The Six-Apart Fuckup.
31 May 2007Whether you know it or not, I originally started with a LiveJournal.
Now, LJ is okay, before Six-Apart aquired it, I would have given it a fair rating. It was nothing fancy, but allowed you a medium to get your point across.
Six Apart, as you may or may not know, makes “Movable Type”, which is a blogging package, and its a fairly common one. Six Apart, however, has a long history of dumping on the very people who use their stuff. They have a pretty long track record of pissing people off by not communicating, and outright ducking issues.
In 2004, when MT 3.0 came out, they wound up shafting a great number of people, by changing the license around. Now, its their software, they have a right to do so, however…refusing or not even trying to address the very real complaints people had…was a major fuckup on their part. The customer may not always be right, but when the customer has an active part in helping you improve the product you sell, they do have a right to some answers.
Now, around 2004, I was using my LiveJournal, but I had also registered digitalarcadia.net around that time. I was looking to move the blog to a more self hosted environment. I wound up striking MT off my list, because the licensing just…well, it just sucked. There were better packages with GPL licensing. I eventually wound up with Nucleus running Double Cluepon Day, and eventually I too moved to WordPress.
In 2005, Six Apart aquired LiveJournal. It was at this point that I realized the choice to self host was a right one. Livejournal as a startup was okay. It still had a bit of that mom and pop feel. Livejournal graduating to corporate status…was a different kettle of fish. The bottom line is, when you use a service like LiveJournal, which is now a corporate entity, you can never ever really be sure about the status of your own content. If you can’t be sure, and you care about it, then you should move to something you can control more.
So, here we are, in 2007, and lo and behold, what do we have? The great 2007 “strikethru“. (Outside coverage from BoingBoing can be found here and here.) And once again, we have a situation where the tools at Six Apart adopted the “hide and wait” attitude towards the affected users. Now, I am not saying they shouldnt enforce their user policies. They should. But, they should also enforce the “Lets try to get a clue” policy. Because this looks just like it sounds: they caved to pressure from some whack-job group. They let the squeaky wheel get the grease at the expense of legitimate users. The can dance around the issue all they want, but the whole thing smacks of a knee jerk reaction. My experience tells me they got a fine blowjob from the “Warriors For Innocence”, and in their orgasmic haze, hit the button and pissed off the internet.
This should be a wake up call to people using not only LiveJournal, but any corporate hosted service where self published content is the centerpiece: you are at their mercy. Plain and simple. And, it’s really fucking scary how many people DO NOT understand that what the BIg Print Giveth, (HEY, PUBLISH YOUR OWN JOURNAL AND BLOG FOR FREE, SIGN UP NOW), the Small Print Taketh Away (You agree that LiveJournal, in its sole discretion, may terminate your password, journal, or account, and remove and discard any content within the Service, for any reason, including and without limitation, the lack of use, or if LiveJournal believes that you have violated or acted inconsistently with the letter or spirit of the TOS.). This is basic common sense. And, while people have a right to bitch, at the end of the day, SixApart could delete *every* journal and tell the entire user base to eat shit and die in a big roaring fire. Those are the terms you agreed to. =)
But this is happening everywhere. Flickr has recently been pissing off users in droves through stupid and wrongheaded moves. At the end of the day, when you choose to put content on the internet, you have to consider the options. After the movable type licensing fiasco, WordPress saw a big jump in users, and saw the market potential, they host dry installs of wordpress. You can even relay DNS there. Hosting is cheap as hell these days, believe it or not $15 bucks a month can net you some primo spots on dedicated servers sitting in an air conditioned rack. This is one difference between a service and hosting.
But, Livejournal is unique in that they offer a service that they admit freely to policing. The trouble with policing is this: it puts you on the hook for EVERYTHING. The IRC networks faced this very same problem back in the day. Its like the old anecdote about salt on the sidewalk. In some places, if you make an effort to shovel and salt, and someone falls, you can be liable civilly because you made the effort, whereas if you did NOT make an attempt, the person who falls is out of luck. That pretty accurately describes the problem with LiveJournal. They are stuck with policing their content. But who watches the watchers? Six Apart has a solid track record of fucking things up in a Really Big Way. And with this latest incident, it shows they have a bit of corporate insanity: they do not learn from their mistakes. Indeed, they did this while the original founder of LJ, Brad was on vacation.
The question remains, however, will LJ users learn from this and move to better options? I deleted my LJ awhile back. No need for it. I have all those entries archived here, and based on alot of the things I have seen from Six Apart over the years, it’s just as well I let it get purged. I dont want them to have any control over any of my content. Severing my relationship with them, no matter how minuscule it may been, was a good thing. This weeks actions reinforce that.
