Simulcasting

[vakkotaur]

I, vakkotaur, am now simulcasting my journal entries on LiveJournal and on InsaneJournal. I have permanent accounts on both, so nobody should see be seeing advertising (well, beyond my own should I happen to recommend something) in either place. Obviously, my "friends list" will differ as there are folks on LJ who are not on IJ, and folks on IJ who are not LJ, though there is at least some overlap. I will be reading both places, and will be notified of comments to both journals. I am not, at least not yet, planning on abandoning LiveJournal. I am, however, not trusting it enough to not have some a backup ready. This is not about any one thing or action. This is the result of a trend I do not like.

A List of Symptoms

NavBar: A User Interface Botch
A couple years ago LiveJournal did something almost smart, but did it in a really stupid way. LJ came up with the NavBar and made it an option. I took one look at it and switched the option off. Later, LJ switched it back on, and worse, set up the system so others could force it on. They could choose "Don't show me the NavBar, but show it to everyone else." This is poor user interface design. Off should mean off. To truly turn it off, one has to resort to CSS tricks and/or append URLs with ?style=mine, which can get to be a hassle. This has not been fixed, and it looks like it won't be. Sadly, it looks like the IJ codebase also has this flaw - but at least I already know the work-around.

"Simplified" Layout Selection
There were claims that the layout selection was complicated before. Action was taken. Unfortunately the result is a mess that proves, "If you design a system even an idiot can use, only an idiot will want to." Instead of a few pages with all the options sensibly grouped, it's now a long series of small groups of things that make changing settings harder. The last time I had to change, or even just get at, a LiveJournal setting I wound up going the InsaneJournal controls to find the URL and changed "insane" to "live" so I could get direct access to the thing. When I have to go to another site do get what should be a simple thing done, something is very badly broken.

Interest Search Term Blocking
I sort of understand this one, I think. The only explanation that makes any sense is if there is some sort of out of court settlement (or the suit would be public) that requires LiveJournal, in the U.S.A., to block some terms from its interest search and further requires that the reason not be revealed and the terms not be listed or announced. I might understand it, but I don't have to like it. Also, as initially implemented it blocked many innocuous terms that just happened to contain an "offensive" term within it somehow.

The StrikeThrough Debacle and botched response(s)
You knew this one had to be in here, right? SixApart/LiveJournal screwed up and in a panic deleted a bunch of accounts without any warning (a violation of their own policy) claiming they were supporting child pornography. A few might have been, but most were not. This was bad in several ways:

1. The best way to deal with child pornographers is not to simply delete an account and let them go on about the rest of their lives, but to get real law enforcement involved and put them away where they won't just making another account elsewhere.

2. This simply warned the real child pornographers to scatter.

3. This gave the false impression that LJ was filled with child porn.

4. This made the falsely accused justifiably angry. (I wonder if any have sued or tried to, for defamation if nothing else.)

5. This generated significant badwill among "unaffected" users as they saw how blundering SixApart/LiveJournal was about a truly serious issue. How much more callous would they be about everything else?

6. Rather than speak to their users (customers) the first comments went to the press. This generated even more badwill.

7. When they finally did address the users, the head guy at the time blamed the users and insisted that listing something as an interest meant that one liked or supported it. A simple counter example is that there are people who have diseases who are interested in them but most certainly do not like them.

8. When the "interest means likes" was retracted, it was done not by the head guy who said it, nor by his replacement, but by someone well under him. Who to believe? The boss, or the guy who isn't the boss?

9. There was to be a policy clarification, but each time it only got muddier. A proper document (such as a rewrite of the Terms of Service) was promised and delayed and delayed to point that it still hasn't appeared.

10. The claim then was that anything that was "hate speech" or advocated harm was banned. But what is hate speech? It's like a "hate crime" it's magically worse by directed at some special set of groups. As for harm, the common counter-cite to that is that there are pro-anorexia (not pro-dealing-with-anorexia) LiveJournal communities that are still around.

11. News was removed from the news community to lj_biz and news became a place where ads were put or announced. As with Sponsored Virtual Gifts (see below) this puts ads in front of the eyes of those who paid to not see ads. Here is one place where a new community would be a Good Idea. One just for ad announcement. Then news could have a pointer to the relevant entry and only people who wanted to see it would see it. This, of course, makes sense. Watch it not happen.

Now, the original mess was a mistake and I can forgive a mistake. The dishonesty that followed, however, is where I have trouble with LiveJournal. I do not believe that LJ has been forthright and given honest answers yet. At least some individuals working for LJ have tried, but it's clear that too much is filtered through a broken corporate culture, or a legal department that is allergic to real answers.

Permanent Membership Sale
This in itself was not a bad thing, but the timing was bad. It came before answers to many questions were around. It also was a gimmick used to shore up LiveJournal's deteriorating reputation as for the first few hours a fraction of the payment would be donated to groups that worked to prevent the abuses that the StrikeThrough debacle was. This was not SixApart or LiveJournal making a donation as such, it was "we'll improve our reputation with your money." That there were at least a few folks who managed to get their payment refunded a short time later when they finally got answers (or different answers) says how honest LJ was leading to and during the sale.

Sponsored Virtual Gifts
I find the whole "pay to give someone some pixels" thing rather silly, but if people want to spend their money that way, it's their business. But then Pepsi sponsored images of Pepsi Max, where a livejournal user could give someone an image of a can without spending their own money. This overlooked two things:

1. It was advertising, and one of the things paid account holders paid for was freedom from being bombarded with advertising.

2. With no investment, some people would use that to send images to those who did not want them.

The result was that the official groups (and one or two individuals at SixApart/LiveJournal) got spammed with Pepsi Max, as a lesson in what was wrong with that. Once they realized the problems (by being beaten over the head with them) there came a change that let people decide if they wanted to allow reception of virtual gifts (I turned that off as soon as I could) and either Pepsi or SixApart/LiveJournal pulled the Pepsi Max - but neither is talking about it and so the actual reasoning is unknown. It would not surprise me if it was Pepsi realizing they had stumbled into a deal that only made people hate their product and so backed off in a hurry.

SnapShot
SnapShot lets a person see a mini version of a page linked to, which sounds neat except it gets in the way of reading the actual content of the page being looked at right now and chews up CPU and bandwidth. Not everyone is on broadband, and not everyone wants the distraction. Also, this is another opportunity for trolls to post links to obnoxious pages (things like goatse, for instance) and force them on people. While there is a way to supposedly disable this nuisance, it's unreliable and temporary. Like the NavBar, there is not a proper universal OFF switch. As a result, firewalling or system hackery (hosts file editing) is needed to thwart this idiocy.

The BoldThrough or BoldOut mess
Not having truly learned the lesson of the StrikeThrough debacle, someone got the bright idea to make sure it could never happen again by making the symptom go away: instead of a deleted account showing with a line through it, it would now be rendered as bold. This not only seems a feeble and childish way to handle the issue, it actually makes it harder to determine if an account is deleted. Then, that would be the point, wouldn't it?

Content Tagging/Flagging mess
This is likely more fallout from the StrikeThrough debacle. A person can now mark his account or individual entries as "adult concepts" or "explicit adult content" which in itself isn't too bad. That anyone can flag an entry or account as being those is more problematic. Granted, it supposedly takes more than one person doing this to trigger a real check, but sock-puppet accounts are easily generated and it's not unheard of for a mob of one sort or another to mess things up (think of SomethingAwful goons and PortalofEvil types or the zealots who triggered the whole strikethrough mess in the first place). As originally implemented, everyone was suddenly set to an adult rating which was a rude shock. That was eventually rectified, but it still shows how well LiveJournal tends to think things through: Not very well or not at all. Further, the whole thing is a classic case of CYA. LJ can say it's "doing something" even though circumventing the system is trivially easy. It's not protecting any children as is claimed. It's not protecting anyone except for LiveJournal. Also, at the moment (though it is supposedly being worked on) there is no notification to the account holder if the account or entry has its rating changed because of this system. Nor have I seen any sort of appeals process to deal with abuse or simple error.

The proliferation of communities, spreading out any chance of actually getting answers
As if moving news away from news and to lj_biz wasn't obfuscation enough, there are now a couple more communities: lj_policy which is perhaps overdue, lj_2008 (What will they do next year?). Even before all this happened, someone made a community that can be used to try to keep track of all the various LJ official announcements: the_lj_herald. It's more useful than ever now.

The "100 Day Plan" that isn't a plan at all.
When it was announced that SUP had bought LiveJournal from SixApart, a "100 Day Plan" was announced. Or at least the name was announced. Just what is the 100 Day Plan? How does anyone know if it's being met? What is it supposed to accomplish? Near as I can tell it means, "Don't expect anything for 100 days." rather than being an actual plan. Milestones? What milestones?

Denial and Omission
The most recent news post lists a few "favorites" that are favored by almost nobody and lists only the initial strikethrough mess as a problem LJ had in 2007. That they called it part of a "Zero Tolerance Policy" doesn't help. There is good reason that they are derided as really being "Zero Intelligence Policies."

What this is NOT about

Child Porn
The very idea makes me ill. And it was a cheap and very dirty way for SixApart to play the game of setting the blame everywhere except themselves, even as they claimed to be owning up to making a mistake. While SixApart tried to frame everything after the strikethrough mess as that, that's not the case. The initial cause was a botched attempt at superficially dealing with this issue. As others have pointed out, to really deal with this subject you don't just delete accounts and leave guilty parties pretty much be, you work with real law enforcement and get them arrested.

FanFic and SlashFic
I don't write FanFic and I generally don't read it. Most of it deals with things of which I am not a fan. Slash I find even less appealing. There are real reasons that LJ could say "no fanfic" by simply citing copyright law. Or they could say "no slash" as a matter of policy. I know some would scream if they did this, but it wouldn't really bother me. At least they'd have a policy people knew about.

SUP buying LJ from SixApart
This means a change of management, and could potentially be an improvement. Or it just be a new rent collector that keeps the same bunch of idiots running things the same lousy way. Or it could get much worse. As so far SUP hasn't really done anything and SixApart is mixed up in things at least somewhat for about a year more, it's hard to tell. It's just too early to tell. Aside from the "100 Day Plan" which seems to be a marketing phrase rather than any true plan, nothing seems to have changed yet for better or for worse.

Desiring more of feature X (e.g. userpics)
As I said, I have a permanent account. I already have all the goodies that there are to get from LJ, including more userpic spaces than I am using. If it were just about the goodies, it'd be LJ all the way. IJ might have more of one or two items (userpic spaces, mainly) but overall LJ has more features. Unfortunately LJ also has more misfeatures.

Why I haven't abandoned LiveJournal

There are a few reasons. With the change of ownership I still have some hope that there will real improvements and corrections. The LiveJournal "community" is fairly large, which is a way of saying most of my friends are here. I do have the permanent account and see abandoning LJ as a loss of my investment.

I won't rule out that it might come to my bailing from LJ. Already one of my friends has taken the precaution of simulcasting and another has bailed from LJ completely. A few more have accounts elsewhere, just waiting in reserve should they be needed. So I am hardly alone in being wary of LiveJournal. The impression I get between IJ and LJ is rather stark. With IJ I get straight talk, with LJ I get double-talk. So I realize that my staying on with LJ might be like those who enter a marriage after a couple divorces: A triumph of hope over experience.

My hope for improvement might be in vain, and I certainly don't like the general trend of ignoring user desires (don't mess with the defaults, give us OFF switches that actually work) and general dishonesty about policy ("It's all about protecting the children" No, it's not. And that line should make everyone suspect ulterior motives) so I am taking the sensible precaution of not trusting LiveJournal. They have not yet reached the "tipping point" at which they'll be losing users at unrecoverable speed, but they seem to be approaching it.

Comments

[thecanuckguy.livejournal.com]

Heh, interesting timing. Mere minutes before I read this I started re-categorizing my bookmarks - since a few friends of mine have already moved the bulk of their journalling to another blogging service (not IJ, but Wordpress) it's pointless for me to keep one bookmark (my LJ bookmark) in my favourites list to keep up with my friends' blogs, so I've had to make a folder called "blogs" to keep up with all of them now. I just came on LJ to see the address of the other friends', and I find your announcement! I will be adding your IJ one right away too. :)

The question comes to me though, what will you do when your paid account comes up for renewal?

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

My accounts (both LJ and IJ) are permanent ones, thus there is no renewal to deal with.