Are you the architect of the content strike? Well done.

It has started a debate in my friends circle...

But I think it is worth doing. Thank you.

Spectacular. This really is amazing. You should be proud of what you've started and what you're doing. Changed are happening. We will be heard.

Good job.

Personally I'd prefer if the strike also included not visiting LiveJournal at all (the drop in page views would be of more concern to advertisers) and was for longer, say a week...but it looks like this will have to do.

Thank you for your work on this, it's appreciated.

I appreciate what you've said here about silence though with LJ addressing the key issue for me (interests exclusion from pop interests page) and now further showing willingness to negotiate on the basic account creation front for those who were bothered by this change, I feel this is a significant victory.

Now I see that Anton Nossik has addressed the issue in his LJ about the statements made (and translated).

I don't know how strikes are handled in the USA, but in the UK they are often called off.

OK this isn't the Post Office or a train service where a strike is going to have an impact on the community.

While I intend to respect the 'picket line' in terms of not commenting on older posts in those journals and communities participating nor responding to posts in communities determined to stir things up and spam about the strike, I do feel at present that I'm going to treat tomorrow as any other day.

Honestly part of me always holds my breath a little when it comes to days such as Good Friday and this being the anniversary week of the Iraq invasion and with Bin Laden today threatening Europe and all that is happening in Llasa, I am keeping a closer eye than normal on the news.

Hopefully we all will have a quiet and peaceful Friday. However, if something unforeseen happens I know that this community will respond as it has in the past with 9/11 and 7/7.

I for one will still be following through on the Content Strike and encouraging others to do so.

I'm still on, as well as my comm.

Thank you for the information.
Sorry for having no time to retell it in Russian for my friends, I'll just give them a link.
Think, according to these apologizes the idea of temporary account deletion (as a variation of this 'day of silence') is not so good now. So I'll just keep silence for one day.

Right on! Apology is a nice thing, but only if it is backed up by action - which, in this case, should have been to revert to the previous situation re the basic accounts, no questions asked, no excuses given. Till then - let us continue as planned.

Clearly and unequivocally, LiveJournal has promised to inform users before any further change to the site that affects how we use the site, or demands on our resources.

They've promised the same before. That's what LJ Inc. and including Brad FitzPatrick was supposed to be about. It doesn't matter if they "recant" some or all of the negative changes, over the last year LJ have made it clear that they are against the users. If they don't delete journals, they'll blank interests. If they don't black interests, they'll find some other way to be disruptive.

The word of the people who run LJ is pretty meaningless now. I support the strike, but I will be leaving regardless.

(Here via... a long chain of links.)

You haven't -won-? THAT'S what this whole business is about?! You winning against LJ?! Are you effin' kidding me lady? >_<

So they took a FREE product off of the shelves and didn't tell us. Why does that upset you? That's like being mad at a grocery store for not carrying the brand of toothbrush you bought back five years ago, and being upset that they didn't tell you about it.

I find it all a little ridiculous, personally. :/

And even if they were completely honest and told you about it, I have a feeling folks like you would STILL be very VERY upset, even to the point of hysteria....and over nothing.

Are you currently paying for LJ? Is this the -only- place you can network? Why stay here if you hate it so much?

Oh, and a one-day strike? Are you kidding?? Why not try a one-WEEK strike, if all this upsets you so much??

Were you planning to make a Basic account sometime soon?! Is THAT why this bothers you? Why does it matter whether or not new members make a Basic or a Plus account? They're both free to use.

And did you -really- expect a basically -free-, but highly-trafficked, site to be completely ad-free forever? HONESTLY?? I mean, unless you're trying to find them a butt-load of money from other sources, I -really- don't think you have the right to complain.

Anyways, I think this whole thing you've started is COMPLETELY disproportionate to what was actually happening. I never look at the most popular interests tag page, but as long as an interest is searchable [and they are], then that's good enough for me.

Why it matters to you people that those things aren't the 'most popular' is absolutely beyond me.

Good luck with that whole over-reaction thing, though. :/

Edited at 2008-03-20 12:22 pm (UTC)

I don't think it's overreacting at all. A page is enough that it's symbolic, though not functional - and as LJ is user-based, disrupting the users is not the best thing that the users can do. I like that already the support that this thing has has attracted attention.

I believe I can keep my trigger finger away from that LJ bookmark for 24 hours.

Becky, your page is very informative and well written besides being very thoughtful and does not represent an "over-reaction" to me. Those who say we over-reacted to the loss of basic accounts miss the point. Sure, other journaling sites like IJ and journalfen don't have ad-free basic accounts either, *but* we would have understood a business-driven decision that was admitted to be such. And interests deleted because they might be considered inflammatory really rubs me the wrong way. I"m staying here but supporting the strike. Thanks for all your posts -- I even felt better reading your LJ after seeing some posts on the strike being anti-semetic -- lord, what's a protester to do with all these many factions? Thanks again.

Do you think the stuff in lj_2008 is because of the strike, or just because of the reaction through the comments?

I know some places have reported about the strike, but has anyone official acknowledged it?

(I'll still be striking, but the retraction in lj_2008 caused me to be outvoted in striking some communities.)

Having spent the last six hours researching the issue, I have to say that I'm really impressed with your commitment to action. I'm as-yet undecided as to my involvement in the strike, but it's looking likely at this stage!

Something slightly off-topic, but still connected: I'm a first-year Journalism student in Brisbane, Australia, and I'm hoping to cover the LJ strike for my assignment for Reporting. The assignment is a story pitch only, possibly to be developed into something more for the next assignment (but not published - just assessed). I just wanted to know if it would be alright to contact you (after the strike, obviously) and find out more about your role, in the context of this assignment? I can email you further details, of course.

Thanks for your commitment to change, and I hope the strike delivers some significant results.

I will not be participating in this LJ strike.

There are many reasons I won't participate, but the one that shines in my mind is that it won't matter. I also have a hard time really getting behind the cause. It's not that I don't understand why people are upset with the LJ/SUP, I do. I just don't think what they're doing is exceptionally evil.

This is a business. Yes, we are customers and the customer is supposed to always be right. But it's still a business. And businesses make decisions like putting ads on the site and cutting out ad-free free accounts. Don't like it? Go elsewhere. Or pay.

Simply, this whole thing is just basic economic sense. LiveJournal is a growing business. In the beginning, there weren't that many people as members. It's easy to say we'll never ever charge you. Ever. Because you can make that kind of promise.

Now, in 2008, millions of people blog on the ol LJ. Server demands are high. We see server crashes. It costs a hell of a lot more to run LJ than it did in 2000. So they introduce paid accounts to generate some income. Over time, that's not gonna cover it. Everything's just TOO damn expensive these days. LiveJournal is trying to figure out how to generate the funds needed to keep up with rising costs. Enter LJ V-gifts. Problem is, they're SO gay that hardly anyone uses them. Well, at this point, they say, ok, we're gonna have to resort to advertising. People will pay us for ad space. But we don't want to dick over our free folk, so let's make it still an option. More LJ users. Prices go up. At some point, something has to be sacrificed.
It's not selling out, it's surviving.

This has been the problem for countless other sites. So many websites out there really want to keep things free for as many of their users as they can, but a webpage COSTS to keep up.
Neopets, Yahoo, Google, Angelfire, Lycos, Geocities, the list goes ON.
All these sites offer free services at their own expense. But what happens when they can't afford it anymore?

I think another thing we forget is we're being invited onto their servers. I'm posting this, this very thing right now, to their servers. They have every right to tell me I can't post this. They have every right to cancel my account, even if its permanent, if they want to. Sure, I'd like my money back -- but that's the risk I take. They even have every right to filter user interest data, though the choice of what to filter is questionable -- it's still their right.

It's like being invited over to someone's house. You are expected to follow the rules of the house. Yes, your house may be far more liberal on the rules than the other person's, but it's common sense and courtesy to respect them, no matter what they may be. It's no different here. At all. If they say we don't want the fandom business here, well, then, that's their rule. Take it elsewhere. We may not like it, but... well, them's breaks, kids.

One of the LJ releases stated "No change, even the most correct one, will not experience some resistance," because it's TOTALLY true. Someone will always think that any change is unjust and such. I can list off a dozen offhand.
I see it everywhere. From Neopets redesigning their site to Warcraft players complaining because when Blizzard made the game fairer, their power characters became weaker.

The problem is basically this. LJ is not some company run by a couple of college kids anymore. Its long since become a corporation and such. Its just gotten so big. Yes, its unfortunate that a corporate attitude does lend to a detached air and that's an uncomfortable transition.
I myself miss the old days of Neopets before it became a multimedia empire.
Things change.
And their point is we can't please everyone. If they left the free accounts as is, they'd have to increase their paid account rates. Which would draw complaints from everyone.
But that's how an economy runs and it outright sucks. LJ of 2000 could not survive inside the demands of 2008.

Are you going to update your strike memo to reflect the fact that the removed interests were restored within days? As it stands, it seems to me you're engaging in misrepresentation of the facts by not doing so and implying it is still an ongoing and active issue, which is what many people who are reading this memo are assuming and getting upset about.

I am definitly still going through with this. Thank you so much for organizing this!

I wasn't entirely convinced about this idea until LJ's official 'apology' was put in a community that most LJ users don't seem to know exists.

Come Thu 8:00 PM, I'm logging out for 24 hours. I can re-post what I put up at IJ later on.

Becky,

I guess strike_2008 was inevitable. :(

I ended up reading a lot of posts about the strike after hearing about the anti-Semites trying to hijack it, and that reminded me to do something important.

Win, lose, or whatever, I want to thank you for running this, for giving a focus to LJ users' discontent, and for signing up to put up with an avalanche of comments, including vitriol from people disagreeing with you for a million reasons and, as you've seen, nauseating support from the kind of allies you'd much rather not have. Thank you.

Beautifully stated, Becky. Thank you.

And you're right--there really is a dialog opening up between Anglophone LJ and LJ.RU happening here that the strike/boycott action is facilitating and this is cool.

5 hours to strike time.

I'm still not sure this will actually mean anything to SUP but I'm in.

I'll be posting my butt off tomorrow to counter strike you crybabies.

If you don't like ads on the journal that YOU'RE NOT PAYING FOR, then do either of these two things:

1. Leave livejournal.
2. Buy a paid account.