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May 18th, 2011
07:13 pm - What is this?
"This is a comment journal. I will be writing a slightly surrealistic blog about the night on Wordpress. I will come over to Livejournal to talk with people who are interested in some of the same things about which I write, and I'll post about those discussions on this blog."
- Posted to my livejournal on 07:19 am, January 8th, 2010, shortly before I let the journal site idle for a while, which turned out to be good luck for me. When I started hearing about censorship on Livejournal, I was initially skeptical, which might sound strange, because censorship is not a difficult thing to find online, and I've certainly run into a fair amount of it, myself. But, when I did a search under livejournal and censorship, what I found were references to a subculture that I hadn't heard of ("Lolitas"), which seemed to center around simulated pedophilia, and to porn sites that had been removed, from what is understood to not be an adult service. So, I concluded, hastily as it turned out, that the complaints were so much mudslinging. How wrong I was.
I soon discovered that a lot of deletions were arbitrary or sleazy (eg. a journal that was deleted because it linked to an honest, negative review of a business on the basis that it was "disrupting" the business), being justified by rules that were invented after the fact. I noticed that even though the people at Livejournal would sometimes back down if enough of an outcry was heard, and say that they had seen the error of their ways, there would always be another incident, and one name on the Abuse team kept coming up, over and over, in a very bad way, without Livejournal taking any action against the offending individual. After being given many chances to reform by a community that had shown them far more patience than anybody could deserve, Livejournal chose not to do so. The company isn't to be trusted.
This being the case, I decided to not get too deeply invested in their community, to limit the damage that could be done by their notorious "abuse team", which isn't even manned by employees, but by other users, some of them, by their own account, were still in their teens when they were given the power to delete the accounts of full grown adults, with no real appeal procedure in place. Picture children being given power over adults that can't be challenged, and imagine how such a role reversal would work out in real life. I'll still post to that community, but everything I post there, will be mirrored elsewhere, and I won't link to Livejournal, any more. Those I meet there will learn how to find me elsewhere, if they wish to, and if Livejournal (or its volunteers) should delete my accounts, all that they will accomplish by doing so is a small reduction in their own company's ad revenues, placing it incrementally close to its eventual, well deserved bankruptcy
Livejournal gets, at most, a sampling of what I have to say, all of that and more going to Scribbld, as long as Scribbld deals with me honorably, and that includes not subjecting me to absurd censorship. If, for example, this post were to be deleted - and I will be saving a copy of it for my records just to be safe - we would be done, here. Criticism such as what you just saw is neither defamation nor "offensive material" under any sane standard, and were I not free to post it here, I would have no use for the service, at all. What good is a blog on which one dare not speak one's mind?
Will Scribbld be like that? A search under "scribbld.com" and censorship turns up seven hits, all of them sites on Scribbld about censorship, and I take that as a good sign, but if not, then this is why my sites have the distributed nature that they have. I've moved before, and I can move again, if need be, without any serious difficulty.
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