This morning I received an email from someone offering to hack LJ in support of the strike. So I sort of broke strike, just a little bit. I logged in and opened an Abuse report, to give the LJ team a heads-up. I messaged a couple of people I know who are active in the Abuse team, or work at LJ. Then I spent most of the afternoon logging in and out again, nervously peeking to make sure no public pages were defaced and no offensive comments left on prominent journals.
Sure, it would be funny to see the login page plastered with a big picture of Frank the Goat wearing a muzzle. But this sort of script attack can harm LJ. I don't want to harm LJ -- I love LJ!
Just as the LJ management ends up hurting themselves when they forget that they are interdependent with the Community of Users, it hurts us when we forget our own interdependence on LJ.
LJ is the street corner where we hang out. LJ management keeps it clean and welcoming. They put up lights and set out chairs. When they set out a donation cup many of us give generously to help maintain our favorite place to party.
We didn't like it when the LJ management started covering the walls with billboards, but we learned to put up with it. This was still our favorite street corner.
But we don't like it at all when the LJ management tries to "sanitize" the party by shooing away people because they don't like their looks, or says that our friends are "freeloaders".
So instead of standing around complaining about it, we all left the party for one day. We demonstrated that we do have the ability to organize quickly and act decisively. We started the conversation about the relationship between the content we provide, and the place where we choose to provide it. (Google "LiveJournal Content Strike", for 192,000 hits!)
We hope this will help SUP understand that this is not LJ's party -- it's our party.
But, hey, it doesn't help if we deliberately trash the place.
Comments
I'm hopeless with this kind of things, so I was hoping you might have a way.
Before the strike I looked at the "number of posts in the last 24 hours" on the front of LJ, the number was 195.2 thousand, after, 167.9 ! That's 27,300! That's AMAZING! That means that 27,300 posts that WOULD have gone up (its Easter weekend, posting is high) DID NOT!
That means 13% of the posts didn't happen
That was part of what I sent Becky. Yeah, it worked, and the effect was huge. I also mentioned that the amount of posts held back was probably more, because of the many people posting more on purpose.
Hope this helped!
Considering all the posts made by counter-protesters and trolling communities set up solely for the purpose of countering the strike... I am BLOWN AWAY by that 13%. It's a significant dip.
What I did today, in honoring the strike, was to ready my personal server to maybe take a bigger role in taking our toys and going elsewhere. I'm also taking suggestions as to what us grey-hairs want in a new community server.
I'm thinking of being, if you will, an apartment manager.
But, yeah. Thinking we own this joint is misguided. We own what we own; we don't own this. Time to hunt (or make) a better place.
But I didn't post, didn't comment....I was a
verymostly good girl :)I'm not sure if my PM ever got to you in regards to a response I got from the LJ Abuse team, but I got this from them after leaving a complaint (admittedly I was kinda rude, but at the time it was just after Mr Nossik's interview and I was quite seriously pissed off by the idiot and blackmailing comments he'd made):
Thank you for contacting us about this matter.
We would like to assure you that Anton Nossik was not speaking on behalf of SUP. He is an employee of SUP, but retains no management or executive role in SUP or in LiveJournal, Inc. The opinions expressed by Mr. Nossik are his own, and do not reflect the opinions of SUP or LiveJournal, Inc.
Marta
LiveJournal.com
I am really glad to see that LiveJournal Inc is distancing itself from SUP's "Social Media Evangelist". If that's the attitude towards social media that he's evangelizing, I'm not buying!
Thanks for sharing Marta's reply.
And thank you for participating in the strike. Didn't it feel good to know that you could go without LJ if you really had to? And didn't it feel extra good to come back? :-)
I forgot to log out before the strike, but I closed the tab it was on and didn't come back until just now. I'll be interested in the coming days to see what the shakedown is.
Did you know that
All because of this little, ill informed, self important boycott of misguided entitlement.
I'm so glad that so many thousands of people have used this as a starting point in the discussion of how important the content is that the LJ Community of Users provides.
I've seen a fair number of people who are so distressed by the thought of losing access to that content, even for only 24 hours, that they've felt compelled to make strong, over-reactive counter protests like yours.
That, more than anything else, proves that it is the User Content that we want to see here.
I'm disappointed. I thought you were the reliable one behind this strike and you failed us. Thanks for providing content.
I provided no content on LJ. Unless you count an abuse report. Heh.
How does that work again?
But I did report the threat to the LJ Abuse Team, and I logged in to do so.
he says to tell you "If you're ever in Texas tell her I like blowjobs and beer."
Tell your friend my favorite beer is Guinness on draft. :-)
And while were at it, why don't we organize a similar effort for something that actually matters. Like, you know? The war in Darfur?