannot be shared publicly. This advisory body could even be put in charge of polling and interviewing the membership to keep the pulse of the users. They could ensure that problems are worked out together from the beginning, rather than decisions being made in the dark.
Membership would not imply, necessarily, an extra level of service in terms of the things people pay for, though it would be good if it did. Often, membership organizations give their members discounts on use of their services. If Livejournal were a membership organization, members could perhaps expect perks like free extra userpics or special members-only layouts and other features, but a membership might not mean you don’t also need to be a paid user to get the best services. (Example: Maybe you could be a basic account holding member and pay for membership alone, and perhaps, get the privileges of a plus account.) A site could choose to bundle paid usership and membership as a one-larger-payment package, offer lifetime memberships as a fundraiser, etc., and still retain its basic yearly revenue streams for paid services.
(Note: I don’t actually consider the membership model impossible, if we can also win at Option 4 first. And if not here on LJ, let’s work on having membership at minimum for the fandom_flies project(s).)
Option 4. Six Apart gets its head together and makes real and valuable changes
There are ways 6A could choose to better incorporate user voice. There are ways 6A could steeply increase user trust by even starting to seriously consider what they could do better. It doesn’t take a genius to come up with a list more than a page long of things Six Apart could do to demonstrate a solid commitment to its user base, and to increase user confidence. And most of these things are not ridiculously radical, not difficult under the law, not even necessarily all that expensive - apart from the person-power required to implement them.
It’s up to us to help 6A reach the point where they see the sacrifices they’d have to make to bring those changes about as worth it.
7. Livejournal is worth saving - whether or not Six Apart is along for the ride
I’ve always been proud to be a Livejournal user. Frequently, in interacting with people who’ve only been exposed to the “mainstream" blogosphere, I hear about things other folks think are new, that we’ve had going on at Livejournal for years. We were using feeds before they were cool, we just called them friends lists. We were an online social network back before venture capital had figured out that social was cool. Heck, we’ve even already had all the old standby wanks and flamewars. Even now, at my blog salon meetings, I often find that the features folks are building as websites of their own have already been enriching our lives at LJ for some time. I hear about “new" things that we’ve had here since the previous millennium. We’re a community on the cutting edge.
I noticed one LJ representative say that LJ is “Web 1.0" instead of “Web 2.0." They’re wrong. Web 1.0 is the static web, the web of publishing one to many. Web 2.0 is the living web, the web of interpersonal connection and interactivity. Livejournal was Web 2.0 before anyone else had even imagined the term or knew what it might mean. (But does Livejournal know that?)
I look at the mainstream blogosphere, and honestly, I think we have something better here. Something healthier. We may have some big names, but our networked structure makes it easier to be inclusive. I feel that I’m more likely to hear about things that will matter to me, to meet people who will be interesting to me, here. I know the code is available elsewhere, but Livejournal is the place with the largest and most diverse network.
The community here is much much broader than fandom. For a time, I even kept two separate journals, one “fandom" and one “regular life," because so many of my local friends, friends from activist or Jewish or queer or cooking or dancing communities, were here. The LJ community davis_square is, after email and my work-related websites, the single place I go every day I’m online. There are a whole lot of wonderful and diverse communities here, and unless and until we can offer something truly better, they’re not going to leave to follow us, and it’ll be a hard sell even then.
Lastly, we’ve got history here. We have history we can’t replicate elsewhere. Accounts of friends who have passed away whose journals here have memorial status. LJ phoneposts and projects (remember the hpreadaloud project?) built around them. Memories. Archival roleplaying games (nocturne_alley!). It’s not impossible for us to migrate, certainly, but a migration is never going to be as complete or as smooth as we’d like. And the more times we have to move, the more we’ll fray around the edges.
I resent the idea of needing to leave a place that I was part of building. I didn’t help make the code and I never volunteered in support or abuse, but I am part of building this community, and I have been for the past 5 ½ years. We, the users, have built the value that is Livejournal. A social website’s main currency is the size and engagement of its userbase. We made that value for Livejournal. Do we want to walk away without fighting to keep our ability to enjoy the site we’ve helped build?
I want to keep being proud of Livejournal. I want to be able to recommend it to my friends and colleagues and blog salon compatriots again. And if the way to save Livejournal so that I can do that is to break it apart from Six Apart, I’d be fine with that. But I’d rather see Six Apart make the serious changes needed to make things good here again.
8. Love is all we need
Apparently, I love this place too much to give up. It's ours, because we made it, we the users - definitely not fandom alone - because you can have all the code and servers and staff you want and without the user base it's worthless.
Our love is what keeps this ship afloat.
Love can't be quantified in currency, love can't be sold, and love needs a lot more nourishment than you might think.
Six Apart, nevermind the IPO or what you paid to buy LJ. This place isn't even worth the hardware and the software and the salaries if there's no love. Love is nourished on trust. Trust is earned through transparency, clarity, consistency, and respect.
Give us that, 6A, and at least some of these geese just may keep laying the golden eggs.