On the recent LJ controversies

[jducoeur]

[I was responding to a posting by liamstliam on the current LJ uproar. Reading through it, I think it deserves a top-post, so here's a slightly tweaked version.]

I kind of fall in the middle, between the outraged and those who think it's all a big over-reaction. I wasn't particularly upset by the free-account change (which I think is a perfectly reasonable business decision, and not likely to make such a big difference in practice), and while I was concerned about the interests filter, I was more worried about it driving people away than anything else. (It was a stupid and rude change, but really mattered mainly on the symbolic level: in *concrete* terms, I think it was pretty marginal.)

That said, I do think the hullaballo is perfectly reasonable and appropriate. At its heart is an important question: who really owns LiveJournal as a social entity?

I mean, it's not that different from the controversies surrounding the SCA, Inc -- or even some of the ones around the federal government. In all cases, there is a legal entity that has all the formal power, but in a sense its *moral* authority flows from the relatively powerless people who comprise that entity. The legal entity has the *power* to change things, but it is less clear whether it has the *right* to do so.

In all of these cases, the "citizens" mostly have one recourse if they disagree: making a big stink about it. It's really a rather decent market-based solution to the problem. If enough people to matter object loudly, the "government" tends to recant unless there were damned good reasons for the change. (Certain recent shameless US administrations being the exception that proves the rule.) If the citizens don't object all that loudly, the government takes their silence as consent, and assumes that it is following an appropriate course.

(Of course, there are often harsher options, including violence against the government or moving out of the entity entirely. Those are sometimes necessary, but usually have all sorts of unfortunate side-effects, so they're generally best not used as a first option.)

So I don't have a problem with the big stink. It caused a very quick revocation of the interests filter, which doesn't surprise me: I suspect that that was a fairly casual stupid decision on somebody's part, and the company wasn't deeply invested in it. They haven't reversed the decision to remove Basic accounts, which also doesn't surprise me: I'd bet that that was a cold-blooded business decision, made with full knowledge that people would be cranky about it, and they're not going to back down.

All of this strikes me as the correct responses of an active citizenry, and I think that's healthy: it indicates that many members of LJ regard themselves as part of a community, not just consumers of a service, and that's important in any meaningful social entity.

(And mind, I say all of this knowing full well that, if CommYou succeeds, I'm going to be on the receiving end of some of those stinks down the road. Best to figure out my philosophy now, so that I can react more consistently and sensibly when the time comes...)

Comments

[querldox.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, what I see as a bad sign is that LJ made a fairly significant deal of choosing what seemed to me to be a reasonable "advisory board" and then not bothering to tell them about the account change. While I tend to agree it was a business decision that wasn't going to be reversed, not even bothering to tell the board about a significant change so soon after it was created and promoted doesn't bode too well.

[jducoeur]

While I agree, I'm willing to be a little charitable on this: I know from experience how hard it is to get consultative bodies functioning smoothly, and figuring out the communications chain can be a serious pain in the ass. Precisely because it's so new, I'm not really surprised that it's not functioning properly. I'm willing to give them some time to fix that, but I agree that it's currently broken...

[ladymacgregor.livejournal.com]

Um. I'm not sure that I agree that LJ is like the SCA, a social entity.

The SCA started as a hobby - a community, if you will - of like-minded people. The BOD was originally set up to support the community and be subordinate to it. (At least, in theory.) The point of the SCA is not to support the BOD.

LiveJournal, on the other hand, is a *product* - just like CommYou will be, someday. Presumably created for some kind of profit, somewhere (I don't think this is all freeware, is it?). Now, one of the best ways to *make* profit is to get more customers, and make them feel all warm and cozy and Part Of It All - Part of the Community, and all that. But that's not the point of the enterprise. The point of the enterprise is to make money.

If the community gets angry at you, then certainly that will have consequences, money-wise, especially if the customers leave. In that sense, a hullabaloo will get attention. But I don't consider myself a "citizen" of LJ the way I am a "citizen" of the SCA, and I would think it would be dangerous to expect a business to act in any way other than in its own best interest. (See: Superfund sites, exploding Pintos, etc.)

[alienor.livejournal.com]

You've only been on LJ since it's been a product - it originally was a community of like minded people (who wanted to keep up with each other electronically). The source code was open source freeware, the site was supported by donations, yadda yadda.

Things have changed a LOT since I started, and that was 2002. Back then you had to know someone to even start an account; someone who was already part of the community had to agree to let you in (via a referral system). It wasn't bulletproof, but it was a different community.

re: customers

[etherial.livejournal.com]

We're not strictly customers here in lj-land, though. We're also content providers. We are the chief sole selling point.

[jducoeur]

As alienor points out, it's not nearly that cut-and-dried. Indeed, in many ways it is *very* analogous to the SCA situation. In both cases the social community was there first, and the commercial entity as we know it built up on top of that, without much consent by the community. While it certainly varies, I think you're seriously underestimating the depth of feeling that many people have for LJ as a community.

I mean, really -- how *is* SUP (the owner of LJ) different from the SCA, Inc? They're both commercial entities that exist essentially to provide services to a community. Yes, one is for-profit and the other isn't, but that's a rather fine line to draw, and means less than most people think.

Similarly, how is LJ different from the SCA on a social level? Yes, you are a member of LJ who feels rather casually about it -- similarly, I'd guess that the considerable majority of SCA participants don't give all that much of a damn about the Society in the large, but just care about their friends in it. There are differences, but I suspect that, if you step back and look at both entities in the aggregate, they are more alike than you're giving them credit for...

Context?

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Could you maybe provide a pointer to a (preferably brief) summary of the "current LJ uproar" for those of us for whom your post has no context?

Re: Context?

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

http://brad.livejournal.com/2368071.html

Re: Context?

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

Sorry, that's half of it: the other half is that 'unpopular' interests like 'bisexuality' were either accidentally or intentionally filtered from the "Popular Interests" page. I don't have a handy link for that one.

Re: Context?

[jducoeur]

Sorry -- this has been going around so much that I over-casually assumed everybody had seen some of the blowback.

There have been two very recent controversies. Briefly:

-- First, they rather quietly deprecated the "Basic" account level, which probably accounts for the considerable majority of LJ users. Essentially, from now on nobody can get a completely free account: you either put up with ads, or you pay. Existing accounts are grandfathered in, but it still caused quite a bit of dismay among people who think this fundamentally changes the nature of the community.

-- Second, last week folks discovered that a large number of interests were now being actively filtered off of the "Most Popular Interests" page. It was a bit inconsistent, but they all appear to be sexual in nature, and seemed to some to be particularly biased against LGBT interests. Needless to say, that pissed off a number of people something fierce. LJ fairly quietly retracted the change yesterday, and is claiming that it was unintentional. (Hence my suspicion that it wasn't accidental, but was a dumb decision that someone made without much review.)

Unsurprisingly, these have had a cumulative effect, and a bunch of people were vocally spitting mad last week; this has engendered the usual backlash of others saying that they are over-reacting...

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Mind you - this comes from an LJ user who hasn't even heard about the problem you're talking about. It has not appeared in substantive form on my Friends list...

Much as many people would argue, I think we are customers, and, "who owns LJ as a social entity?" is confusing the issue. The fact that we provide the content is not particularly relevant - there's a great many places where the size of the customer base is part of the selling point of the product, but that does not change the business dynamic. The issue at hand isn't the source of the content, but the fact that it is primarily a subscription-based business model.

Then, it is pretty much as you say - anyone who is primarily subscription-based has to react to the desires of the customers, as they are the basic future revenue.

To use the term "rights" in this context is, in my opinion, applying an emotionally charged concept where it does not belong. LJ users do not have "rights". They have an account in a computer system. They have agreed to a Terms of Service, and get to use features so long as they keep within the ToS. The only appicable "right" is to take your money elsewhere.

[siderea]

I wasn't particularly upset by the free-account change (which I think is a perfectly reasonable business decision, and not likely to make such a big difference in practice)

See, I'm out here in the wilderness crying, IT SO IS NOT ANYTHING LIKE A REASONABLE BUSINESS DECISION THEY'RE GOING TO BANKRUPT THE SERVICE AND WE'RE/OUR JOURNALS'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!

Seriously, I am flabbergasted how many people have been nodding their heads saying, "Ayup, must be a sound business decision to try to increase revenue by putting ads on things." Yeah, right, because add supported content has always been so wildly successful a business model on the internet. *rolls eyes*

Here's a hint: Google? Is not Livejournal. Tripod? Is. Geocities? Is. Salon.com? Is.

You can put billboards on the side of superhighways and turn a profit, but not in residential neighborhoods. Putting billboards up in residential neighborhoods only depresses property values and turns the neighborhood into one without the population you want to advertise to.

[jducoeur]

Hmm. I'm biased here, and actively hoping you're wrong. I perceive a spectrum where you seem to be seeing a strict dichotomy. I mean, yes, residential neighborhoods are usually advertising-free. But many interactions happen in the town square, which isn't. It shouldn't have an *oppressive* amount of advertising, and that scale does make a difference, but the presence of commerce is certainly quietly there. (Admittedly, I have no clue how much advertising is standard on LJ, since I've always been a paid member; for all I know, it might be oppressive.) It isn't obvious to me which spatial metaphor is most apt, given LJ's odd mixture of diarizing and community interaction.

But like I said: I'm biased, and this is food for thought -- fairly scary food at that. I mean, I have to monetize CommYou *somehow*, and absolutely from the word go -- I can't afford to run the system if it isn't bringing in enough money to at least pay me a salary in the reasonably near term. Given that LJ's original shareware sort of model has at *best* a very shaky record in the mass market that I'm targeting here (a few big successes, a lot of utter failures), I'm more than a little nervous about depending on it.

So I *hope* you're wrong. My plan has been to have advertising, albeit at a very low and highly targeted level -- far less than the ambient advertising already present in Facebook. (Essentially using Gmail as my model.) I don't *think* that is going to drive away the bulk of the audience; heaven knows, a significantly larger advertising presence doesn't by and large seem to have driven most people away from Facebook itself. But we'll see: this is certainly one of the aspects of the project that I am most concerned about, and one that I'm lavishing more than a little fretting on...

[camilla-anna.livejournal.com]

...In regards to the LJ-stupidity, I have a paid account, largely so I can have more icons and no advertising. If I wanted a CommYou account, and it had the same choices as LJ currently does, I'd pay for no advertising. If the service was as useful as LJ (which I'm not yet sure of, though it sounds very cool), I'd pay at least twice what LJ asks for a yearly account before I balked. If I was a broke college student, I'd ignore the ads.

Oh, and in response to the previous comment, last I checked my gmails have ads. Silly, context generated ones (which largely cause me the giggles) from the text of the mail. And gmail is my favorite platform so far for email.

One of the strange things about ads on the internet...they are everywhere, and we strive to ignore them. Just like on TV. There's a huge social disconnect there somewhere, does internet advertising work? I'd say I click on an internet ad about twice a year.

[jducoeur]

If the service was as useful as LJ (which I'm not yet sure of, though it sounds very cool), I'd pay at least twice what LJ asks for a yearly account before I balked.

I'm actually hoping to make it *less* -- my attitude is that I'd rather have many people paying a little bit that they scarcely notice, rather than a few paying a lot. I won't know the actual numbers for quite some time yet (indeed, paid memberships are at least a few months off), but I'd really love to be able to pull it off for something on the order of $10/year. We'll see.

Oh, and in response to the previous comment, last I checked my gmails have ads. Silly, context generated ones (which largely cause me the giggles) from the text of the mail. And gmail is my favorite platform so far for email.

Right, exactly. I like the Gmail approach: small number of ads, not *too* intrusive, and highly context driven. If I go the ad route, I'd like a pretty similar approach -- indeed, it's pretty likely that I'd use Google as the ad provider.

I'd say I click on an internet ad about twice a year.

Yep. But that's why I'm keeping the company lean: so that I can still function on a low clickthrough like that. I don't know how it will actually wind up working (or even if there will be ads at all), but my mental model was to show just three ads per user session, only in conversations where there is enough content to stand a chance at getting something *useful*, on the theory that I'll get a few bucks worth of click-throughs per user per year.

If I can get a few million users (and heaven knows, if Superpoke can have millions of users I ought to be able to do so), that just might work...

[meranthi.livejournal.com]

Silly, context generated ones (which largely cause me the giggles) from the text of the mail

*grin* Did you ever notice that when you click on your Spam folder, you get spam recipes? :)