Digital Eclipse

You know, it's almost the anniversary of Strikethrough'07?

Yeesh how time flies.

On one hand, I want to celebrate. A whole year after that utter mess and LJ has yet to do something stupid enough to drive me away! Strikethrough was the impetus that started forming the userbase into a cohesive whole; somehow we're beginning to look like something that's worth taking account of. We have the up-coming elections, a policy document that's in progress and not looking too shabby (though it still needs work). It's all... something to be incredibly pleased about. Almost proud of.

On the other hand, it seems rather crass to celebrate or remember fondly something that pretty literally brought LJ to its knees. We're still cleaning up the mess it caused. User trust (or perhaps blindness) isn't back to where it once was. There's still management in charge that doesn't really understand the eclectic group of pure individuals that form this community they're trying to market. Owner-user communications have only made a little headway. We've still not heard any official explanation for the various cataclysms of the 07-08 year.

On the business/technical end, LJ is growing only in terms of data—not use. And that data gets weirder by the day. Ad-free Basic is gone, probably for good, which was one of LJ's key selling points when pitted against other journals. "Family morals" still isn't searchable.

Over-all though, I think I'll actually call it a good year. All of the bad we've dealt with (and are still dealing with) seems to have been a catalyst for some pretty awesome moves forward. We still have a lot or work to do, but we can do it.

I suppose this seems kind of rambling, but... Well, I feel like I want to do a meme-type thing. Here it goes.
( What I learned because of Strikethrough'07 )
So... what have you learned because of Strikethrough? Feel free to meme it or reply in comments.

Wow. Talk about a bad day. And just when I'm ready to veg out in front of the computer, LJ manages to take even that bit of "not horrible" away. I'll bullet this list of how my day went, because I could go into a rant on any one of them.

• Went to bed at 5AM, then woke up at 8AM because my grandpuppy Jace had been coughing and my Aunt thought there might be something stuck in his throat. So I packed him up and we went to the vet. Well, there wasn't anything stuck, thankfully. Instead it's an upper respritory infection. So he gets a week of pills and I get to hope it doesn't turn into doggy pneumonia. He also has a yeast infection in both ears. *SIGH* I feel like a bad puppy-grandma.
  
• I installed a smoke detector. My elbow has been killing me lately (I think it's a pinched nerve), so this involved much cursing and trying not to move in a way that would hurt worse than necessary.
  
• IT is staffed by morons. I remotely checked into our SQL server today (because I've been babying them since this damned thing with the databases started, and I'll be damned if Spring Break is going to stop me). We lost a gig of our (very limited) harddrive space within 24 hours because the guy in charge of the SQL server hardware won't do his damned job.
  
• I spent way more than I should have, between vet bill (thirty dollar blow), books at Borders (sixteen dollars after coffee for two) and the movie place going out of business sale (twenty dollars for seven dvds). Luckily, my tax refund is due in, but that really should have gone to certain short-term bills... Especially since Spring Break week isn't a paid one. Short paycheck May, here I come. Blech.
  
• I got my hair done on Monday by my staylist-to-be cousin. Tonight she's home. And my inferiority complex is in full swing. *SIGH* I'd love to have her hair/nails/body/etc... but I hate myself for wanting them. Gah, what modern life does to women.
  
• LJ has FUBAR'D again, this time by taking away the Free Accounts from new users. Just when I was starting to get some trust back, there it goes again... I think this is honestly worse than Strikethrough. At least then they were trying to cover their legal tailfeathers, no matter how stupid their method. This is jjust money-grubbing, and then trying to hide it! Worse, now they're insulting our collective and individual intelligence by saying they axed Basic because the sign-up table was too complicated.

I'll rant more on these later, but I'm tired, have almost no braincells to spare, and am possibly a bazillion comments behind in replying. Right now my newly-aquired trick-elbow is killing me, so I don't think I'll be replying to anything anytime soon.

I'm feeling really, really annoyed at LJ today. Earlier I was reminded of all the crap that went on and is still going on. This reminded me of the support request I'd opened many moons ago. 11 weeks, to be specific. And I still haven't even gotten a reply. So, being an annoying bitch, I opened a support request about my untouched support request. I wonder if this will get any answer?

http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=850532& auth=fhbt (remove the space)

ETA: Huh. That was fast. It's private again. I think they just don't like me.

Somedays I kill me. Expect to see more of this once I figure out where I want it to go. :D
( Presenting... BanMan )

Well, the 6A puff now has a name, courtesy of niko_hime. He is... Stan the Ban Man. In celebration, he now also has a magnifying glass and a name tag. XD I feel like I'm going to be playing with him a lot in the future. As always, be gentle with posting him, unless you're aiming for bannination. In that case, be as rough as you like. ( Stan likes it rough. He's also a vouyer. )

As we've all heard (and rejoiced) by now, Barak Berkowitz has resigned. If you want to read the official word on the subject, here's the press release and here's the unofficial source. Both are little more than "yay team" and mindless buzzwords, so don't expect much from them. 6A, as per their usual pattern, announced it on Friday in lj_biz and had no one standing by to handle the (relatively minor, in this case) fallout. The extremely stupid part of this mess? After leaving the post open for comments, it was rapidly turned to screened and then all comments were disabled. Since I don't see any reason for this at all, in any way, shape or form, I suspect that someone panicked at the thought of 5000 renditions of "ding, dong, the witch is dead" when they're trying to pretend everything's gravy. So what do people do? The usual. Move to the last post and start bitching.
( The long and short of everything I've heard lately... )
Ahem. Onto the cheery parts. The new CEO is Christopher J. Alden, who used to be EVP and GM of the Professional Division at 6A. I don't know about the rest of LJ, but I've never heard of him. Thus, being a curious Faery by nature, I followed a link over to see what kind of smackdown we can expect next. What I saw gives me hope. Not much, mind you, but a little bit. ( Here's the important parts. )
What this says for "potentially objectionable" forms of self-expression is up in the air still, of course, and I'm not holding my breath over even getting them defined, much less getting an answer I like. Will he be just another Barak? Maybe. Are we going to see LJ go FUBAR? Probably. But still, I think there's some hope here. The man's only been CEO for three days, two of them weekend. I'm willing to give him some time to identify the mess Barak left him and start to address it. Not much, but even if he starts to admit there might be problems, it'll be more than we had before.

NOTE: bubble_blunder replied to the post I linked and got a response. Okay, so it's a "let's set up a phone call" response, but it's officially more than anyone's gotten Barak (who ignored us like we'd go away if he did). I'll keep an eye on bubble_blunder's journal to see if there are any updates.

References

A Company that Matters
Official Press Release
About Six Apart @ Mena's Corner
Running Dog

*sigh* Well, LJ has cluster-fucked again. This time they seem to have decided that Child Porn = Art. ponderosa121 is down for posting art with "underaged minors", though any idiot can see that the particular piece stomped on only contained adults, and was chock-full of artistic merit. (I myself envy her ability with backgrounds and hands.) Basically, the LJ staff pulled a knee-jerk, went "ew, gay!" and it seems like they couldn't get passed that. I adored her work, to be honest, and I didn't even know she was on LJ. Now that she's gone I feel like I missed something good. *sigh* I followed her back in 1x2x1 on Yahoo!Groups. She's been invited back to LJ of course (they've shown they jump when users scream about particularly well-known artists and comms being banned), but I don't blame her for not coming back.

Note: After Strikethrough became a widely-used term synonymous with "LJ Fuck-Up", they seem to have changed the coding for banned/deleted journals from a Strikethrough to a Bolded. I wonder what they'll do when Boldthrough joins its predecessor in infamy? My bet is "[Suspended User]".

To be completely honest, LJ is trying to address art as "obscene" rather than "child porn", but they're looking specifically at underage-obscenity. Do we really all need to go over the whole "I know it when I see it" fiasco? Obscenity is beastly hard to prove, but they seem to have decided "better safe than sued". (Or, more accurately, "Better safe than lost advertisers," or, "Better safe than lost IPO.") Even disclaimers aren't holding up, nor is previously-deleted material. After the whole Strikethrough 2007 mess, I've been watching them pretty closely, and at this point I've made some (expected) discoveries.

Yes, this is going to be insulting. I feel the need to blow off steam, and unlike coffeechica and rachel (LJ staffers/offenders), I am capable of doing so in a non-official capacity.

1. No one on the LJ staff or the 6A team is able to find their asses with both hands and a map. How they expect to cover them if they can't find them is beyond me, but I'm sure they'll at least try.
   
2. Neither the LJ staff nor the 6A team is capable of making reasoned, non-biased judgments about what kind of socks to wear in the morning, much less what constitutes artistic/social/scientific/literary value and merit.
   
3. Collectively, the entire paid (not volunteer) Abuse Team seems to have stopped taking art classes in kindergarten, and possibly think three plaster ducks is a bit avant-garde.
   
4. Text wasn't mentioned in the changes, and since that was what caused the greatest number of cat macros in the last wank-storm, I can only assume that:
   
   • The Trolls aren't attacking/reporting text yet.
     
   • The LJ staff/6A team isn't attacking reported-text yet.
     
   • The Trolls are illiterate.
     
   • The LJ Staff/6A team are illiterate.
     
   • All of the above.
   
   
5. Finally, the LJ/6A staff have no concept of what constitutes good customer service in regards to their users.
   
   • This makes a certain sort of sense, as we're not customers anymore. We are, however, content providers, and therefore possibly more important than mere customers. This is something they have yet to grasp.
     
     • If LJ loses its customers (advertisers), they can always find more quite easily. The Users will still be around, pumping out content and luring more advertisers and eyeballs in.
     • If LJ loses the users, not only is it losing eyeballs and the content that attracts them, but it won't be long before it loses advertisers. It's harder to attract new content (and users) without old content (and users) than it is to attract new advertisers with new content.
     
     I equate it to fishing. Any good fisher-person will tell you that bait is important. The content and users are the bait, both to potential users and advertisers. With out that, they've got nothing.

I'm not going anywhere yet, but I'm looking around for other sites. Pretty soon I'll post a link to whatever alternate-journal I'm putting together, and start transferring my stuff. LJ isn't my online home so much as my online nest. I'm comfortable here, and I've collected quite a few bright and shiny things that would be difficult to move and re-coordinate (Friends, communities, etc.), but I'm not so attached that I'll put up with abuse from Abuse. It won't be fun if I have to move, but I'll do it. Call this a precautionary measure, like collecting canned food in case of an earthquake in California. You don't want it to happen, but you know it will. The only question left is, "Will it hit me and my friends too?"

If anyone has any suggestions for journal sites I should look into, let me know. I'd rather it be free, but I can dig out a small (small!) fee from my wallet if I have to. Also let me know if an of you are planning on building safety-nests for yourself elsewhere. The location of my friends will definitely influence my decision regarding my new nest.

ETA: Greatest Journal is looking like a decent option so far. Yes, Blogger and InsaneJournal look more professional, but GJ provides a nice, simple list of what I can get by way of photos, icons, etc. I'd be more interested in JournalFen if they were open to new accounts (you would think they'd be taking advantage of Boldthrough), but they also don't have a list of service enticements. They're still a major option though, since it's safe for fans there. Also, it looks like my layouts will work om GJ as well as LJ, which would be nice. I'm looking at starting to create all of my own layouts (not that twilightified isn't amazing, but I want to switch them up more often and I'm too lazy to go looking for truly awesome layouts every few weeks), and not having to toss my initial ventures is a definite plus. Does anyone have any experience with GJ, positive or negative? LJ isn't threatening me (yet), so I have time to make sure my next home is secure.

Also, if I do end up moving, I probably won't abandon this LJ entirely. I'll keep up with a few communities and such (mostly hogwartsishome ), but I won't post fiction or art, and I doubt I'll really update on personal issues either.

ETA2 (Revenge of the Sporks): Mozilla plugin, Deepest Sender? Completely and utterly awesomesauce, if I can get it to work.