The Froofraw

[richardf8]

The problem with advertising is that it makes blackmail possible. This is what "warriors for innocence" relies on when it extorts certain behaviors out of a company like six-apart.

Then comes the response - the customers, the content providers, the folks for whose eyeballs the advertisers are actually paying, shoot right back.

In this is a lesson - call it Newton's first law of public relations - for every vested interest there is an equally vested opposite interest.

If your status quo is working for you, don't change it because some self-righteous prigs threaten to say bad things about you. LiveJournal is for communication and expression. It's designed in such a way that if I don't want to see something that squicks me I can easily avoid it.

The problem was one of pure laziness - so much easier to do a query on interests than to sift through public content.

My relationship to LJ has been one of mostly kind disposal. It is not a professional tool for me, but has served me well. I'll stay where my posse is and that's that.

Comments

[hilleviw.livejournal.com]

"The problem was one of pure laziness"

I don't actually agree with this. I think the core problem has to do with defining ownership. It's my perception that part of what happened here was...like a dog peeing to mark territory. Things have been quite freewheeling and independent here at LJ. I believe that part of why it has been so successful is that people have felt some ownership. To an extent what has been so shocking is that the corporate owners have just explicitly said "Oh no, you do not own this pixelplace. Mine. It is Mine." Witness the dismissiveness implicit in the CEO addressing CNet, and not LJ News. To me that was a clear statement of who matters: tech press which reaches potential investors and advertisers, not the user community. I'd be very interested to know the revenue break down - how much comes from users and how much from advertisers (who are invisible to paid users, so I wonder if we payers are actually a liability to the company?).

[richardf8]

You may be right, but that does not come as much of a shock to me, I guess. I never really believed that content I post here would be safe in the way that content I post on a machine that I own would be. I guess my cynicism has kept me from feeling terribly wounded by all this.

[hilleviw.livejournal.com]

Ditto, my heart is unbroken, my sensibilities untouched. But I have seen volumes of distress among people who mean a lot to me. So I have put some thought into what was really going on here, and I think saying it was about laziness does everyone a diservice. That's all.

[jesterstear.livejournal.com]

Witness the dismissiveness implicit in the CEO addressing CNet, and not LJ News. To me that was a clear statement of who matters: tech press which reaches potential investors and advertisers, not the user community.

I've been telling people that also. For some reason they want to think that this was done "to protect the children." If Six Apart / Live Journal wanted to do that, they would have taken action any time over the past several years when other users or the group Perverted Justice reported these accounts. Instead, LJ said "there's nothing we can do about it." When a crackpot Christian supremacy group comes along and threatens to go to advertisers, though, we saw a poorly-thought scorched earth policy implemented. That's not "to protect the children," that's "to protect the money."

[hilleviw.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Nuthin' to do with bunnies and unicorns. All market pragmatics, delivered entirely clumsily. I also try to point out to people that there's a world of difference between being an apologist and offering an apology. I still await the latter from 6A.