boy am i glad i got out when i did… it just sounds like it’s going from bad to worse…
This journal may disappear at any time. But, guess what? So could yours.
LJ admits they have no legal training re “Bible-based” child abuse communities
And don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
2007-08-06
By insomnia
Looks like Brad is leaving LJ… to the wolves.
He tries to reassure us by saying “LiveJournal’s in good hands — I’m not worried about it.”
Except, of course, that he doesn’t really believe that. He knows LJ is dying, and he’s been openly upset about the unwillingness of 6A to keep its promises to LJ’s users, about LJ’s obvious shrinking, and about the direction the site has been heading in for quite some time. (I’d cite the specific posts in his journal where he has openly groused about this, but I can’t be bothered right now.)
When it comes down to it, he reveals himself as basically out-of-touch regarding the goings-on of the site for quite some time.
A prime bit of ignorance of recent goings on is revealed here:
“I didn’t follow the latest child porn debacle, but as far as I heard: child porn. Even cartoons (even those based on underage characters) are incredibly illegal, and LJ’s TOS can’t permit it (or conveniently ignore it). Maybe communication sucked, but I haven’t been following. I heard about it for about 30 seconds just earlier today.”
He didn’t follow it?! **Bullshit klaxons!**
How could he have missed it? Doesn’t he, you know… read blogs or the news or something? Or perhaps he might enquire why people at his work are screaming down the aisles, in full damage control mode?
I haven’t been working at LJ for years, and at the time of the suspensions, I was recently back from a vacation and hadn’t been following my friends list, and yet I absolutely couldn’t avoid hearing about it. People still contact me when sh*t happens. Probably always will, I suppose.
“…but as far as I heard: child porn. Even cartoons (even those based on underage characters) are incredibly illegal…”
Actually, that’s a pretty silly thing for someone who has run a site like LJ for years to say… and a pretty insultingly dismissive attitude to cop.
Did 6A screw up? Bigtime?! Just keep repeating the mantra “child porn, child porn, child porn” until it all goes away. And whatever you do, don’t come to the obvious conclusion that practically no one out of all the thousands who were suspended could be legitimately called child pornographers in any legally valid sense of the word.
What SixApart did was flat-out wrong. A witch hunt. Prior to the mass bannination, the policy was to respond to any complaint filed against particular items that were posted. Instead, they overreached in a massively draconian fashion.
While current U.S. law does outlaw all photographs of minors having sex, cartoons and drawings are largely exempt, except those involving pre-pubescent kids in actual pornographic situations. That’s why you can go to pretty much any comic book store, any Borders, any Barnes & Noble and find yaoi, yuri, hentai… all with characters who appear to be minors. As long as they aren’t pre-pubescent, it’s fair game.
And, no, that doesn’t mean that you can’t have nude drawings of pre-pubescent teens, either. Run free, Calvin. Run free.
“In any case, LiveJournal’s in good technical hands, even if communication about child porn suspensions is bad. .”
So, LJ is just in good *technical* hands. (Excepting, of course, certain problems with the basics, like back-up generators…) Meanwhile, LiveJournal is still stuck in its death spiral of declining active users, with under a million users active during any 30 day period. By year end, it should be down another 10% or so.
I know Brad knows all this is happening… I’ve given him the same information, and he absolutely does not deny it. Infact, one of the reasons he seems turned off by LJ’s ads — besides the fact that they’re a huge betrayal of LJ’s users — is that he *KNOWS* that ads decrease the growth rate of the site. Ultimately though, what is making this continued deline inevitable is the behavior of 6A’s failed management, so it’s perhaps no real surprise why he qualified his original statement to say that LJ is in good “technical” hands.
So, yes, he should probably go, in that he’s not accomplishing much of value with 6A… not that he necessarily will elsewhere, because, to tell you the truth, he appears to be too wrapped up in his persona and all the trappings of success to be as productive and prolific a coder as he once was.
In retrospect, he’s bailed out and sold out the people who use his sites so many times over the years, that this really seems like more of the same really.
Young, creative, hungry coders out there… let this be a lesson to you.
Truth is, the future belongs to you, and not to Brad or Mena or Ev or any of those other sold out dotcom slackers who are too busy with the keynote and cocktail circuit to get an honest 20 hours of coding done in a day. They’re a good six years past their prime, and that’s a century or two in ‘net years. You don’t need these people who seem to have lost their way and their ideals. You don’t need their bloated stacks of code, their crumbling edifices, and their failed idealism. You don’t need to feel like the barrier to making something meaningful is too big and too insurmountable, and you certainly don’t need to think that everything has been done, either.
You only need to do something new or do something better. Your failure, if you have one, is not a lack of ability, but a lack of effort and/or a lack of vision.
Identify a problem. Fix it. Hack the planet.