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March 21st, 2008

March 21st, 2008

09:24 am [Link]

Yes, Dammit, I'm Posting... And I Don't Want To The child looks at you. "I'm going to hold my breath," he says, "Until I turn blue." Indeed, you can't stop him. He holds his breath. And, twenty seconds later, the kid explodes in a whoop of fresh oxygen, and you now know a very important fact: His threats really don't mean that much. If that kid had held his breath until he turned blue and passed out - as some children do - then you'd actually listen to that kid. You probably wouldn't give him everything he wanted, but by God this is a kid who's willing to go to extremes to carry out his edicts, and he has the willpower to carry it out. He'd be something you'd have to worry about. But the kid who whinily tells you, "I WANNIT!" and then accomplishes nothing at all? Well, you don't take him seriously. Every other threat from that child is minimized from now on - "Sure, you're gonna do that. G'wan, show me, kid." And you pat him on the head. The lesson is that you don't threaten unless you can follow through. Everybody knows the guy who threatened to get "his lawyer" when you posted something bad about him, and you laughed because you knew he wasn't going to do it. You laughed at the one-day gas strike people, because it really didn't teach anyone anything except that hey, the longest you can go without filling your tank is a day. And if you were a boss and your workers said, "I'm going on strike! Well, not all of us. Or even most. Like, some percentage of us are taking the day off from work. Just to show you," well, you'd laugh. Which comes around to the LJ Content Strike, wherein people are abstaining from posting for a day. To do "something." Except that I don't believe that doing "something" is always a good thing. For one thing, abstaining from posting only means something if you're an LJ junkie who posts every day. If you're the sort of person who posts every other day, or twice a week, then your oh-so-significant stopping is likely to be viewed as just a regular day off, lost in the percentages. There's no way to tell. And, let's be honest. I'm the 44th most popular person on LiveJournal! By LJ standards, if not real-world standards, I have a large audience. And yet, if every single one of you reading this were to stop posting - which, I urge you to remember, you're not - then that wouldn't be a tenth of a percentage point of LJ's overall stats. LJ's huge, I'm small, and the audience is very widely spread. Unless there's a lot more penetration into this LJ thang than I think there is - and I'm not certainly seeing it on my friends list, one of the more LJ-centric groups around - then our Russian overlords are probably not going to see a drop of a percentage point, let alone the five or six it'd need to be significant. In other words, I doubt the effectiveness of this scheme. Just as I doubted the effectiveness of the one-day gasouts. "But it's something!" you cry. Yes, it is. If this fails, you've effectively proved to our new Russian overlords that we complain a lot, but can't really do anything effective to punish them. A fact which they will, I assure you, note. And what are you protesting? Well, you're protesting two things: 1) Censorship, and: 2) The removal of basic accounts. And as someone who is a content provider, let me tell you that on the second point, you are big whiny babies. Seriously. They're not saying you can't make free accounts. They're saying you have to watch ads. You still don't pay money, you just have to have ads there. And I don't know how you've managed to overlook something as large as the rest of the fucking Internet, but you may note that almost every other site in the whole world is supported by ads. This is how people make, you know, money. It's just the way things seem to be slanting these days, and I'm pretty sure that if website X isn't selling ads or your personal browsing information, they will be soon. That's not evil. They're knocking themselves out to create something for people to enjoy. Why shouldn't they try to make a living off of that? And you know what? Goddamn, folks, when you get as much for free, bitching about "OMG I HAVE TO WATCH AN AD" doesn't seem to be all that much of a sacrifice! You're not paying them. You're asking them to do something for you. And being such a selfish git that you expect them to get nothing in return except for the lovely brilliance of your posts strikes me as committing the traditional fanboy sin of "THE COMPANIES I LOVE SHOULD GO BANKRUPT TO MAKE ME HAPPY." You can still make accounts for free, dammit! It won't cost you a dime. You just can't post for free and get everything you want. Which, I think, is fair, because I've often wondered why the hell I pay for an account when so much of it comes for free. I pay to support LJ, because I - one of the Great LJ Content Providers, mind you - really could get by on a free account and not care at all. I'd skip a few polls, but aside from that I don't really need an account. I've said that I've felt like I'm donating to a charity, not actually purchasing a service I want. And if I don't need an account, then chances are their conversion rate from freeloaders to paying customers isn't too strong. They need something to close that deal, so they can stay in business. It's just another bump to try to offset costs, not an act of purest greed. Sure, I know that brad says otherwise. He thinks the content is enough to get not just bodies, but money, in the door. I disagree with him (which is fine, since I didn't always agree with him when he was in charge, and they were not the good ol' days). I think that frankly, ads are not that big a deal, and that if you aren't willing to get a paid account - which is pretty durned cheap - then you should be willing to give something to the lovely folks at LJ, who work hard for you. And bandwidth and infrastructure costs are pricey at the top end of the Internet for sites like LJ. And if you don't like goddamned ads, do what I did! Get Firefox and an adblocker. It doesn't take much. You don't have to see them. But expecting a company to run on no income because I DON'T WANNA SEE ADS! strikes me as holding your breath in front of the TV until they take the commercials away. (And yes, I own TiVo. I am aware you can get rid of ads now. And I am aware that a large revenue stream now comes from DVDs, proving that technology changes things rapidly. Like, say, the idea that every site should never ever have ads. Thankew.) As for the other bit, the censorship, well.... That, I take seriously. Very seriously. I don't like the slew of "Adults-only" content I see when I'm not logged in, and I don't like the fact that they've quietly removed my interest in "sex." And they did that clumsily, and without warning, and I will admit that I'm not entirely sold on the idea of the Russian commitment to free speech. I will not support people who censor. That's not my style. At all. I'm seriously considering leaving. It'll be a pain for me. I'll lose the social network I've built here, and have to do those annoying double-posts for a while so people will know where I've gone (I hate hate hate the "This is hosted at my real blog" link at the bottom of many posts), and have to do my own Wordpress upgrades (I hate upgrades only slightly less than I hate security flaws), and lose all my Google inbound links, and have to deal with my own spam filters, and rebuild everything from the ground up. It will, in short, be a colossal inconvenience to me. But I cannot hurt LJ without that. The idea of the trauma-free, effective protest? It generally doesn't work. You need to tear part of yourself to hurt them. I'm not saying I'm there yet. I'm watching carefully. There are mistakes, but they could be genuine misunderstandings with a new company that doesn't really understand just how tetchy any social network can be. I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt for a little while, because as my wife notes, there are a lot of inherent benefits to LJ you can't get anywhere else. But if I think they're actively moving to alter my journal's content, or the content of the journals of others, I will go. I won't give a lot of warning. I won't make a big fuss. I will just take my business away with a post here, write them a final letter to let them know why I'm leaving, and I'll be off. They won't see the back of me again. And if you're serious, leave. I'll miss you. But I'll understand. Because you've made it a protest that means something. (184 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)