For those of you who don't already know, there has been a strike scheduled for Friday, March 21st, 2008, during which we hope to have many members of LiveJournal provide LJ with absolutely no content for twenty-four hours. This means no posting and no commenting. If you post elsewhere and have it set up to be posted through a feed on LiveJournal, don't do it. Stay away from LiveJournal for twenty-four hours. That can't be too hard, can it? I know some of you are probably quite active on LiveJournal and will find it hard to stay away for an entire day, just as I will, but this is something that needs to be done, to show the people running LiveJournal that we're watching the changes they are making, that we're paying attention, that we're discontent, and that we want to be heard and taken in to consideration. We are not simply users who can be tossed to the side and ignored. We are the people who make up LiveJournal. Without us, without the content we create, without our words, our voices, our creativity, our participation, there would be no LiveJournal. This is a fact, and it needs to be realized and understood and then taken in to consideration when making decisions regarding the way that LiveJournal is run. The strike is only a few days away, so there isn't all too much time to prepare. While this is unfortunate, it isn't enough to keep this strike from taking place. It will take place, the second it is meant to, and it would be best to have as many people take part as possible. Please, spread the word. Spread it fast. There are only a few days to organize this. If you find that you care about LiveJournal or care about the people you interact with on LiveJournal or simply want it to remain a place where you can entertain yourself without constant censorship and money-hungry practices being thrown in without the consideration of those who use the service, act now. If you don't wish to spread the word, that is fine, but please: refrain from using LiveJournal on Friday, March 21st. Do something else for a change. It's for a good cause. (:

For background on this strike and why it is being held, please read the following posts:
http://beckyzoole.livejournal.com/394838.html
http://beckyzoole.livejournal.com/395310.html

To find out exactly when the strike begins and ends, depending on where you are located, please see this:
http://beckyzoole.livejournal.com/395125.html

What's this about?

* It's about free and ad-free LiveJournal accounts being abolished for new members, ignoring the advice from the newly-formed Advisory Board.
* It's about LJ staff trying to sneak this decision in under the radar, and when people found out, telling the users it was done 'to make the signup process less confusing'.
* It's about LJ staff failing to apologize for trying to hide the facts from view and for lying about the actual reasons for their actions.
* And finally, it's about the latest decision to hide certain user interests from the list of Most Popular Interests, some of them being fanfiction, bisexuality, sex and depression. This decision was not announced or explained in any way. Users found out for themselves.

AND ICONS TO SUPPORT THIS:

The Good: Angela Davis is in Australia! RIGHT NOW!!!
This is almost awesome enough to cancel out...

The Bad: I'm totally exhausted and yet can't sleep but also have heaps of shit to do. And work today. WTF is wrong with my body/brain?

LJ is getting its homophobia/biphobia on by suppressing popular interests related to queerness. Looks like another reason to leave.

This totally doesn't count as meaningful content.

So, SUP, the company that bought LiveJournal from SixApart, has decided to stop allowing new basic (ad-free) accounts to be created. Not only did they decide this, but they failed to announce it in the news community because apparently it wasn't something that would affect existing users (which betrays how little they understand about how users use LJ!).

Not only is this horrible -- PR-wise -- but it's also rather destructive to what the LJ community is about. Until reading some of the discussion in the news post comments, I hadn't thought much about how the LJ community/economy really works. But people have made some really good points that lead to an explanation of why I feel betrayed by this development.

Firstly, LJ is successful as a business because of the network effect: for non-users to share in the content, they need to sign up to the service and make a certain level of commitment to it (like with Microsoft Word -- since so many people exchange documents in .doc format, people need to acquire and install Word to be able to participate in the sharing of content). Those users who like the content enough pay for it. And as brad has said:

When I started LiveJournal, there were two account levels:

• Free Account -- no ads, no cost, but minimal features.


• Paid Account -- no ads, costs money, get everything.

The paid users, while minimal, paid enough to keep the site running, and brought in enough revenue to keep growing the site, and paid our salaries. The free users, while not paying, were extremely valuable because they produced the content that the paying users were there to consume.

While LJ run by Danga Interactive (the people who built it & owned it before selling it to SixApart) it was free and ad-free; this dynamic made LJ very communal and DIY. Because free users were generating content in their own time for other users. At the end of the supply chain, there was always a corporation which profited from the free content generated by users. However, the corporation was part of the userbase, used LJs and participated in LJ communities themselves. Volunteers often became paid employees because their expertise was necessary to the running of the site. The open-source and communal nature of LJ was emphasised over other aspects.

This changed when SixApart took over. If Danga Interactive was the grass-roots, 6A was Astroturf. 6A staff tried to integrate themselves into LJ communities, but they only showed up how mercenary their motives were (e.g. openly insulting users on LJ). 6A and SUP both treat users not as generators of content which generates their revenue, but as consumers of a service. When advertising was brought into the site, users were no longer creating content for one another, but for the corporation.

And there's the rub. That's why I'm taking this somewhat personally: our posts are the raw material from which a corporation profits. And I've posted some pretty personal, and important stuff here. The time, energy, and work put into posting is now quite obviously and visibly done for someone other than who I intend it to be for.

As I said before, this has always been the case. There has always been a for-profit corporation behind LJ, at least for the 5 years I've been using it. However, it is obvious that Danga, 6A and SUP have made very different decisions about how to trade off commercial interest against user autonomy. The Danga model was uniquely successful in creating a community of users who collaborated in the maintenance and management of the site, and generated sufficient outside interest to grow the business. Pretty much everything (including aesthetic considerations -- oh god, it used to be so boring to look at!) was subordinated to the content created and shared by users. That made LJ accessible to a great number of people, and made me want to contribute money to it.
6As introduction of "v-gifts," paid themes, "sponsored" accounts, etc. shifted the focus of LJ away from the content created by users. And their neglect of the value of this content showed in the disrespectful way they dealt with "inappropriate content": suspending accounts without notice, arbitrarily changing policies, not listening to users.

SUP has made a similar decision -- which wasn't surprising, I guess. When they say their contribution to LJ "means new ideas, new features, new colleagues, new offices, new technology, new hosting facilities, new products, new policies and, yes, a new account structure" what they actually mean is that they have no interest in what the users get out of LJ so long as they can get something out of users. They are taking the userbase for granted, as if the writing, photography, art, news, ideas, information, stories, and plans of people was just a uniform resource to exploit. They see no value in the inherent dynamism of this content -- the fact that it's so difficult to standardise and regulate. Their strategy for generating profits is to transform the service so that it's consumed more passively. The problem with that is that LJ ceases to be a journaling/blogging community if people don't engage!

The problem with statements like: "[w]e're still working out how to strike just the right tone when communicating with such a diverse and complex collection of communities" is that if they were a part of the community, they wouldn't need to figure this out. The Danga team made mistakes, but there was nowhere near the level of animosity between the userbase and the owners that there is now. Sites like Scribblit and JournalFen are gaining interest because they're perceived as being created by a community, for a community, not owned and operated by people whose interests diverge from those of the community.

This is why I'm inherently uninterested in Facebook and Myspace. Only the network effect keeps me interested in Facebook, and Myspace is so ugly and unintelligible that I can't even be bothered. The content generated on LJ has more personal investment by users, and the technology is set up so that users can engage with each other, rather than with a script. Maybe it's because I'm really unpopular and so I never get into it, but I've never felt less like a human being as when I try to interact with people through Fb or Myspace. Unfortunately, standardising the experience so that it's more like a "social networking site" seems to be the direction LJ is going. And that also seems to mean a more authoritarian approach to the content.

Which brings me to the eminently selfish conclusion: feeling conflicted about how I participate in these sites. The fact that Facebook takes possession of any content posted to it, granting itself inalienable rights to redistribute that content, and that users are now a cog in the LJ machine, makes me lament the future of open-source interactive media. Or want to move to Wordpress, which is scarily like actual blogging (i.e. commitment) rather than occasionally posting something that comes to mind. I'm gonna think about what to do, but I don't think I want to post anything remotely meaningful to me on here any more.

Not feeling too well, health-wise, but I thought I'd up my posting record by inserting a couple of memes. Two, because they'd get lonely all by themselves.


1. Post something you think I should do or try to do in 2008. Big or small, silly or earth-changing.


2. Let's Make a Band:
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

( I has an album cover: )

My internet access at home has been erratic and unusable for the past week or so. A technician is coming around tomorrow to have a look at it, but I'm not sure when it'll be fixed. I'm not keeping up with LJ at the moment.

BTW, that login problem I had before was resolved. It was a Firefox plugin that blocked my login. I've uninstalled it so now everything's pretty much fine.

WTF? I can't sign into LJ using Firefox. I have a couple of accounts and I can't log into any of them. It keeps coming up as the wrong password, even though the exact same thing in IE works fine.

I also find it stupid that only paid users can edit their comments now.

LJ and facebook appear to be doing it. It is NOT my social-networking-site OTP. I find the whole thing kind of disgusting.

MY NEWEST OTP IS NOW CANON.

I JUST WON AT FANGIRL.

I CAN DIE HAPPY.

( Spoiler! )

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=r4dUQgIaXGg

DAVID TENNANT.

DRAG.

SKINNY LEGS OMFG!!!!!!!
(We'll just ignore the gay jokes and subtle misogyny.)


I'll be in my bunk.

In conversation with draicana:

Me: I might have to briefly duck out to get a ook for Gav at the library
Me: *book
Me: ook@
Me: ook!
Me: librarian!
Me: LOL

draicana dubs this the "best typo ever". Is it? You decide!

My thesis is due next Friday (HOLY CRAP), and I'm trying to decide where to get it printed and bound. Around the uni there are four printing services (that I know of): Kopy Stop on Mountain street (near Broadway), Kinko's Broadway, Officeworks Glebe, and the University Copy Centre.

For USydsters: had particularly good or bad experiences with these places? Any recommendations?

For non-USydsters: any advice on formatting, binding, etc. would be totally welcome too.

Yay, the deer game is back!

The new version works on my computer (not the laptop, though)! Hooray!

This was exactly the mood-lift I needed.

I was gonna banninate myself from the internet, but then I read this: http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/new-sneak-and-peek-powers-for-police/2007/07/31/1185647903263.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

Holy shit.

This is so fucked up.

I turned 23 today, and in celebration I have more Deathly Hallows spoilers for you!

( SPOILERS )

That is all.

I spent all day yesterday reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows rather than fleshing out my thesis plan. Bad me.

( So now I have (spoilery) fannish ramblings to fling at you! )

That's about all I can think of to say right now. There's prolly more, but my brain is now over writing about it. I should work on my thesis.

Hahaha, LOL, see the Dalek dance! Dance, little Dalek, dance!

P.S. I drew it myself!

{looks at clear blue sky}

So, some storm we're having, huh?

How 'bout them gale-force winds then?

:-p

Meteorologists are loopy!

For non-Sydneysiders, we had a storm warning for today, with winds of up to 150 km/hr predicted, and heavy rains.

for satyrica but you can read it too (if you're not him):

http://community.livejournal.com/heroes_fic/tag/--isaac/peter

http://community.livejournal.com/heroes_love/

The most angsty pairing evar! Yaaaaay!

Enjoy!

I've removed a lot of people from my friends list because I'm really using LJ in a different way now. I'm not really interested in making my life public, and I don't have time to seek out new people and make a connection with them via LJ.

A lot of the people I removed are still friendly acquaintances who I see very occasionally, but I don't feel much of a need to share silly rants or navel-gazing with them. A lot of people whose other projects I am interested in just talk about their personal life on LJ and I feel neither qualified to comment, nor personally invested enough to do so.

And the friends-list bloat was making me feel too overexposed to share what I wanted to with my actual friends, which was dumb.

Everyone is still welcome to add me and read my public stuff, though. :-)

So yeah, this post marks a transition in my journaling, one that's been coming for a long time.

Comments screened, in case you wanna leave a LJ-goodbye or pass on a URL about your blog/site/art/photos/other stuff, or just flame me. ;-)

OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Doctor+kitty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

{dies}

Ooh, pretty!