2 posts tagged “livejournal”
Jasmine Guy being bitchy! The Gute on a motorcycle! Malcolm-Jamal Warner! Debbie Gibson! Danny Glover! John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John! Aykroyd! Ferrigno! Bialik! Feldman! Helmsley! Abdul! I can't even count all the fantastic washed-up celebrities! Oh, the awesomeness!
Any video with Lou Diamond Phillips and Billy Dee Williams having a conversation wins at life.
So, the Sound of Sleep sponsored community on LJ has created the biggest ruckus since the default icon/nipples-are-indecent/I just want to feed my BAYbeeee scandal created by hardvice because his Bea Arthur breast-tassel icon got censored.
I've been following it all, because I find LiveJournal meta-drama to be incredibly fascinating. That wasn't meant to sound sarcastic -- I honestly do. I even read the LJ Wikipedia discussion page to watch random LJ obsessives argue with regular old Wikipedia users about which information is VITALLY IMPORTANT to be included on the Wikipedia page. It's hella fun.
Anyway, I'm a paid user and have been for a long time. And I really don't have much of a problem with occasionally accidentally running into advertising -- I'm not going to clutch my pearls about it. I've always said that the current web 2.0 situation is untenable -- if people are going to be able to sustain sites, they have to make money. I prefer subscriber models, but given the number of 14-year-olds who just want to start 8 million LJs named after whatever-the-hell manga character and abandon them and never pay a cent -- they've got to cover their bandwidth costs somehow. Advertising models are the only way that web-commerce at this size can really function. I don't love it, but I accept it -- these people need, and deserve to, get paid for all the work they put in. (There's a whole other discussion here about the poor support volunteers who are bearing the brunt of all this drama and not getting a cent from SixApart for dealing with it. And then there's a whole other discussion about the corruption and inequity of the support structure in:re suspending accounts and shit. But I digress.)
The one thing that totally does concern me is all the copyright violation that happens on the site. But as Burr86 stated in a recent lj_bi post, all the copyright violations have ALWAYS been actionable; it's just a question of whether companies wanted to act on it or not. Obviously, now that the corporations have taken an interest in LJ, there's going to be way more opportunity for them to poke around and find stuff they don't like, and it will be a YouTube-esque situation where content gets pulled. But you can't stop the flow of copyright violations on the internet -- it's been shown time and time again. If fan communities have to become friends-protected and totally word of mouth, that's the way it's going to be. But it's like a hydra -- you cut off one head and three grow in its place. The copyright violations are out there, and if you know where to look, you can get anything you want. And corporations, despite their billions of dollars, haven't been able to stop it yet. I can get pretty much any television show I want, any time I want, perfectly free on the internet if I just poke around long enough. And if they shut down one LJ, or one torrent, or whatever, another one will come around. So I think their fight is kinda futile.
Everything is going to work out. I would recommend being much more careful about what you post publically, but I think that's a lesson everyone should learn, whether corporate info-mining was an issue or not. And I'd back up your journal regularly, in whichever incredibly clunky way you choose to do it. Just in case. But honestly -- I can't go anywhere else unless EVERYONE ELSE I'm friends with leaves, because the social function is the one thing that still keeps me there. But if another site came up with a functionality that would let me export 5-plus years of journaling, and everyone I wanted to talk to left along with me, yeah, I'd be out of there by now probably. I don't feel any particular loyalty to LiveJournal as an entity.
