Tastes Just Like Human

LJ screws the pooch
Nice going, Six Apart. You've ruined the trust that it took LJ a decade to build. You've made my decision about purchasing a permanent account much much easier. As of now, I'm not even sure if I'll ever renew my paid account. Depending on the admin's response, I may not even stay with this journal.

It's funny, over the weekend at Balticon, I was talking about how I expected this site to last for decades, perhaps throughout our lifetimes - the only thing that could really prevent that would be some sort of massive stupidity by the owners.

I return home to discover that the management did exactly that.

Even if this is resolved amicably and properly, it'll be a long time before most users are convinced that 6A will never pull shit like this again.

The fact that they did it suddenly and without warning is bad enough. The fact that they didn't even post an explaination when they did it is even worse. And the fact that there's a huge outcry and they still haven't responded takes the cake.

But even after that, it gets worse. First, the abuse team (who's only following orders, after all) responds with a form letter telling those persecuted and banned unfairly that they're just doing it on the advice of their lawyers - because if someone lists an interest in something illegal, their lawyer thinks that there's a remote possibility that they could somehow be held responsible.
Of course, you can say that this lawyer is acting in the best interests of the company. But the interests of the company are the interests of it's paying customers - these are lawyers they should be retaining to help protect the rights of both the company and it's customers if, in some extreme circumstance, there is some sort of absurd lawsuit to that effect.

Except for the insane hypocrisy embodied in such an act. Just months ago, LJ refused to take action even when people would post their intention to commit heinous crimes. And they were entirely correct to do so - as their response then said, It is not illegal to discuss illegal actions. Yet now, people who aren't even thinking about doing anything illegal - such as a discussion group for Nabakov's Lolita - are being unilaterally punished.

But then, while still remaining mum in the face of mounting customer outrage, the CEO of Six Apart went and spoke with CNET as they wrote an article on the exploding controversy. His words were the diametric opposite of reassuring - in fact, they were the absolutely last thing everyone outraged over this fiasco would want to hear.

"Our decision here was not based on pure legal issues," countered Six Apart's Berkowitz. "It was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what's not."

Essentially, a man brought from the outside to run an unrelated company that purchased another company that we have been active members of, is now telling us that his personal moral opinions trump the interests and desires of the customers who's very patronage made LiveJournal the massive, popular site it is today - people without whom LJ would never have been important enough to be worth buying; without whom Six Apart would never have been important enough to need to bring in an outside CEO like this man.

Putting aside for a moment the moral obligation of LJ to honor their unspoken contract with their users to preserve the innermost thoughts and feelings that these users have spent countless hours of their precious limited lives entrusting to the care of their servers, a company has the right to decide what they want and don't want to have on their servers.
A company who feels this way, who wants to limit what I have to say in my personal diary to conform to their parent company's CEO's new personal morality, is not a company I wish to support or patronize. Judging from the thousands of angry comment in LJ's latest news post, and all over the site, I'm far from the only one.

It's also worth pointing out the sidebar in the CNet article where they mention that "Legal experts say LiveJournal is clearly not liable for fictional stories and related discussions posted by its users."

When 6A brought out LJ, I pooh-poohed the doomsayers who warned that this would be the death of LJ, that a seperate company would have no idea how to run it properly. After all, 6A was a blogging company, a close cousin of diary sites like this one. When they started offering ads, I dismissed the idea that it would affect LJ - after all, they survived without ads, and if some advertiser didn't like something that some random subset of users was interested in, a young, responsive, intelligent company like LJ or 6A would tell them exactly where to stick it.
But then they went, and got themselves this new CEO - and now it turns out I was wrong, and the doomsayers were entirely right.

What's next? From the sounds of it, anything illegal or even "immoral" is fair game. If I list "medical marijuana" or "gay marriage" or post a poem including the HD-DVD or DeCSS encryption key, will my account that I've spent a decent amount of money on, and countless hours upon hours of my time and energy on, suddenly disappear on the whim of some corporate desk jockey? Will this record of my life, and my friends lives, and our interactions and hopes and dreams, just vanish into the digital ether as if our lives have never even existed, just at the random whim of some faceless lawyer in a legal department?

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