6 Apart and LiVEJOURNAL (I hate the capitalization from the logo) announced new child safe policies and tools for the site.
The full post (and 3800+ and growing comments) can be found in lj_biz
New functionality opens up a big can of “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” these factors once again feed into an innate problem of LJ.
Good:
I can type more freely with intent to limit audience rather than self censoring.
I have tiers of filters based on age that I don’t need to maintain.
Bad:
I can not opt out the age restrictions for my child.
We’re so early that there are many unanswered questions:
Ugly:
Can I trust the age constraints of LiveJournal
How abuse proof is the mechanism:
When you put the power of censorship in the hands of the community, you give that community a new tool. Tools can be used for good. Tools can be used as weapons. As a software engineer I will state firmly, often and with conviction
So, what is the innate problem?
6A/LJ and LJ before it has lived with one major issue since its inception. It’s the site’s biggest draw and the site’s biggest drawback.
LJ is a technology with MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder… or is it Associative Identity Disorder… or whatever the politically correct term is this decade)
What is LJ?
Is it Bloging site with Social Networking? Is it a Social Networking site with Blogging?
Because, dear friends (and that doesn’t mean everyone who I’ve subscribed to)… New Shimmer may be a dessert toping and a floorwax, but inevitably it won’t do both well.
Over the past years of LJ usage… I’ve watched mini exoduses (thank you spell check, I had no idea how to pluralize).
“I’m tired of this as a SN site… I’m going here.”
“I’m tired of this as a blog site I’m going here. ”
“I’m tired of MySpace, it sucks.. I guess I’ll stay here.”
“Ooh, DeadJournal is soooo Emo, I love|hate|don’t care about it”
The innate problem comes down to the tribal nature of community.
When I worked at E*#&hL#&k (Hail Xenu) one of the architects came in and told us, “We’re going to make an IM client.” Everyone was excited and I raised my hand and said, (Direct quote), “Why in the love of God would we want to do that?” (Yeah.. I don’t work there anymore) The architect (didn’t) asked me not to sugar coat my opinions and(er but, did ask me to) elabourate.
I explained that IM is a group of people that communicate, thus.. Community. Getting someone to switch IM’s is like asking them to move towns they’ve lived in. I use the example of the picture of a station wagon packed with boxes, the 6 year old girl in the back waving good bye to the 6 year old boy on the street with a dog and an overturned tricycle. The car pulls away. (Yes, I took advertising classes in college; I can be evil with the Pathos)
The point was that at the time this proposal came down there were three: AOL IM (who’d eaten ICQ) and Yahoo and MSN. The latter two of which were talking about combining to get onto equal footing with AIM. (Opinions mine and do NOT reflect those of any company I might share with MSN)
So what’s the problem and what does this have to do with a Goat named Frank?
LJ is stuck in that middle ground. It wants to be a Blogging utility. Unfortunately, it also wants to be a social networking system. Any LJ user who’s looked beyond their own journal can tell you about the controversy about calling it a friend‘s list.
So.. it is a place for you to exercise your free speech, as long as your community doesn’t object.
Much like tobacco, and software… once you get hooked, it gets harder and harder to walk away. People gawk at me because I have 6 emails and 10 IM accounts. Trust me… I’d rather have 1. 1 account that is Andrei @ world. And I say who reaches me on what terms. Unfortunately, I have yet to master the ability of saying, “This is the site that does it. EVERYONE ELSE CHANGE”
I know this because only about .5% of the people I track have come to Facebook after 3 1/2 strong recommendations (the 1/2 one can be viewed as self referential to the statement before the parenthetical. ha!)
So… what are your choices?
1) Keep adding IM’s and SN sites and blogs and deal with the fact that you will need that to track everyone and get the freedom you want.
2) Find one that meets your needs and stay with it hoping that you will be followed and tracked by the people who don’t follow
3) Figure out what you need in the online world that will solve the problems and make it or get someone else to make it.
Personally, I am sticking with LJ for blogging because I don’t really think I’ll ever post anything that’s really going to raise legitimate hackles. I also think that if this system gets abused it will be fixed before it harms the average user. (And by average I don’t mean 14 year old girl with issues
And for the record… I’m doing #1 while I try to find my magickal answer to #3
There’s probably more to be said.. but it’s been a long post already. I’m bound to have unintentionally annoyed people *shrug* and will either get lots of comments, or more likely most people will shrug it off, not read the cut, and 3 or 4 friends (the real kind) will post, “Amen”, “yeah” or the like.
I wrote my opinions. I’ve been doing SN for a “Long” time (measured by the concept)
I’m always happy to discuss the concept. Even happier for a paycheck.
P.S.: Yes.. New default icon to distract you from the actual content of this post.
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Flag me! I’m chock full of Adult Content!
First, here’s my take on the whole issue.
However, if you read the FAQ, your child (or my child, as she has an account here) can simply click past the warning to get to the stuff. All that she would be locked out of would be communities that are explicit or adult concepts… and even then, she could monitor them (watch), but not be a formal member. If you read the FAQ closely, that seems to be clear.
So… I think the whole bru-ha-ha over this is a tempest in a teapot.
As I said in the car….
LJ is stuck in that middle ground. It wants to be a Blogging utility. Unfortunately, it also wants to be a social networking system.
The thing is that LJ predates those awkward artificial boxes keeping blogging separate from social networking, and as a result I think does both better than most of the sites that do separate the two (or focus on one and add the other later).
Social networking is useless to me without blogging because there’s no incentive to keep it up to date once the shiny wears off; and blogging is pretty meaningless without social networking. I think the arbitrary division of the two is the awkward part.
Off topic
Your new userpic kinda makes you look like Osama Bin Laden.
Can I convince you to take one with a turban? 😉
Re: Off topic
I was thinking that too, but was too polite to mention it… 😉
Actually, my first thought was, “Wow, that makes [Andrei] look like a wise old man.” My next thought was, “might take offense to the word ‘old'”. Then I thought, “hmm, nice beard. Looks much friendlier then another person seen with a similar beard.”
i like the userpic.
Thank you
I don’t think I look like OBL myself 😉