What Livejournal Terms of Service changes mean for LJ's future - and why I'm sticking with it
Back in Monday (very early Tuesday morning Moscow time), SUP, a company that owns Livejournal gave its users one hell of an unpleasant surprise.
About a day earlier, LJ alerted its users that it would be taken offline for a few hours in what would be night on Moscow time. It gave no indication that it would be anything but routine maintenance that occasionally takes the service offline for a few hours. But when LJ came back online, users were greeted with a message.
There was a new contract they had to sign. And, unlike the previous version of the contract, which was a version of an American-based contract that has been part of Livejournal since the beginning, this was a Russian contract designed to comply with the Russian federal law first and foremost. And while the pop-up gave you the option of clicking "not now," I hesitated the click on that, because the original Russian-language version of the agreement said that, by not agreeing to it, the user must "discontinue any use of the Service."
(According to kaffyr and some of the others, it seemed to mean that LJ would automatically log you off until you signed it. Which is more benign then, say, deleting your LJ, but it also means that it, in essence, forced you into signing an agreement if you ever wanted to do anything with the account)
While I was, to put it mildly, annoyed with the way this was imposed on us, I didn't think too much of what the agreement means. At an admittedly casual glance, it didn't seem like it had anything that LJ-Russia users, at least in theory, weren't required to do already. But over the next few days, I discovered that more than a few LJ users took an issue with Section 9.1.3, which stated that "[The user] is obligated to mark the Content that, in accordance with the laws of the Russian federation, it's allowed for dissemination to children (ages 0 to 18) as adult material, using the service's functions." In other words, the users had to mark entries as adult-only (for non-LJ users - there is a post setting that does that) if they, among other things, fell afoul of Russian federal "gay propaganda" law.
Now, in theory, that law has already been affecting LJ-Russia users and comms within Russian Federation limits more or less since the moment it took effect. At the time, I remember asking my mom if this would affect her, since her Russian-language LJ, which gets pretty sizable traffic, makes absolutely no bones about her feelings on LGBT rights. And she told me that nobody is going to bother to check every single LJ in existence, and she's not terribly cornered. So far, that has bourne out.
(And, come to think of it, my post about the 2015 Chicago Pride Parade got reposted to lj_world, a community operated by Livejournal's official service account - and, aside from an obnoxious troll, I haven't faced any consequences)
Anyway, the point is that I surprised by how sharp some of the reactions from non-Russian LJ were. Some, like cleolinda, where already thinking of jumping ship to Dreamwidth, and this was simply the last straw. Others, like solarbird, took the stance of, even if it's not going to affect them, they refuse use a service that would ask users to accept the not-so-implicit thesis behind the "gay propaganda" law. Solarbird herself is planning on auto-cross-posting from Dreamwidth until her LJ is deteled for violating new TOS, but otherwise not using LJ at all, while many others, including aforementioned Cleolinda and Kaffyr, are planning to delete their LJs altogether.
My own initial take has been - this changes nothing, Russian Federation laws aren't any more enforceble outside Russian Federation limits than they were before April 4. I am kind of worried that it might come back to haunt me whenever I wind up setting foot on Russian soil... but then, my mom visited Russia numerous times since the "gay propaganda" law took effect, and nothing happened to her.
But, at the same time, elfgrove makes a compelling argument, in that, even if Russian authorities can't affect non-Russian users directly, SUP can, theoretically, take steps to pressure them indirectly. Remember - with Russian laws, it's not really the question of what the letter of law says, but how the latter of the law can be used against you if the government decided to crack down on you for some reason.
(Since I started writing this post, I had a chance to meet with my mom over lunch. Her take on this is that it's much ado over nothing. The new TOS doesn't explicitly say that "Adult content" includes "gay propaganda" (which, as she pointed out, isn't properly defined anyway. And she doesn't think that enforcement is going to be any different than she did in the past because, as she said before, there is no way to police every single LJ in existence, and, if the Russian government wants to come after you, they will come after you no matter what you do. And they're not going to want to come after a bunch of people who don't even write in Russian.)
By the way - there has been some confusion about the announcement that paid accounts would still be managed by Livejournal Inc, while the rest of the services will be managed by SUP. A Kommersant article quotes SUP executives that this is a "jurisdictional formality." The best I can tell, they need time to transfer payment processing services to Russia, so Livejournal Inc, an American company owned by SUP, needs to be in place, at least for the time being. What will happen once the financial processing is transferred to Russia remains to be seen.
If worst comes to worst, I do have a Dreamwidth account I got back when scansdaily mass-migrated there from InsaneJournal. I've barely used it, but as I've said elsewhere, it could be pressed into service, if needed (for those with Dreamwidth accounts - it's the same handle as my LJ one).
Another thing that does concern me is how it's going to affect Russian users who live in Russia. I have seen some users trying to use the old agreement as a legal dodge against the demands of Russian federal law, putting up big disclaimers in their profiles that, since the TOS follows the American law, they don't have to follow Russian legal requirements. I've always been dubious about that, for the same reasons as I am dubious about the new TOS affecting users residing outside Russia now - but, whatever that was worth, it's definitely gone now.
I have heard some anecdotal evidence suggesting that the Russian federal laws have already driven many Russian LGBT users to other LJ-like platforms. If true, this may make the situation worse. I don't know enough to confidently speak on it, so if there are any users reading this who know more *cough* svollga *cough*, please feel free to chime in.
But that bit in the agreement isn't the only change.
A day after the changes took effect, a news post outlining some of the other service changes went up in ru_news (here is the English-language version). The five types of accounts have been reduced to two - unpaid and paid. The early adopter accounts, which had some privileges other accounts didn't, have been rendered moot - which, if you ask me, is a pretty shitty thing to do to the few early adopters that are still around. Permanent accounts, which where basically paid accounts that didn't expire and had some perks paid accounts lacked, such as more storage space and more avatars, got to keep their privileges and more storage space than before.
Me, I used the basic account. It's the kind of account that, after a certain point, you couldn't get by default, and people who still had it were grandfathered in. While this left me with fewer avatars than the default Plus accounts, but it also meant that I wouldn't see a lot of advertising Plus accounts and users who weren't logged in got bombarded with. That's a major reason why I never went to plus - that, and a certain pride in knowing that I've been around long enough to have a Basic account.
But now, that choice has been taken out of my hands - which was the point.
The Kommersant article I referenced quite a few paragraphs ago lays out why SUP made the changes that it did. And there are two factors. First of all, back in December 2016, SUP moved the Livejournal servers from California to Russia. The reason? Saving money. Apparently, having servers in United States is ten times as expensive as having them in Russia.
They did away with Basic and Early Adopter accounts to increase the amount of advertising people see on Livejournal - the company estimates that it would increase advertising revenue by 35 percent.
Whereas in back in 2014, Livejournal was trying to regain some of what it lost in English-speaking countries, right now, their strategy appears to be to try to squeeze as much as they can out of LJ-Russia. The English-speaking LJ doesn't appear to matter, one way or another.
"LiveJournal is a fairly frequently visited and important portal in the Russian internet," Arseniy Ashomko, the General Director of Tigermilk Media, mused. " But it hasn't been a leading platform in a while, and it doesn't influence the future of the industry."
He noted that the more popular bloggers want to "escape the limits of this ecosystem," using Varlamov.ru as an example.
"And new creators, at the very least, don't rush there," Mr. Ashomko concluded. "Hence the [Livejournal owner SUP's] strategy - minimize costs and increase the advertising volume, so as to squeeze as much as possible out of the platform"
Which is depressing. Because this is not a winning strategy. It's the "lets milk this cow until the teats run dry" strategy. Which doesn't exactly inspire confidence about Livejournal's future.
For now - I am staying put. I was always going to stay put, out of sheer stubbornness. Plus, it has some functions that Dreamwidth lacks. Like social media buttons, and the ability to repost. And I like the feeds.
I was originally going to end this post by saying that I can't presume to make moral decisions for other people. If they feel that the new TOS is tantamount to endorsement of "gay propaganda" law, I am not going to tell them they're wrong.
But when I talked to my mom, there was one thing that struck me.
"Why is everybody running?" she mused. "If you believe in something, you stand up for it. If you like the platform, don't let people just force you off it. Protest. Complain. We've seen, with Trump, what happens when people stand up. If they ban you, if they delete entire Livejournal, that's a different story, but right now. Post whatever you want. There's not enough room in Bastille to lock up everybody."
For those who don't regularly read this Livejournal, this is coming from someone who grew up in Soviet Union, someone whose parents and grandparents were victimized by Stalin's regime.
Like I said, I don't presume to make choices for everyone. But this gave me all the more reason to stick with mine.
Until I am TOSed, until Livejournal shuts down, I will post the way I had before.
I am not running.
About a day earlier, LJ alerted its users that it would be taken offline for a few hours in what would be night on Moscow time. It gave no indication that it would be anything but routine maintenance that occasionally takes the service offline for a few hours. But when LJ came back online, users were greeted with a message.
There was a new contract they had to sign. And, unlike the previous version of the contract, which was a version of an American-based contract that has been part of Livejournal since the beginning, this was a Russian contract designed to comply with the Russian federal law first and foremost. And while the pop-up gave you the option of clicking "not now," I hesitated the click on that, because the original Russian-language version of the agreement said that, by not agreeing to it, the user must "discontinue any use of the Service."
(According to kaffyr and some of the others, it seemed to mean that LJ would automatically log you off until you signed it. Which is more benign then, say, deleting your LJ, but it also means that it, in essence, forced you into signing an agreement if you ever wanted to do anything with the account)
While I was, to put it mildly, annoyed with the way this was imposed on us, I didn't think too much of what the agreement means. At an admittedly casual glance, it didn't seem like it had anything that LJ-Russia users, at least in theory, weren't required to do already. But over the next few days, I discovered that more than a few LJ users took an issue with Section 9.1.3, which stated that "[The user] is obligated to mark the Content that, in accordance with the laws of the Russian federation, it's allowed for dissemination to children (ages 0 to 18) as adult material, using the service's functions." In other words, the users had to mark entries as adult-only (for non-LJ users - there is a post setting that does that) if they, among other things, fell afoul of Russian federal "gay propaganda" law.
Now, in theory, that law has already been affecting LJ-Russia users and comms within Russian Federation limits more or less since the moment it took effect. At the time, I remember asking my mom if this would affect her, since her Russian-language LJ, which gets pretty sizable traffic, makes absolutely no bones about her feelings on LGBT rights. And she told me that nobody is going to bother to check every single LJ in existence, and she's not terribly cornered. So far, that has bourne out.
(And, come to think of it, my post about the 2015 Chicago Pride Parade got reposted to lj_world, a community operated by Livejournal's official service account - and, aside from an obnoxious troll, I haven't faced any consequences)
Anyway, the point is that I surprised by how sharp some of the reactions from non-Russian LJ were. Some, like cleolinda, where already thinking of jumping ship to Dreamwidth, and this was simply the last straw. Others, like solarbird, took the stance of, even if it's not going to affect them, they refuse use a service that would ask users to accept the not-so-implicit thesis behind the "gay propaganda" law. Solarbird herself is planning on auto-cross-posting from Dreamwidth until her LJ is deteled for violating new TOS, but otherwise not using LJ at all, while many others, including aforementioned Cleolinda and Kaffyr, are planning to delete their LJs altogether.
My own initial take has been - this changes nothing, Russian Federation laws aren't any more enforceble outside Russian Federation limits than they were before April 4. I am kind of worried that it might come back to haunt me whenever I wind up setting foot on Russian soil... but then, my mom visited Russia numerous times since the "gay propaganda" law took effect, and nothing happened to her.
But, at the same time, elfgrove makes a compelling argument, in that, even if Russian authorities can't affect non-Russian users directly, SUP can, theoretically, take steps to pressure them indirectly. Remember - with Russian laws, it's not really the question of what the letter of law says, but how the latter of the law can be used against you if the government decided to crack down on you for some reason.
(Since I started writing this post, I had a chance to meet with my mom over lunch. Her take on this is that it's much ado over nothing. The new TOS doesn't explicitly say that "Adult content" includes "gay propaganda" (which, as she pointed out, isn't properly defined anyway. And she doesn't think that enforcement is going to be any different than she did in the past because, as she said before, there is no way to police every single LJ in existence, and, if the Russian government wants to come after you, they will come after you no matter what you do. And they're not going to want to come after a bunch of people who don't even write in Russian.)
By the way - there has been some confusion about the announcement that paid accounts would still be managed by Livejournal Inc, while the rest of the services will be managed by SUP. A Kommersant article quotes SUP executives that this is a "jurisdictional formality." The best I can tell, they need time to transfer payment processing services to Russia, so Livejournal Inc, an American company owned by SUP, needs to be in place, at least for the time being. What will happen once the financial processing is transferred to Russia remains to be seen.
If worst comes to worst, I do have a Dreamwidth account I got back when scansdaily mass-migrated there from InsaneJournal. I've barely used it, but as I've said elsewhere, it could be pressed into service, if needed (for those with Dreamwidth accounts - it's the same handle as my LJ one).
Another thing that does concern me is how it's going to affect Russian users who live in Russia. I have seen some users trying to use the old agreement as a legal dodge against the demands of Russian federal law, putting up big disclaimers in their profiles that, since the TOS follows the American law, they don't have to follow Russian legal requirements. I've always been dubious about that, for the same reasons as I am dubious about the new TOS affecting users residing outside Russia now - but, whatever that was worth, it's definitely gone now.
I have heard some anecdotal evidence suggesting that the Russian federal laws have already driven many Russian LGBT users to other LJ-like platforms. If true, this may make the situation worse. I don't know enough to confidently speak on it, so if there are any users reading this who know more *cough* svollga *cough*, please feel free to chime in.
But that bit in the agreement isn't the only change.
A day after the changes took effect, a news post outlining some of the other service changes went up in ru_news (here is the English-language version). The five types of accounts have been reduced to two - unpaid and paid. The early adopter accounts, which had some privileges other accounts didn't, have been rendered moot - which, if you ask me, is a pretty shitty thing to do to the few early adopters that are still around. Permanent accounts, which where basically paid accounts that didn't expire and had some perks paid accounts lacked, such as more storage space and more avatars, got to keep their privileges and more storage space than before.
Me, I used the basic account. It's the kind of account that, after a certain point, you couldn't get by default, and people who still had it were grandfathered in. While this left me with fewer avatars than the default Plus accounts, but it also meant that I wouldn't see a lot of advertising Plus accounts and users who weren't logged in got bombarded with. That's a major reason why I never went to plus - that, and a certain pride in knowing that I've been around long enough to have a Basic account.
But now, that choice has been taken out of my hands - which was the point.
The Kommersant article I referenced quite a few paragraphs ago lays out why SUP made the changes that it did. And there are two factors. First of all, back in December 2016, SUP moved the Livejournal servers from California to Russia. The reason? Saving money. Apparently, having servers in United States is ten times as expensive as having them in Russia.
They did away with Basic and Early Adopter accounts to increase the amount of advertising people see on Livejournal - the company estimates that it would increase advertising revenue by 35 percent.
Whereas in back in 2014, Livejournal was trying to regain some of what it lost in English-speaking countries, right now, their strategy appears to be to try to squeeze as much as they can out of LJ-Russia. The English-speaking LJ doesn't appear to matter, one way or another.
"LiveJournal is a fairly frequently visited and important portal in the Russian internet," Arseniy Ashomko, the General Director of Tigermilk Media, mused. " But it hasn't been a leading platform in a while, and it doesn't influence the future of the industry."
He noted that the more popular bloggers want to "escape the limits of this ecosystem," using Varlamov.ru as an example.
"And new creators, at the very least, don't rush there," Mr. Ashomko concluded. "Hence the [Livejournal owner SUP's] strategy - minimize costs and increase the advertising volume, so as to squeeze as much as possible out of the platform"
Which is depressing. Because this is not a winning strategy. It's the "lets milk this cow until the teats run dry" strategy. Which doesn't exactly inspire confidence about Livejournal's future.
For now - I am staying put. I was always going to stay put, out of sheer stubbornness. Plus, it has some functions that Dreamwidth lacks. Like social media buttons, and the ability to repost. And I like the feeds.
I was originally going to end this post by saying that I can't presume to make moral decisions for other people. If they feel that the new TOS is tantamount to endorsement of "gay propaganda" law, I am not going to tell them they're wrong.
But when I talked to my mom, there was one thing that struck me.
"Why is everybody running?" she mused. "If you believe in something, you stand up for it. If you like the platform, don't let people just force you off it. Protest. Complain. We've seen, with Trump, what happens when people stand up. If they ban you, if they delete entire Livejournal, that's a different story, but right now. Post whatever you want. There's not enough room in Bastille to lock up everybody."
For those who don't regularly read this Livejournal, this is coming from someone who grew up in Soviet Union, someone whose parents and grandparents were victimized by Stalin's regime.
Like I said, I don't presume to make choices for everyone. But this gave me all the more reason to stick with mine.
Until I am TOSed, until Livejournal shuts down, I will post the way I had before.
I am not running.