I've been amazed to see how CCP, the maker of Eve Online, simply, without a lot of angst or fuss or forums wars (as far as we can tell, anyway), organized a player governance council.
Imagine, this world that only has to deal with imaginary starships and skill-grinding and mining minerals (the spacebux aren't supposed to be sold outside the game, but of course are) can have a governance council of players brought to company headquarters to discuss features and help make decisions.
But we in our "not-a-game" of Second Life, where the spacebux can be legally cashed out for real dollars in far greater quantities than are made from blackmarket activity by Eve Online, don't get to have any presence in the Linden councils except through horribly stratified and controled FIC institutions like SL Views and AWG which are appointed, not elected by the resident base.
Live Journal, a blogging service that was purchased from the owners of this blog site I'm typing on by a Russian company SUP, also created a council of bloggers and experts -- and rapidly became involved in deep politics of social media you find all over these days (leftwing idealists like Danah Boyd and Lawrence Lessig want to retain free accounts -- which make for more furies if not for more furries -- and the Russian company, after first promising to keep the community as is, moved to eliminate the freeloaders and force people to pay for subscriptions. Good!
Then I read how Fred Wilson, a VC backer of Twitter, is getting "tired". Like Susan Wu, another VC backing Twitter, he's starting to get bored and restless -- and conscience-stricken -- about the inanity and frivoloty of Twitter, that is so far, despite signing up "the masses" and their enlightened avante garde like Robert Scoble or Steve Gillmor, have failed to save the world or make it a better place (the affluent California student day-tripping in Egypt got sprung from jail after twittering, but not his hapless local translator).
Well, that prompted me to write quite the letter to Fred Wilson on his blog, which I will cross post here:
"Re: "It has to be a force for positive social change. It needs to be about making the world a better place for our children and their children."
Fred,
No private media owner or government media owner who has tried to assign to the media such a social function as "being a force for social change" has ever succeeded. The question instantly becomes political: Who gets to do the ascribing of what role to the media? Why you?
Media has to be free to be able to accomplish these goods of "making social change", which is achieved not by media itself, but by people who use media who can publish the news and commentary without fear or favour.
Social media is still media. And this awful urge that venture capitalists have to try to force social media into a prescribed social roles like this lurching around the world "doing good" will succeed in killing it -- and is already killing it in places. Unless you want social media merely to become a tool for social engineering and social control, you have to enable it to be as free as possible, and that means that it will take many forms and that good content may not always drive out bad content.
Nobody needs a handful of venture capitalists to "organize" the world as unelected, unrepresentative, and undemocratic forces planning from the top down. To the extent that old and new media can be accessed and used freely by groups in civil society and political parties working for change (or working to conserve what is good -- change for change's sake isn't an absolute good), that's all fine, but it has to be genuinely pluralistic, not welding extreme leftist social views into the very tools themselves, enabling leftist influencers to ban, mute, expel anybody whose views they don't like. It's important to retain a free public commons that can debate public issues from a variety of perspectives.
There's something basically flawed in your model, like the model that Danah Boyd or Lawrence Lessig or Philip Rosedale seem to want to impose us. Basically it works like this:
o create a really popular website, game or world and enable lots and lots of people to sign up for it -- masses of people (you always love those masses!). Have them pay nothing -- and have free accounts -- you want the poor of the world to have access. Keep those free acounts! No matter what! Otherwise you are evil imperialist old white guys!
o get the middle class or overstretched working class to pay for the subscriptions and sustain the entire enterprise; get people to create content for free while expending money themselves to have premium accounts
o get some advertisers to buy ad space
o find some more angels
o try to scale the whole thing to enable a very small number of wealthy corporations with ad dollars and a smaller apex of middle-class premium purchasers, plus a tiny percentage of content-creators/widget engineers to sustain the entire rapidly growing pyramid as a small number of devs work frantically to scale the whole enterprise -- all on behalf of masses and masses of free accounts that keep piling in the door; never charge, even $3.45!
o watch as VCs become disenchanted with the frivolity, porn, hate speech, mass culture of the masses -- the reality of the masses as they pour in outpaces their vision of the masses being "empowered for a better world"
o watch as engineers can't scale the thing with all those masses on top of the servers
o watch as premium account holders grow disenchanted as mass numbers deteriorate the quality of the experience and performance diminishes
o watch as ad dollars go elsewhere because they aren't getting clicks from people who have no money because they are using free media for free
Why does this keep happening over and over again on Web 2.0?
The origin of the problem isn't engineering scaling problems; it isn't fickle advertising dollars; it isn't easily-offended customers, although they are fickle and burn through content and features as they always did on MMORPGs.
No, the problem is your utopian vision of the world: that you can make a tiny handful of people work for free, and a tiny number of companies with ad dollars sustain an enormous mass of freeloaders to do...something that is supposed to Make the World Better.
It's your belief that all you have to do is pile on masses of people online for free, and magically, they will transform into a global village all thinking the same thing (as if that were a good thing!).
Russian businessmen, who went through 75 years of this sort of betterworldism in real life as "communism," with "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us," dumped the free accounts on Live Journal, to the howling of idealists Danah Boyd and Lawrence Lessig. But...social media's engineers, servers, bandwidth, etc. cost money. Why not make people pay, after a trial account expires? Indeed, why not? They pay, even in Russia, for cable or electricity or cell phones. They can add this, too.
Before you and other backers get sick of Twitter like Brad Fitzpatrick got sick of Live Journal, Fred, you should really think about these basic truths: when you offer something for free, nobody values it. They treat it badly. And when you can imagine that you can just harness the masses like that in such a utilitarian way and "do good," they will slip through your fingers -- and that's a good thing. You shouldn't be in charge of them. That's not a better world.
Television could broadcast for free to millions of people who did nothing more than buy cheap TV sets once because it had a huge volume of advertising dollars -- and people dutifully went out and bought the things advertised on the TV -- it was effective. But TV and magazines haven't disappeared to the extent that Web 2.0 advertising can completely replace it, and people just won't click on ads with dorky things like "Lonely? 52 years old? Find eligible males in your city."
I don't want you or Umair or anybody else to "organize the world's freedom" just because you are wealthy or because you are politically correct. Leave the world, and media alone, and let people organize themselves as they see fit.
I hope you will not lose sight of your historical mission here."
See, I'm really unimpressed with wealthy left-leading venture capitalists who make their millions in IT stuff inciting the masses to join social media, then getting bored when they don't lock-step into some pre-planned Bright Future where it will all be Better.
And I frankly don't get, as I spelled out here, why we can't have more paid subscriptions, and why social media can't be treated like a kind of cable bill.
Oh, I totally get why we need free accounts in SL for all those creative Europeans and Asians who can't access Paypal or credit cards. But...so many? Forever? Not even figuring out how to charge $3.45 on a cell phone, which everybody in the known universe has nowadays even in Africa or Central Asia? Come on.
No, I submit that what's wrong with these Better Worldniks and their Web 2.0 isn't the engineering, isn't the failure to scale, or the crass culture of those middle-class people that they always shanghai into paying for this stuff, if not with paid accounts, then with unpaid time as creators or community leaders.
No, the problem is in their incitement of the masses, their excessive love for massness, their belief that first they have to gather 69 million people together doing *something*, then whip them into making the world "better" by "organizing hunger" or -- this is a REALLY bad idea -- "organizing freedom".
Fred quotes Umair Haque's "Manifesto" which is just about the most awful Orwellian thing I've seen lately -- under the guise of being hip and connected and Web 2.0, it slips in the most awful collectivism and top-down "organizing" and social-engineering of people I've seen in a long time. Of course, they aren't to feel engineered, as they wlll all be, um, empowered by social media and led by SM influencers.
Sigh.
Danah presents a remarkably twisted and emotional justification for the free account. If her case merely hinged on "we were on this advisory board that they created to get our input and we weren't informed," she'd make more sense.
Instead, first she cites Brad Fitzpatrick's notion that the free accounts are making most of the content on Live Journal (sounds unsupported to me, would like to see real numbers and facts on that); then she turns around and says no, the free accounts are for casual users, i.e. friends or colleagues who just want to drop in and read her blog and write a comment for the day. Like the putative friends who wish to drop into an SL business media or educational lecture.
I couldn't help thinking of Jimmy Dell's wise words the other day: you cannot impose business models on other people.
Once Brad Fitzpatrick sold the Live Journal to the Russian company, he shouldn't have been imposing his utopian views on a business. Why should a California Ph.D. student and a bored entrepreneur get to impose a business model on another business, even being on an advisory board? There's just something wrong with this whole picture. Reading the Reuters story is especially freaky, as the Reuters reporter dutifully collects a sound paragraph from each of these gurus -- who are not elected, or appointed, by anyone, but just "there" -- by dint of having been sound-byted a million times before that.
I'm just not getting the mechanism by which they have legitimacy in stumping for free accounts -- beyond the point of common sense, when here's a service that has to find ways to monetarize.
"Systems like LJ are an ecology and individual-driven monetization approaches fail miserably," says Danah. Oh? Who says? Was it tried? Why doesn't it "fail miserably" for cable TV lol? Please.
Could Brad have cut his users into his Google and other revenue stream? Might that have brought in more users and more hours and more content?
An ecology, you say? But who is going to go on sustaining the ecology? The stone-soup always needs that old lady to keep growing the turnips. But she herself can't live off turnips only...
What's so tangled about Danah's blog is that she can't make up her mind -- well wait, is it the freebies creating the content? or it is me creating the content as a minority user and providing the engagement for the freebies?
Wired into all this is heavy ideology about mass-ness, and saving masses, and having a Better World, and that's where the trouble begins.
Frankly, I think it will be fascinating to watch how these leftoid Americans, who are perennials on every Web 2.0 and social media conference from here to breakfast, will duke it out with this Russian company.
Of course, the cliche is that this Russian company is in bed with the mob or the KGB or both -- I have no knowledge of them. Anyone who follows Russia knows that the Kremlin controls the Internet and all broadcast and print media. Very little escapes their long reach -- which can be deadly especially for journalists covering topics like the war in Chechnya.
The blogs, like a few small-circulation newspapers and radio stations and provincial TV stations, may have slipped control merely because it was cheaper, in Kremlin terms, to let the intelligentia, in a tiny minority, express their sentiments on those little-watched venues, rather than crack down on them and risk wider discontent. They left ZhZh alone, although at least one blogger was arrested, and an untold number more are likely "curated," i.e. influenced, sometimes through blackmail and coercion, to be part of the secret police kurator's propaganda.
(Live Journal is known by its initials in Russian, Zhivoy Zhurnal; some of the ZhZhe people came into Second Life and started Russian islands).
Of course, they could begin cracking down, or filtrating or tracking and harassing at any time, and may do so already and it isn't known. The customers apparently have the option of putting their content on the American servers rather than their government-controlled Russian servers, but that's only as good as the narrowest point of the pipeline, which is controlled by the government, too.
Whatever their provenance, the Russian company is not going to bother to get into the risky media business without resources and connections and like all Russian biznes they will want to get paid, and will not have the sort of socialist utopian Better Worldist plans of a Danah Boyd or Brad Fitzpatrick -- nor, frankly, many of their customers.
Some Russian bloggers are complaining about oligarchs taking over. Of course, oligarchs pay for stuff that you can't endless provide for free, unless customers start paying...
What's especially funny in reading about all this is what the masses being recruited and saved by Danah to be kept as freebies aren't out there, oh, stopping hunger and killing in Darfur, they are in wacky Internet cults just like Second Life that stray into the same sort of BDSM and furry and child anime weirdness that Second Life has.
Except...that doesn't bother Danah in the slightest, because it's out of such marginals and freaks that she is going to build that better world. Here's what she wrote in Salon in 2005:
"The Internet has always been a special place for freaks, geeks, queers and other alienated populations. Online, these marginalized members of society created communities that relished their idiosyncrasies. Collectively, they helped one another take pride in their identities and practices -- whether the passion be learning how to make synthetic hair, collecting Japanese manga or engaging in sexual practices frowned on by the mainstream.
The result is an infrastructure of support for a new form of social solidarity -- a set of collective beliefs, practices and values -- that operates outside of the dominant culture. Most important, these communities have been created virtually, across space, a feature that is particularly valuable for nonmobile populations -- teens without driver's licenses, for instance."
Yolki-polki...
Danah puts forth a number of dubious ideas, in my view, in a state of strained, giddy over-exposed prognosticating, like Clay Shirky does, from too much tapping by mainstream media and tech media eager to cover these issues. So she'll say, without any scholarly backing to bolster the claim, that the U.S. military "blocks MySpace but doesn't block Facebook because the officers use Facebook and the recruits use Myspace". She's trying to shoehorn a complex story into a sound byte that also reflects her gut feelings about class war and the evil American government, but it fails. The U.S. military likely banned MySpace because there was just more of it at that time, and because 19 year olds might well on the whole, rich or poor, be on MySpace rather than Facebook. Danah's trying to build a theory that Facebook users are all going to college -- that's absurd. And how does she know this? Does Mark Zuckerberg send her weekly scraped data to support these claims?
On her blog is a fascinating challenge from a user forming an alternative user community who poses the kind of questions we are all facing now in Second Life -- the problem of the game gods killing the goose that lays the golden egg. He makes the point that users -- posts -- have dropped precipitously since Six Apart took over LJ, and ever since -- in fact, when they discovered that Russians had so enthusiastically adopted ZhZH, that was a compelling reason for Fitzpatrick to sell the service to a Russian company, they seemed to have most stake in it.
Read Mark Kraft's letter, even without knowing anyting about the LJ drama, because it has some interesting thinking about how to monetarize these services -- and as he pointed out in a fascinating intervention, they have to compete against a "culture of free" -- and that's free of ads, not just free of cost. So if LJ pushed ads on accounts unless they bought subscriptions, that could cause them to leave, but if they enabled users to have ads tailored to their content (and from which they also got micropayments I could add), that would retain users better.
In SL, the equivalent is for the Lindens to take their prime ad real estate -- the website, the welcome areas, and the infohubs -- and sell advertising that will benefit inworld businesses. That's the ideological barrier they need to cross, just like in the LJ situation the owners had to cease thinking of how to push their own ads and figure out how to get their customers paid, too. Unfortunaetly, like Boyd, Kraft believes the secret of Internet monetarizing is to harness the freak communities (this is like some SL bloggers pushing "fringes" as a concept) -- but the reality is, if you want to get paid, you cannot chase away the mainstream -- and why should you, if it is supposed to be a Better World? Better...for whom?
Ah. Livejournal. A specialist subject. (I have been a Livejournal user for almost exactly seven years.)
Firstly, SUP have not actually moved to a paid-only model - they have just removed ad-free accounts, keeping two levels, free but with ads and paid but without ads and with extra features. Most people are not horribly concerned about this.
I have seen the signup system for Livejournal change over the years and the difference in content caused by reduced barriers to entry - which is really what having free accounts is about, it isn't about whether people _can_ pay or not, it's the psychological barrier - has been remarkable.
Initially when I joined there was one of these daft "invite code" systems which get used occasionally, users being able to generate codes to allow free users to join if they didn't want to pay, which mostly led to not many people joining and a lot of very irritating begging for codes.
Of course, at that point, Livejournal was ahead of its time. It had many features that are considered essential for "social networking" sites, a proper authenticated comment system, friend groups, communities with their own discussion areas. This actually put off "serious bloggers", who really just wanted to write their own big screeds and took comments from the few readers that existed via email, but for other people it was enough that they were willing to put up with the signups and the technical problems (rampant back then).
Removing the invite code system and allowing people to sign up for basic accounts _dramatically_ increased the amount of worthwhile - and of course worthless - content on the network. The social network systems made this valuable to a far broader range of people than standard blogs and sites. It was so much _easier_ to find things on Livejournal, following friend links and going via communities, and pick out what was good that you wanted to continue to follow, than any other blogging system. RSS readers were not really known about, there were no trackbacks and pingbacks.
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Where Livejournal failed in my opinion was at about the point when MySpace came out. MySpace is an entirely inferior system in my opinion but it did offer a few things that LJ didn't: the ability to completely customise blog appearance (LJ's customisation has always been immensely clunky and the standard templates back then were very dull) and also, a focus on posting music. Video wasn't as important back then but MySpace made it far easier to link to and play music, whereas LJ _still_ makes it a pain in the backside and filters your HTML to stop you embedding non-approved players etc.
People go to places where they can find what they are interested in and where the barriers to entry are low, and people were interested in music on the internet, and MySpace had friend lists and groups and all that just as LJ did. LJ didn't so much lose users as not gain many new ones.
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In a lot of ways LJ shares characteristics with SL...
* Ahead of their time at the start with features that nobody else offered;
* Lots of user-generated content and community groups, which attracted and maintained a loyal user base;
* Large non-US/UK presence, particularly, as you say, Russians;
* Free and paid account system;
* Horrible technical issues and extensive downtime, in the first few years, though this got better, before the 6A buyout;
* Great sense of entitlement by paid users despite them already having specific benefits;
* Lots of sky-is-falling drama at every change;
* No shortage of furries.
After the 6A buyout it also had:
* Kneejerk mass content removals and bannings based on moral panics.
(6A's time running Livejournal is not generally regarded as a success. They did tidy up a few things but mismanaged the community and did silly things like add Facebook-style "presents" and so on.)
LJ, of course, is still active, and has become more interesting as more people join and also as the teenagers and young adults who joined originally, and have stayed around, grow up and become better writers. It's a lot more respectable now than it used to be. This last part doesn't have a specific correlation to SL where the average age is much higher, and if people haven't grown up by now they probably never will.
But the fact that it has survived huge technical issues, losing its monopoly on its innovative features and missing the boat on a big internet phenomenon might have a few pointers:
* LJ did introduce some new features like WAP access and voice and email posting, but generally these were actually _useful_, and they mostly concentrated on network failures and system access, and they managed to solve that problem. Nobody cares whether they can send somebody a virtual teddy bear for $0.50 if they can't even read their friends list.
Incidentally, if I recall correctly, they did introduce a "priority login for paid users" system at some point.
* LJ, at least before the 6A buyout, paid attention to user community groups and didn't mess them about. Too much. It was never that interested in determining what could and couldn't be said, though I'm sure that there will be people who disagree with that. There are and always have been plenty of adult groups on LJ without endless "but what if a CHILD sees this?" hand-wringing and clumsy coded non-solutions.
* Actually, LJ never really seemed to me to have a social agenda as a company. Brad was not... whatever that irritating Facebook guy's name is. There wasn't any self-important "we are saving the world" stuff, even when people did use LJ for political reasons and organisation. It was a social communication tool, as trivial or important as the communication that took place on it.
Posted by: Ordinal Malaprop | 06/30/2008 at 08:24 AM
Oh, and LJ is and always has been open source. There are a few alternative networks that have been set up by others. However, it has not had issues with security, possibly because it was _designed_ to be open source and thus didn't contain lots of little shortcuts and hacks that depended on people not knowing what you were doing. To be fair, it is also a lot less complex than SL.
Posted by: Ordinal Malaprop | 06/30/2008 at 08:29 AM
LJ is still free for old users. I don't think they allow basic, advertising free accounts now. That whole situation was mishandled when making the transition to Six Apart and then to SUP. They made crazy deletions to different communities. Some were reasonable but others based on ignorance. They actually deleted a reading community that was in the process of discussing Lolita. It was after that I cancelled my premium account. I was a premium user there for 2 years and paid more on top of that for their scrapbook and bigger icon storage. Like other users I moved to Insanejournal and now I'm a premium user there. Squeaky, IJ's manager, offers very nice service. But again, he is overrun with free accounts. I don't know how long he can operate on that model.
Eve Online seems to be the exception of all these online worlds. WoW is a total subscription based game and I see the same "my way or the highway" attitude towards it's users as SL. So being a premium, subscription paying user doesn't seem to add value either. I don't know what the solution is, honestly.
On one hand the developers of these worlds want to present their creations as the virtual equivalent of small nations. But then they balk when the users actually request services that nations offer, such as government, land zoning and proper security. They need to settle on a definition, they are either a game or a nation.
Posted by: none | 06/30/2008 at 11:16 AM
Prok -
The "Reuters" article you linked to is actually a press release hosted on the reuters.com domain. (Scrutinize the URL. I know, it's an imperfect system.)
May I suggest instead your readers consult the LJ elections story Reuters/SL ran?
http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/05/29/elections-if-not-democracy-spread-to-livejournal/
Posted by: Eric Reuters | 06/30/2008 at 02:13 PM
Thanks for that correction, Eric. That's odd, I just grabbed what seemed like the URL that went with that article.
Ordinal, that was a fascinating back story. Loved it, and thanks for taking the time to put it all down.
If the issue was only having to put up with some ads to get the service for free, I suppose something like you do with Yahoo, my God, what the hell was Dana Boyd's problem?! She couldn't bear any hint of capitalism on her pristine dear diary?!
I'm not certain that they mishandled this issue of the free accounts. There's probably no good way to get rid of free accounts, who are going to howl no matter what. But why should the middle class and the VCs go on carrying the masses and their asses endlessly?
I'm all for easy entrance to markets. They could make it cheaper ($14.00 feels like too much for me even here on my blog, and I really think they need to find a model where they let me get paid at least micropayments for ads they give me to pick, or take a cut from, or something, on a blog like this).
As for the deletions, I am reading that they faced the same exact issues as Second Life -- ageplayers, BDSM, furries. Did they cut furry communities or something that they really had no business to cut? Well, I'd love to hear the cases -- and from what I gather, they are reviewing the cuts and making restorations.
Brad *is* a Save-the-World type if he lines up Danah Boyd and Lawrence Lessig on the advisory board -- it's a political statement.
Ordinal, what I'm reading everywhere is that the service lost bunches of customers when Six Apart took over, but not because the Russian company then bought it later. Why did people leave?
I went on Live Journal for about a day -- I'm like a SL sign-up who never left orientation island. It simply didn't have enough features, like Typepad does, for pay. I'd simply rather pay and get the features.
I went back to LJ a few times when I needed a quick free blog, but I could also do that on Typepad for 30 days.
Even though I practically mainline news on Russia every day for my work, I don't find myself very often going to read any Russian Live Journal. I wonder why that is. I guess because there are numerous lifestyle or diary type of journals but not political ones, or those that are political are awful right-wing dreck. Occasionally in clicking around a story on tech or virtual worlds I will get to an LJ that is good -- but all that threading stuff keeps me away sometimes.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 06/30/2008 at 03:22 PM
So Eve Online got around to doing SL Views-style chats with their members?
Elections? Come on. Popularity contests, more like. One avatar, one vote? Preposterous in a world of anonymised alts.
I bet the handpicked Company SL Views people would be more egalitarian than the elected.
You'll get some gorean master, the King of the Furries, Cristiano and Flip getting elected. And maybe you.
Might be entertaining, but that's all it would be. At the end of the day, residents vote with their dollars.
Posted by: none | 06/30/2008 at 04:15 PM
I don't think that the majority of users really care in the slightest about the elimination of the ad-free level. The system before that was a bit of a mess - there were three levels, (a) free with no ads, (b) free with ads and a few extra functions, more user pictures, that sort of thing and (c) paid or permanent with no ads and full access to all functions. Really, having (a) and (b) together was a little redundant, I always felt. People are so used to ads on the net as being part of the deal they are getting for free access that they aren't really concerned any more - they'd _prefer_ no ads but they're not that exercised by the idea. A huge number of them will be signing up for LJ with Hotmail or Gmail accounts, after all, which have ads built in.
It was decent of them to grandfather older accounts without ads, but I doubt this will affect their takeup in the slightest. The "free = ads, paid = no ads" model is generally well-accepted. I doubt that the company is exactly making vast amounts of money from this and rubbing their hands with glee about it.
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Actually, the micropayments thing is a point with LJ, in that, unlike most other blogging systems, I don't believe that they have a system letting you do anything like syndicate ads in a sidebar. Though I may have missed that somewhere.
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There were a few different issues regarding censorship. In general, they were fan-related - one thing that LJ does have is a huge number of fan communities, people posting fan-fiction and fan-art and talking about their favourite series and all that sort of thing. It's not really something I am that familiar with but I am told that LJ is definitely the best network to be on if you are - like, if you have a band and want to promote it, you really have to have a MySpace profile whether you like it or not.
I am trying to remember the exact details of the incidents but I have to say it's a bit vague. There was certainly a big kerfuffle about some Harry Potter slash pictures being removed because they might have been interpreted as paedophilic (despite assorted disclaimers etc - it wasn't a legally credible move) and blanket bans being laid down. There was another recent one too.
I think the reactions were a tad overblown but, really, these are your customers, many of them pay you money and the others keep the paying ones paying, lots of them want to do this sort of thing, you are not legally required to act here, there isn't even any overwhelming commercial impulse, so... don't annoy them. And don't give the impression that you might be cutting things without warning in the future in other contexts - that was why people left during the 6A reign, I think.
This is another SL parallel really - rules which are well-known and which have always been enforced don't cause bother. Rules which are suddenly made up and acted on without warning cause disruption.
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As for SUP - it's a bit hard for me to say, not speaking Russian or really knowing any Russians on LJ, but I will give it a try. Firstly, the easily-dismissable group - there were quite a few dim non-Russians who squawked about it on the "oh no they are selling to Russians they are all gangsters and spammers" level, but I doubt more than about three left because of that, and they would have had free accounts anyway.
However, SUP as I understand it is a subsidiary of some larger media group related to Putin or his faction or a related faction - I don't pretend to know the details of Russian politics and business here, but suffice to say that the evidence of association and associated deliberate bias did seem to me to be very credible.
How much actual _difference_ that could make on the other hand is debatable. Casual censorship I think would be very unlikely, given that (a) news of it and reproductions of the removed posts would spread within minutes across the globe - trying censorship in social networks is a really bad idea! (b) servers are still hosted and run in the US anyway and (c) it would drastically harm their business. There is always the chance that your personal details and IP addresses and so on could be harvested, but I'd imagine that most of the time that won't be a significant issue. If you are maintaining an anonymous blog on a subject which the Authorities might want to interfere with you take precautions _anyway_ to disguise these things - either that or you make sure that you are widely-known enough that your disappearance or prosecution will be remarked upon.
Still, I would be distinctly uncomfortable if I was a member of a network that was sold to a company which had political connections that I wasn't in sympathy with, and I'm sure that there is the potential for interference, so I will sit on the fence a bit on this issue.
I'm not quite sure why LJ is so popular in Russia. It is probably just one of these historical accidents. It had multilingual support quite early which might have contributed to this, but I've noticed it for a while - there were updates made from within the Beslan siege, using LJ's WAP portal, which was pretty innovative at the time. Even casually I notice, for instance, in photo communities that a lot more Russian comments and usernames appear than I ever see anywhere else.
I'm sure that just as with every other damned network, the majority of Russian users are just posting about how they got so drunk last night, with pictures of their cats.
Posted by: Ordinal Malaprop | 06/30/2008 at 04:23 PM
Livejournal is still going very strong. The argument was about new accounts having to carry adverts. I still have a paid LJ account, it's very cheap. Old basic accounts weren't forced to carry adverts.
Six apart went on a strange crusade of banning default pictures of breastfeeding mothers. It's the sort of issue that nobody really notices until someone in management decides boobies are bad, a bit like Linden Lab and the child avatar issues that came to light over SL5B, shooting yourself in the foot over something people only notice when you point it out.
I still think LJ is the daddy of the social networking outlets, it may not be the most popular but in terms of substance it is far superior to the likes of Myspace.
Posted by: Ciaran Laval | 06/30/2008 at 06:15 PM
Ordinal, this Wired story has a lot of interesting information:
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2006/11/72060?currentPage=3
You have to figure anything in Russia related to media with more than 99 people reading/accessing it (that's the press law limit for registering a press outlet I believe) is going to be controlled to some extent or another by the Kremlin. That's just how they are.
Wired talks about Six Apart having a bargaining position with putative KGB (actually they're called FSB now) or mafia types pressuring them, by saying the entire community would have to close and the deal would be lost. Then you'd have to hope that either the KGB or mafia types would see the value in keeping a community they could go on scraping data from, the way they would let certain samizdat authors remain free of jail to be able to track them and their contacts, or whether they'd prefer to roll them all up and send a paralyzing signal -- which they are also capable of, especially before "elections" in the "managed democracy".
I think the simple interface yet Internety cachet that LJ brings made it popular, and also I think people love saying "ZheZhe" in Russian lol. Someone the literal name makes it sound really "alive" in Russian; it came at a time when so many things were being shut down or terribly sanitized.
I really am NOT getting the problem with having free accounts but with ads. For Danah Boyd to be cranking about that is insane -- if that's what in fact she is still doing. Free accounts have to get paid for SOMEHOW. To put it in such personalized terms as she has, "I pay for my account and I want my readers to be able to get on for free easily and read me" seems really short-sighted and self-referential to me.
I'll ask you the same question I asked on the Herald: please tell me the European, Asian, or Latin American cities that allow people to go around bare breasted or with their parts hanging out. And please point me to the European blogging service that enables you to post naked breasts.
Most U.S. jurisdictions allow breast-feeding in public and art work with breast-feeding mothers. Of course, it can vary from state to state, this is the sort of thing that federal law does not control.
But the notion that somehow the U.S. alone among nations is puritanical about this is absurd. Please show me the British, Irish, Spanish etc blogs, newspapers, and cities where you can routinely put up naked people. Perhaps they have somewhat more tolerance of breast-feeding pictures but I have to wonder if breastfeeding is even making a comeback in Europe among young mothers the way it is in the US.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 06/30/2008 at 07:02 PM
Oh please, I never mentioned America being more puritanical, Americans were the most outraged about the issue.
There are lots of naked bits on livejournal, nobody banned them completely.
Posted by: Ciaran Laval | 06/30/2008 at 07:58 PM
Unfortunately, EVE's Council of Stellar Management has turned out to be not all it's cracked up to be, at least thusfar. They haven't completely decided on their own rules yet, there have been complaints flying about their operations, and CCP hasn't provided a lot of guidance. It's too soon to tell if they're destined to become an "EVE FIC," though.
The good news is, as an EVE pilot and corp director myself, I can tell you that whatever the CSM is up to means very little to us, in the context of what we do on a day-to-day basis. We mine, we make stuff, we buy and sell stuff. We don't go around ganking people and we don't smacktalk (loose lips sink ships!). And we take care of our own. It works for us, and we don't really care what the CSM yaks about.
Posted by: Erbo Evans | 07/01/2008 at 06:08 AM
"Please show me the British, Irish, Spanish etc blogs, newspapers, and cities where you can routinely put up naked people."
Ask and ye shall receive: Google "page three girl" and take a look at the results.
Posted by: Melissa Yeuxdoux | 07/01/2008 at 10:39 AM
Um, that's a girl in a tabloid newspaper, dear -- that's great. Thanks! But...where's the rest of what I said: real life cities you can walk down. That's what people on the Herald claim. They claim that half the world grabs their balls in public and shows their tits in public -- not in Africa. And that's just silly, they don't.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 07/01/2008 at 11:31 AM
Well you see a lot of breasts on the beaches in Spain but no people aren't generally doing their shopping topless.
Calling The Sun a newspaper, even a tabloid newspaper, is stretching it.
Posted by: Ciaran Laval | 07/01/2008 at 01:48 PM
A lengthy but well-written article. As someone with a "permanent" LJ account I've had an account there for nearly 7 yrs now.
Every time they try to monetize, the free-loaders who run dozens of accounts to maintain their 'special writing' 'poetry' 'fake identities' and 'not for public consumption' personas throw hissy fits.
They claim that they are producing the content that is the substance of what LJ has to offer the advertisers.
My reaction has always been a sort of 'oh really? So the 3 people reading your poetry LJ should be reason enough for them to afford you the server space?'
But that's not a popular attitude.
I bought my 'permanent' account at a price that far exceeded the annual amounts I would've paid had I just stayed month to month for 7 yrs... but not until I'd been on there for at least 4.
Even so, if tomorrow, the Russians said "sorry, all Permanent Accounts are being converted back to paid accounts w/ X months credit" I wouldn't be surprised nor rage. After all, the ToS are worded such that they can. They were when I bought it even.
There is the belief that if we 'give everyone what we have and like' they will appreciate it... and us for giving it to them. The reality is that all too often, they not only don't appreciate it, they resent us for giving it to them.
Something hard-earned is always more valued than something gifted - is it not?
Posted by: GeekMommy | 07/01/2008 at 06:20 PM
point about LL allowing better access to newbies/community is an important issue for SL. And when they gonna take some better photos for their website...is spectacularly awful and has not changed in very long time. Makes me wonder if there even is a marketing department over there? But LL should just give up on community and release their tools more completely to people that want to use the platform to make their own communities.
Posted by: rightasrain | 07/01/2008 at 08:22 PM