| Mar. 26th, 2008 @ 01:14 am Livejournal strike |
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I don't know how many people noticed, but last Friday (aka Good Friday) many people participated in a live-journal strike. The key facts are:
* The company running livejournal has been sold again. The ownership do several things which piss off to a greater or lesser extent people using livejournal. Removing the option to create free advertless accounts. Disallowing certain topics which are questionable to some people (eg. slash writers, but eg. breast-feeding and abuse survivors groups get caught in the fall-out). Disallowing certain interests. (Some of my friends barely noticed any of this. Some felt they had to leave.)
* But most importantly a lack of transparency: policies unilaterally decided, and vague and inconsistently used, and lying about why things happen. I can understand why the owners don't want to get into arguments and only care about paid users, but like it or not, livejournal now hosts a massive sprawling community. These things all hit paid users too, (even worse if a paid account is banned), and paid users are here because many of their friends with free accounts are (to a greater or lesser extent).
* Many people feel very personal about this because they made a lot of friends on livejournal and feel they'd have to give this up. That's understandable but not quite true. LJ has less lock-in that web-forums, though more so than newsgroups.
* Many people think the problems aren't really important. I don't think livejournal has become unusable -- it still does what I use it for, and probably will do so for years. But I think it will, it's just too big and will only get more ossified, not less.
* Some people say livejournal has a right to do what they like. That's mostly true -- they provide a service, and can do so as well or badly as they like. Although you might argue that someone who bought a permanent account has an expectation it won't be made useless by policy changes. However, you still have a perfect right to point out that their policies, while allowed, might be counter-productive and an implicit betrayal of what they previously offered people.
* Many people think a strike is useless. Certainly it doesn't directly harm the company at all. And many people do it simply because they feel an entitlement to what they were given before and want to make a fuss. However, if you're genuinely willing to leave livejournal, I think it's a perfectly good way of saying "Here are all the people who wanted to pay for the old service, and don't want to pay for the new service. Go ahead and do what you like, but remember, we don't like it, no longer feel any loyalty, and won't pay for it."
* However, I don't think it will achieve anything. I don't think the company will suddenly change it's mind. I think it's inevitable that the large the company is, the more bureaucracy becomes necessary. If I used a small community on a friend's server, there'd be no policies about what icons were ok apart from what he said, and I'd trust him.
* If livejournal were the first phone company, I'd be worried. A phone company is essentially a monopoly, if you don't like what they do, they have to be nationalised or you're stuck.
* However, I think a combination of openid, rss readers, and other blogging software can nearly replicate what livejournal does, without needing all your friends to move to the new system (or do anything at all) and a minimum of effort on your own behalf. Whether this "nearly" is close enough or not I need to find out. Currently, shifting to insanejournal or an openid website is a certain amount of hassle. But I expect there to be some tipping point where it's easy enough that you can move without losing your friends, when I expect/hope people to move across to independently run servers en mass.
* And if so, that'll also have the useful properties that (a) you're no longer reliant on one server being run in a sane manner, you can use a friend's server, or use a commercial server and leave if you don't like it any more (b) a long laundry list of features LJ never had the time to implement can be implemented on individual servers according to whoever has the time to code them.
* However, a truly distributed system suffers from lots of headaches. I don't know what'll be possible, if anything. |
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