Mass Deletion Leads To LiveJournal Revolt 436
Green Monkey writes "LiveJournal has been suspending accounts suspected of promoting incest — except that many of them were communities for survivors of abuse and people discussing Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Even after being informed of the problem, LiveJournal apparently refuses to reinstate the banned accounts. LiveJournal's official news blog has filled up with hundreds of complaints protesting the decision, so we could have another Digg-style user rebellion brewing." Update: 05/31 11:50 GMT by KD : strredwolf writes to let us know that in their offical blog LiveJournal admits to botching the suspension, saying "We made a mistake and now we are going to try to fix it."
Incest has been around since the dawn of time (Score:3, Interesting)
Everyone has a legitimate concern about parents molesting their children. And it would be great if there was an easy solution. But this appears to be blindly striking out at the problem. This is several steps worse than banning novels which have a fictional murder because some people may be inspired by it. This would be similar to sending people to prison for saying that they're "killing time" because someone has a last name of "Tyme". Blind stupid methods for solving problems never work, they just impair the ability of regular people to live their lives. You know that the pedophiles are just going to adopt codewords and continue their pedophile ways.
I would be much happier if this was a regular pedophile hunt. Of course, malware is going to be downloading horrific stuff to unknowing people, leading to innocent people being dragged off to jail by techno-impaired judges and juries.
Re:Oh well (Score:2, Interesting)
discussing incest is illegal? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Oh well (Score:1, Interesting)
More to the point it, I host open source utilities that I've written that a few hundred people download a day. Is there some way I could moneterize this? At one point I put a comment about people emailing me if they found it useful. Well I actually got more emails than I could answer. So presumably, I could say "please visit our sponsors" and I'd get a decent click rate.
Mind you, I'm not sure what Google Ads policy on this is. Maybe I should put a Paypal donation on there instead. I only want text ads too, the site has a no graphics retro feel to it.
To be honest my company pays the tenner a month because the site occasionally brings in paid work so it's not really that urgent. Mind you, I like the idea of the site being self supporting, and it seems like it could be done with a bit of thought. And it makes coding and giving away the results seem like a better use of my time.
Has anyone got any experience of this?
Livejournal is a fool. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been watching this since it started, and what continually amazes me is how poorly livejournal is handling this. Over 24 hours into this, there is no announcement. Nothing reassuring users that their journal won't be next. Nothing apologizing for wiping out the incest survivor's livejournal in their witchhunt. Not even something saying "This is business, deal." The only news livejournallers have heard from livejournal came from an outside news source. [com.com]
Forget the deletions. People were upset, but would have forgotten it quickly if livejournal had just said "We purged some pedophile rings, but some other stuff may have gotten caught in it. If there are any livejournals purged that were genuinely innocent, tell us." People would've bitched, would have said the sky was falling down, that Livejournal had gone down the tubes since Six Apart bought them, but there wouldn't have been this sort of mass hysteria.
Now, I'm anticipating the next great fandom migration will be happening a few years sooner than otherwise, and this makes me grumpy, because migrations are a pain in the ass. And it wouldn't be happening any time soon if Livejournal weren't currently doing their level best to make fandom - a group of people who in my experience pay a great deal of money for their playspace - feel unwelcome.
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Interesting)
If every single person who was dissatisfied by every single thing every single company did just went off and did their own thing, let's face it, the economy would fall apart. Just as the "four boxes" should carefully be used in the proper order when trying to change the government -- jump ahead from soap to ammo, and you'll quickly find yourself alone and in a heap of trouble -- so there is a reasonable continuum of customer response to corporate action, from "enthusiastic recommendation" on one extreme to "boycott" on the other. And there's a whole lot in between.
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Interesting)
On the Internet, you can have as many copies of your house as you like. This will make it a lot harder for any mayor to burn it down. And your connectivity to your friends is not limited by location, but by protocol. If you stop using a proprietary site-specific protocol to communicate with your friends, and use an open one instead, it doesn't matter where your friends are located.
Infrastructure as you call it, which is single-site only, is not really Internet Infrastructure. It's proprietary infrastructure.
Of course it isn't in the interest of blog-hosting sites to facilitate blog-site interoperability, so such an invention has to come from other parties.
I used Usenet a lot in the past, and I'm sad to admit that I don't go there much these days, although I know the groups I participated in still thrive and have strong communities. However, I have found a few webbased boards for some topics that interest me. Boards that are very useful. Also some wikis.
However, an unpleasant experience in the past caused me to think about this issue. Let me explain the experience first. I visited often a place for Danish skeptics, skeptica.dk. At one point a third interested party offered the site to host a forum for the site. However, after a while, the third party, being part of a movement that suddenly found themselves under the conspicous eyes of skepticism, and received a lot of flak on the forum, their motivation being questioned etc. Naturally, one day the forum owner shut down the forum. Poof - gone. All the other relevant debate was suddenly inaccessible.
This could never have happened with Usenet. Why? Because of the distributed nature of Usenet. This is the LOCKSS project principle at work again. Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.
We need two things:
1) A way to distribute blog hosting, so that a blog can't be shut down by a strike against a single hosting service. I don't have a solution at hand for that.
2) A way to distribute blog and web forum comments, so that the comments are distributed in a shared framework for all types of forums. I believe the existing and proven Usenet technology is easily adapted for this purpose, although RSS might also play a role. For example, a new hierarchy, similar to the IANA OID hierarchy, or the Java package hierarchy, using DNS names at the top level, could be used. This way, suppose I have myblog, and you have yourblog. So you post an entry about Java and OOP on your blog: it ends up in a newsgroup, blog.your.org.java, and perhaps you even tag it with the OOP category, so it also is crossposted to blog.your.org.oop.
I post a response on my blog: blog.my.org.programming (because I lump it all into one category), and also crosspost to your blog newsgroups. In addition, I call it to attention to the existing Usenet community by crossposting to usenet.comp.lang.java.misc.
Of course, there has to be some additions to make this work. Perhaps a way to subscribe to your blog newsfeed. Authentication and authorization. Anonymity/Pseudonymity. Etc.
I believe this could bring the known synergy effect from Usenet back into play by making a new unified, but distributed, framework for Internet-based discussion. A kind of Babel-tower project, I suppose. Discussion would again be uniformly searchable (presuming Google would carry all the groups), and foremost: a discussion would not be orphaned when the forum goes down. I visited a great Joomla forum daily until recently, but it went down for maintenance and hasn't been up for a few weeks due to problems. Terrible. What if slashdot.org went down?
Again, as for-profit hosting services will not win much - if anything - from this an approach, they will have to be forced to use it by user demand.
Any takers? This idea is free for anyone to use. But please only one project - having different models would defeat the entire purpose.
-Lasse Hillerøe Petersen
Re:Shopping mall analogy (Score:3, Interesting)
MySpace, LiveJournal, ... They are the Internet equivalent of the mega shopping mall. They represent convenience but convenience comes at the price of freedom. Have you ever tried protesting outside a shop in a mall? You can't. The mall is private land and you will get removed by security. Similarly with LiveJournal and the other "communities" based on a centralised website, they are private space and the owner can boot you out on a whim.
Say the mall owner kicks you out because he doesn't like your anti-war t-shirt, yes it's his right, and yes I have the right to complain about it, and I will. This is what's happening here, a bunch of people got kicked out for possibly saying something the owner didn't like, yes it was the owner's right to do so but we're sure not under any obligation to agree with the owner's actions.
Why not stick with the public spaces on the Internet? If you need a chat room: use an email list, Usenet or run an IRC server. If you want to share your photos: put them on your web server. If you want a pretty home page with lots of "friends" put a home page on your web server with a guest book. These are the online equivalent of the local shopping strip. It's a public place and no-one can force you to bend to their whim. The public spaces of the net are better than web2.0. They are just as customisable, do the job as well or better and you don't have to take it on trust that your freedom will be respected.
Re:Incest? (Score:5, Interesting)
Most people would not object to two people with a genetic disability falling in love, etc. The objection - the one you might make if you believe you have the right to tell two informed, consenting adults what to do, that is - is centered around breeding. Breeding can be controlled. The problem for society is those people on the left side of the gaussian who fail to exert such control... still, if we're not going to tell people with congenital defects they can't have relationships, it pretty much torpedos the rational arguments against incest and turns them into classed prejudice instead of reason.
Re:Oh well (Score:1, Interesting)
Let me be the first to say "incest" (Score:3, Interesting)
I suspect that now the word "terrorist" is starting to loose it's "magic spell" quality, we will be hearing more incantantions of the "sex offender" spell. The USG (as distinct from it's people) will drop Bush and Iraq at the same time and rush home for the new "war on evil sex offenders" who may be guilty of anything from "pissing on a tree" to "trading in child sex-slaves" or worse. The really sad part about this theory is that genuine "rock spiders" will be able to use a "saftey in numbers" strategy and simply dissapear into large chunk of the population collectively known as "registered sex offenders".
Re:Let me be the first to say "incest" (Score:4, Interesting)
Egyptian pharaohs used to marry their own sisters. Several communities in Asia and Africa marry their own first siblings, cousins, or uncles marry their nieces.
While western culture may forbid it, the world doesn't necessarily revolve around western civilizations.
Morality is seldom absolute and in this case, it's quite relative (sorry, bad pun).