New news on the fandom front

[bladespark]

So some of you are probably sick of hearing about this.

But I don't particularly care! Skim over, don't following the links, or unfriend if you must.

Anyhow, after TWO DAYS of questions, and after taking to Cnet and to metafilter, lj has finally talked to lj. http://news.livejournal.com/99159.html

The apologize. Or at least say "we're sorry" a lot, but in my mind they're apologizing for the wrong things. There's no mention of advertisers. There's no mention of panic. They talk about looking just at interests, and taking down communities whose interests didn't make it obvious that the included interests of lolita or pedophilia or incest were anti- or literary in nature.

I call BS. I CANNOT imagine that the Spanish literature group didn't have something in their interests that made it obvious they were a literature group! Of course I can't look at their interests, because they're still banned. (And, in fact, I can't even find them. Where on earth WAS the post that listed them by name? There's like 20 pages of this stuff on my f-list now, sorting through it is impossible. Anyhow.) Lj does say they will be fixing those obvious mistakes. I want to know where they'll draw the line though. The survivor journals will be back, of course, and the outright literary stuff, but what about the Potterfic? What about the role playing character villain journals?

We'll see.

Comments

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

What about the fact that, thanks to legal rulings, there's no good reason for LJ to have banned any journals to start with?

Personally, I'm slightly horrified, but all of the important stuff seems to have happened while I was asleep. The perils of not living in the US, possibly.

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

Oh, and in addition: the offical LJ reply makes a very stupid comment - in claiming that because they say in their faqs that "Interests" = "I like", and this justifies their actions, they're basically saying "We're too stupid to realise that most people will use profile based tags to add semantic context to their journal of all kinds, not just the kind we tell them to add."

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Somebody has pointed out the obvious stupidity there. "So the thousand-odd folks who list depression as an interest think it's peachy keen?"

[rimspace.livejournal.com]

Indeed. If they were intended to be 'I like's, then why use 'Interests:' when 'I like:' is shorter and more accurate? Grade A squirming bullshit, that one.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Heh. Well, it's still ongoing in my book. They've made a statement, but it's an awfully wishy-washy statement.

Fact of the matter - for YEARS they have claimed that they can't take down pedo content except in certain very specific circumstances.

The somebody comes along and threatens their sponsors, and suddenly, why yes! pedo content is out now! Just like that!

They didn't take this stuff down because they were afraid of lawsuits, they took it down because somebody went after their bottom line rather than their lawyers.

[cow.livejournal.com]

istr it was lolita07 which is, as of this writing, still suspended.