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MySpace Users Revolt Against Murdoch
arclightfire writes "Looks like Murdoch's News International have stired up a revolt within users of the MySpace file-sharing site they purchased for $629m (£355m) last July, reports the Independent; "Angry members of MySpace, the personal file-sharing website for young adults, are accusing Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation of censoring their postings and blocking their access to rival sites. The 38 million subscribers to MySpace...discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens. The intervention by News Corp in the traditionally open-access world of the web - in particular the alteration of personal user profiles - provoked a storm of angry posts...The protests gathered pace, and when 600 MySpace customers complained and a campaign began to boycott the site and relocate to rival sites such as Friendster, Linkedin, revver.com and Facebook.com, News Corp relented and restored the links.""
Who ever suggested the net was free of censorship?
Seriously.
The opposite of progress is congress
Why, again, do we care about the cesspool that is MySpace?
Wouldn't the world actually be a BETTER place if all the users revolted, and the site shut down altogether?
What the Web won't be like in 10 years? (1997)
So much for corporations being less in control at the hands of the communities.
This is a perfect example of how to fight commercial censorship... vote with your wallet.
This isn't the sig you're looking for... Move along.
...belongs to those who own the presses, a fact-of-life with which I suspect Mr. Murdoch is well-acquainted.
"My Space." That's funny.
If the dot com bubble taught us anything, it's that "If it's free on the internet, it's unreliable and fully controlled by somebody who will run it into the ground". I'm costantly telling that to bands who rely on Myspace as their primary website. Very soon, Fox might, and could pull an MP3.com and just pull the plug, leaving thousands (millions?) of bands without a web presence. There also plenty of people who only communicate through myspace, and so when myspace goes, all communication ends, and they lose those friends. These kids who think they have the right to post whatever they want are sadly misinformed, but they are 12 years old (claiming to be 18 of course), so we can't blaim them for their naivety.
I haven't found one decent looking webpage on MySpace. It seems to be home for teenagers and college students who are too cheap to pay 3 to 10 dollars a month for a hosting company and who still think the blink tag is way cool. If you want freedom of speech and all that other non-sense on the web go get yourself a domain name, pay the few bucks a month for hosting, and a 20 dollar book on HTML. You get what you pay for.
-Dipster
I do. Gave up on the Guardian following the last election when Polly Toynbee's pro-Blair puff pieces actually started to get offensive (her assertion that anybody who takes the War and the handling of the occupation into account when making their voting decision is 'decadent' and her sudden conversion to PR (which, I suspect, she's never mentioned again) did it for me.)
Some people choose to buy drugs, some people choose to meet people, some people choose to listen to music, some people choose to....
A social network imitating society.. what are the odds?
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
McDonald's changed their menu to make money, not because of pressure campaigns. They realized that people were trying to eat healthier, so they give you a nice, healthy bed of lettuce and greens.
Then they pile on some fried chicken and 400calorie dressing. And charge you more by unit weight for it than just about anything else on the menu.
--Compulsion
True that is one of the purposes...ok it's basically the major use of the site, but another feature that it holds is to put up music files of the bands that are listed there. Basically most of the time bands will put a couple of free songs up there to generate interest in them and hopefully actually sell some of their music.
As stupid as I think the censorship of the internet is, it IS the site of the corporation. They can limit what you do on the site.
Oh well, more reason for me to steer clear of the stupid community.
While you're shutting down MySpace make sure you get every other means of communications those Pot Smokers use too...Cell Phones, msn...aol...yahoo...gaim...jabber...personal contact at school...ban them from the shopping mall...play ground...hell you could escort the kid everywhere he goes but I doubt this war on drugs mentality would make anyones life better.
MySpace was once a filesharing site--free online storage site, to be exact, like freedrive, xdrive, idrive, and mydocsonline use to be. They were once used to share Warez and music files.
So now, you don't trust him and he doesn't trust you. Sounds like my childhood, I _was_ that kid. Our parents were so fucking nosy and controlling that we would do anything possible to subvert it. My sister was off fucking in the back of cars, and I was smoking weed and dropping acid. I caught my dad listening to sis's phone calls with a linesman's test set (if you clip on to a line, you can hear the conversation), and my mom didn't even need to be caught, she would shamelessly turn our rooms upside down. I just hope you haven't shamed their sexuality in anyway, that really hurts to a teen. I wish you luck, it is a hard raod to travel, and now I have two children of my own as well. I would make sure your kid knows that smoking pot sometimes is OK, but becoming a drug addict is not. Maybe a lesson or two on discretion as well.
You can order the chicken grilled instead of fried.
As stupid as I think the censorship of the internet is, it IS the site of the corporation. They can limit what you do on the site.
What you say it true and I have been modded down to -1 for pointing this out in the past. At the same time trying not to be evil is also a great way of winning people over. When a company takes an anti-social tactic on a social site, then people will get unnerved and feel upset about it. Censorship is a great way of scaring people off, especially if you did not indicate clearly that it was one of the rules of the site.
The other problem is we see companys say one thing and then saying the opposite in the small print. I get fed up with small print licenses that I need a lawyer to decipher. How about providing some of that info in a FAQ?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Ah, bitter old people.
Who's the bigger losers: the people who post on MySpace, or the people who take the time to troll around MySpace for pictures of people to ridicule?
This is a proof of the free market concept of needing no regulations.
Customers of Company A (MySpace) don't get what they want. Company B (and C and D and E, etc) offer a better product. Customers complain, customers change hands. Company A either listens to the mass choice making going on, or they go out of business.
Isn't freedom awesome? Hundreds of thousands of people who don't even know each other are able to make a decision together without actually having to decide on what they want. The desires of the masses is met by open competition, not forced by regulations.
Up until 15 years ago, I could understand the regulations debate. Now that the Internet allows millions (billions) to review companies on a whim (and soon via WAP and SMS), the need to regulate would be better covered by more competition. Regulations raise the cost of entry to a market, decreasing competition, decreasing choice, and increasing prices.
I find it more than slightly humorous that the population of Slashdot is willing to put themselves on a pedistal long enough to bash the users of Myspace. Apparently after I went to bed last night the nerds became the highest class in the social order. They may not bathe, they may all die virgins, but on this day my friend, they can claim they are better than the population of another website.
Before you go speaking in generalizations about everyone who uses is site, even if they are by and large scene kids with poor taste in music who take bad photos, remember that the road goes both ways. There are plenty of useless trolls on Slashdot that you wouldn't want to be judged with, and there are scores of people on Myspace who feel the same way about all the people you're mocking them with.
Your Youngest son's biggest problem is a dad who considers "motorcycle stunts" safer than smoking pot.
Oh, and hacking your son's private stuff is also a great lesson on trust. My father pulled that stunt too and it cost him bitter tears of regret a few years after the fact. I hope your son educates himself on the practical uses of cryptography and cuts you off from his digital life as he probably already did from his "real" life.
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
You'll let one child perform motorcycle stunts and show off to his friends but you won't let your other child buy pot? Am I missing something here? I'd rather my kid smoke a joint than eat through a tube for the rest of his life. Not that I'd like my kids to do drugs, but you get my point.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
I hope people are finally Getting It that if we are to subjugate ourselves entirely to technology, if we are content to surround ourselves with gadgets and gizmos, that than perhaps it's not a good idea to leave every single last scrap of control over technology, from space stations to digital watches, in the hands of about five trillionaires worldwide. Can anybody see a problem there?
First off, there are more women on the system than men.
I've never been to MySpace, but I know a LOT of girls with Livejournals, versus a handful of guys. I think it's the social aspect.
And yes, if you look at teenagers' livejournals as an aggregate, most of them are pretty similar, because the amount of unique experiences in a teenager's life is generally far outweighed by the normal ones.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman