Mass Deletion Leads To LiveJournal Revolt

Green Monkey writes "LiveJournal has been suspending accounts suspected of promoting incest — except that many of them were communities for survivors of abuse and people discussing Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Even after being informed of the problem, LiveJournal apparently refuses to reinstate the banned accounts. LiveJournal's official news blog has filled up with hundreds of complaints protesting the decision, so we could have another Digg-style user rebellion brewing." Update: 05/31 11:50 GMT by KD : strredwolf writes to let us know that in their offical blog LiveJournal admits to botching the suspension, saying "We made a mistake and now we are going to try to fix it."

Comments

Keep up the good work

[Cassius Corodes]

Jeez, how hard is it for these companies to just NOT piss off their own customers.

Re:Keep up the good work

[kestasjk]

I wonder if everyone who posts to livejournal will put incest advice in their posts as a form of rebellion, and I wonder if we'll put incest advice in our posts and signatures to show our support.

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0x14CE57

Re:Keep up the good work

[KingKaneOfNod]

You've got it wrong; they haven't pissed off their customers, they're probably in fact doing what their customers have asked. You forget that advertisers are their customers. Now they may have pissed off consumers who use their site (and thus generate the traffic they need to attract advertisers), but I'm pretty sure their customers (the advertisers) won't be at all upset about this.

Re:Keep up the good work

[someone1234]

It is somehow fishy that there are MANY communities discussing Lolita.

Re:Keep up the good work

[tirerim]

Actually, no. LiveJournal is only minimally supported by advertising, which only comes through users who have agreed to have Google Ads show up on their journals in exchange for extra features. Most of their money comes from users with paid accounts. If those users get pissed off and leave, the site dies.

Re:Keep up the good work

[aussie_a]

I doubt it

Re:Keep up the good work

[starwed]

Wait, what? I don't think LJ carries ads, at least, none that I've ever seen. (And no, I don't have adblock or the like running, nor am I a paid member.)

Re:Keep up the good work

[jx100]

You could choose to have a plus account, which gives (IIRC) most of the benefits of a paid account for free, with the extras being paid for by ad revenue run on your page.

Re:Keep up the good work

[tezbobobo]

Its the nature of those in power to force their will onto others.

Quite frankly no amount of people telling me how much better it would be with my sister is gonna make me want it;

As for those who are into that sort of thing, letting them post is not a tacit approval if you choose not to moderate anything.

Re:Keep up the good work

[tezbobobo]

And no-one could dispute that without chancing being labelled as a paedophile.. Keep walking with the masses man

Re:Keep up the good work

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. These teens are more concerned about posting what they did every 20 minutes than doing anything more than getting upset about this issue.

Personally, I haven't used LJ since...uh...um... I can't seriously remember. I used it for a year or so and dumped it when I moved my own WordPress site. If this type of thing would have happened when I was a member, I would have posted "incest" in a second.

Re:Keep up the good work

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll post the AACS key on my LJ userinfo if you do. That sound about fair?

Re:Keep up the good work

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to forget that LJ is supported by these people via subscription services. They pay for advanced features, mention 1 word and *poof* - account gone, no KY Jelly needed.

Re:Keep up the good work

[Anonymous Coward]

No, everyone should post loli

Re:Keep up the good work

[Opportunist]

So when I discuss "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" I automatically advocate drug use? When I discuss "Cecil B. Demented" I advocate violence against commercial film?

Can we at least still talk about the Teletubbies or would we automatically discuss gay issues that way?

Re:Keep up the good work

[instanto]

Well.

1. This affected a minuscule amount of the total LJ user population.
and
2. The unnaffected parties will most likely
i.) ignore it
ii.) get annoyed and move on
iii.) do nothing (see i.)

The result is thus:

a) Nothing except the affected parties will stop using LJ
and
b) It will not have any major negative impact

Because people usually dont care what happens to others unless it also affects them, and if it affects them at a later stage -- hey, they are alone in their fight as well. --

So to summarize:
Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:Keep up the good work

[Anonymous Coward]

M0therfuckers!!!

Re:Keep up the good work

[Baddas]

Well, maybe when YOU talk about Fear and Loathing, you're not advocating drug use, but when I do it, I sure as hell am.

Re:Keep up the good work

[Aladrin]

It's not just 'these companies', it's 'all companies'. We had a little swing back to 'the customer is always right' for a while, but we're headed back to 'grab the buck, fuck the customer' again now.

Example: Yesterday, I went to Best Buy because my mother wanted software for my niece. I find the require software, and I'm browsing and find Circus Empire. Knowing that my friend wants this game, but he's in Europe, I take some pictures of the box. The flash went off twice, alerting employees. I walk to the next aisle and look around and there's a whole gaggle of employees pointing to where I was standing. Finally a manager walks down the aisle and finds me on the next one and informs me that I cannot take pictures in the store. Why? Loss Prevention told him he has to stop me.

I told him I'd delete the pictures and then did so. But then I realized how insulting that is, and found him again and told him that I will -never- shop at Best Buy again. He told me to tell corporate, and I told HIM to tell corporate because I'd have nothing to do with their company ever again, then handed him the software in my hands to put back.

Immediately afterwards, I went to a competitor and purchased most of that software, plus blank DVDs and a $500 laser printer.

Are customers so dependant on these companies that they give up they let them insult them right to their faces?

Why are their prices so important that I can't take pictures of them? Are they -that- much higher that they know they'll lose business if anyone on the internet learns about it? Are they doing something illegal?

To be fair, the competitor said (when I asked) that if I took a lot of pictures, they'd do the same thing.

The furniture store, when I was shopping there a few months back, happily let me take pictures of anything, and even asked if they could photo-copy the pricelist for me.

Most companies have lost focus. It used to be about making the customer happy so they'd -want- to shop there, and now it's about making sure they are forced to, and making as much money as possible. I'm not against making money, but there's better ways to do it than be assholes.

Re:Keep up the good work

[Opportunist]

I don't advocate drug use when I talk about FaLiL. Or, rather, I dunno what I'm talking about when I'm stoned.

I do advocate violence against the film industry when I talk about CBD, though.

Re:Keep up the good work

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a billboard for some giant company by the side of the road as I drove by. If I had been driving on the road, I might have read the ad. As it was, my legal adviser advised me (or at least I'm pretty sure he did) that the speed limit did not technically apply to driving off the road.

Re:Keep up the good work

[giorgiofr]

Hate to brak the news to you, but he ASKED you to do something and YOU DID. Maybe grow a spine next time and tell him to call the police? He cannot force you to hand over your property (camera + pics) and if he tries you simply sue him, and you win.
Oh and in case you're wondering, YOU LOST. You ran away scared to another shop where they are kinder to you rather than telling him to suck it up.

Re:Keep up the good work

[Aladrin]

Well, that's a matter of opinion, I guess. I never liked them much, and I only shopped there because their selection was better than any other local retailer. It certainly wasn't for the customer service. (Last time I was TV shopping, an employee actually told me to get out of the way. I bought the TV elsewhere.)

I've always believed in voting with my wallet, and that's what I've done. So I definitely didn't 'lose'. I admit, I probably shouldn't have volunteered to erase the pictures, but I tend towards nice rather than angry. In return, I expect others to do the same.

Yelling at the employee wasn't going to do anything. LP told him to say that, and he's just doing his job. I'm not mad at him, I'm mad at Best Buy. Taking a few more pictures and they buying the software doesn't hurt BB at all. Taking my money elsewhere -does-. I didn't leave 'scared', I left insulted and angry. They could have done nothing to me that I wasn't going to do anyhow: Leave the store without a purchase. The most the police would have done was the same as well, unless I caused a huge disturbance.

I did come to the same conclusion afterwards, though... I should have taken more pictures right in front of him, and smiled. If he threw me out, I wouldn't have had to walk out. The police would not have been necessary, though. I'd have left when they told me to.

I know I'm going to use my camera more openly in more stores now, though. It's an easy and interesting way to find out the stores attitude towards customers.

Re:Keep up the good work

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG! It's like... a recursive comment!

Re:Keep up the good work

[Ed Avis]

What customers? LiveJournal's customers are the advertisers. They're probably not too bothered about no longer being able to put their adverts on discussions of incest or Harry Potter erotic furries.

Re:Keep up the good work

[D-Cypell]

Remember folks.... genealogy is an easier hobby if the tree doesn't fork!

Re:Keep up the good work

[AiToyonsNostril]

Yeah, no.

Fandom constitutes a great part of the lj stakeholders and it's fandom that SixApart have annoyed by deleting discussion, fanfic and adult communities. Those are the people buying paid accounts for their communities, themselves, and their friends. If SixApart don't do anything to alleviate the situation, all those people are just going to claim they are 18+ and move over to JournalFen (a lot have done it already).

Forgot to add another point: fandom is a raunchy little beast and if darker adult themes are threatened by deletion, it will move. I just don't think it will happen though because SixApart will not keep this up.

Re:Keep up the good work

[Eggman27]

As several people above have mentioned, LJ offers paid accounts that have many features free accounts do not (such as mobile posting, voice posting, space for several avatars, etc.) - LJ only recently started putting advertisements on users' journals, and even then, only for those who chose to have their free accounts upgraded to "Plus" status. Get your facts straight.

Re:Keep up the good work

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the terms of use say that the content isn't theirs.

Re:Keep up the good work

[bberens]

Their customers are not the ones writing journals.

Re:Keep up the good work

[giorgiofr]

Yeah, sorry about looking like I was angry at you for not "sticking it to t3h man" :). What I meant is that one should never let this kind of behaviour go unnoticed - it is however imperative that you never lose your cool while confronting them, otherwise they'd you out for a GOOD reason! So yeah, you reached the same conclusion yourself, be polite and firm. AND leave them without making a purchase: double win!

Re:Keep up the good work

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Somebody has to mod this up.

Re:Keep up the good work

[StrawberryFrog]

You've got it wrong; they haven't pissed off their customers, they're probably in fact doing what their customers have asked. You forget that advertisers are their customers.

No, you've got it wrong. I have a paid LJ account, that makes me a customer, but not an advertiser.

Re:Keep up the good work

[elrous0]

Does this mean they're going to ban all of us from Kentucky?

Re:Keep up the good work

[Pojut]

I always advocate drug use.

I always boycott drug abuse.

Two little letters make a massive difference.

Re:Keep up the good work

[mdwh2]

You've got it wrong; they haven't pissed off their customers, they're probably in fact doing what their customers have asked.

I'm a paying customer.

And if they are responding to advertisers, that's a serious issue for any site, but especially for LiveJournal.

For a long time, LiveJournal never had ads, and they were strongly against the concept. Then recently they said they'll have ads, but only for people who opt in for "plus" accounts, for extra features. Well, there was a slight flaw in that non-paid users who view a "plus" account will also see ads, but anyway - the point is we were assured that this wouldn't change anything.

But now I wake up to find that content is being dictated by advertisers? When did that get decided, I want to know. Especially as a paying customer - who was told the change to ads would never affect me - why I now can't access or have accounts that the advertisers disapprove of?

This is all speculation though - we don't know yet whether there was any direct involvement from advertisers or if LJ acted out of fear of annoying them. The WFI site claims they contacted advertisers and received responses, but I'm not sure anything they say can be trusted.

Re:Keep up the good work

[ehrichweiss]

Nope, that's clearly not what's happening. My wife, who wasn't directly affected by this as you suggest, has a paid LJ accnt and we'll be moving her shortly if they don't start straightening up fast. This isn't the first time that something like this has happened with SixApart and I'm not keen on supporting people who can't make good decisions concerning their users.

You also must not be too aware of how tightly knit a lot of the LJ community is. A friend of a friend being unjustly punished will still draw scorn and lots of it. As a matter of fact that's likely the exact reason you're hearing of it here.

Re:Keep up the good work

[sumdumass]

I'm willing to bet that Live journal knows it is pissing people off and is doing this with the intent of losing those customers loyalty. I think maybe they are attempting to maintain an image and those people don't fit the bill. Kind of like how some restaurants have dress codes for their guests to keep the poor out and stuff.

Businesses do this all the time. It is so they ca confidently charge more for something or somehow profit. Sometimes the objective is to keep anyone who isn't the same out. It is probably so Live journal can make X amount of advertising dollars more where X equals more then the combined revenue from the people they pissed off. It could also be were they seem a certain amount of paying customers not willing to pay with the content mentioned around.

Re:Keep up the good work

[ultranova]

I know I'm going to use my camera more openly in more stores now, though. It's an easy and interesting way to find out the stores attitude towards customers.

How do they know you are a customer and not, say, a burglar planning a robbery, or better yet a potential terrorist planning a bombing ? Their attitude is likely to be one of cold calculation: it is better to risk losing one customer than risk losing the whole inventory or the store blowing up.

Sure, such things are very unlikely, but think of it from the staffs point of view: they lose nothing if a single customer is lost, but could risk being identified as someone who saw the burglar/terrorist preparing for a strike and did nothing. Alway squash any even tiniest bit suspicious activity; it is the easiest way to cover your ass.

That's how it works, and why seemingly idiotic and paranoid practices keep on going: no one wants to risk being the scapegoat if something happens.

Re:Keep up the good work

[sumdumass]

Post a comment like the ones being mentioned. If they delete you and remove your account, then it would be obvious that they don't want you as a customer.

It may be all asinine, pointless stupidity on whoever was charged with deleting offended material. That person could have take the comment about deleting all sexually explicit whatever content to mean everything that touches the subject. Or as the case seems after supposed complaint not being answered, they don't want you as a customer.

Businesses have often done things to piss people off to end relationships with them. The have dress codes to keep some people out, require obscure degrees to limit candidates for job positions,or keep you in a database so they can just tell you to bugger off when you have a complaint. It isn't anything new. Look at bestbuy's customer service model, "the customer isn't ever right". They have done this because they don't want customers who are trouble makers and they have stores in places that no other company would setup and in a lot of cases it is the only option outside the internet.

So you have to ask yourself some questions about LJ. The number one is if what they are doing effecting you. The answer to that leads into do they want you as a customer. And don't use the "they make money" as a reason to believe that want you as a customers. Like it or not, they could be telling certain customer to go somewhere else.

Re:Keep up the good work

[mdwh2]

Businesses have often done things to piss people off to end relationships with them. The have dress codes to keep some people out

True, though they usually do this before taking your money rather than kicking you out without warning.

Re:Keep up the good work

[bkr1_2k]

This was actually in response to some idiot who claims to be "saving the children" threatening to go to LJs advertisors and showing them supposed accounts that are doing and discussing illegal things. The mass hysteria is a result of LJ going overboard with which communities and accounts they suspended/deleted.

Personally, I think anyone who lost data should get over it. There are plenty of ways of archiving your stuff, and if a conversation held anonymously in an internet discussion forum is that important to you, you need a life. Than again, I didn't lose any data either, so my opinion might be different if I were involved in any of the stuff that got deleted.

As for the advertisors being their customers, I believe LJ actually gets most of it's revenue from users with paid accounts. I haven't bothered to verify that, but it's the impression I've had for the last year or so. Most of the advertisers seem more like supplemental income to pay for the free accounts.

Re:Keep up the good work

[Aladrin]

I look all around when I walk through the store, too. It's obvious I'm checking out the layout and the cameras. They should kick me out for looking at things, too.

And I look ALL over the store. Another obvious sign of terrorist activity.

And I wear a cellphone. It could be a bomb.

There's a bulge in my pocket. Must be an evil terrorist device. (Car keys, calm down.)

They have no more reason to suspect my taking a picture of a display box than anything else I do. If I was taking pictures of employees or doors or security cameras, yeah. I'd understand.

This isn't the first time I've taken pictures of boxes in stores. My memory is horrid, and pen and paper are a pain to carry around. So I take pictures of things I want to research before I buy. (Which is just about anything these days.)

You can say that they did it for any reason you dream of, but the guy flat-out told me why he approached me. Loss Prevention told him to. No dreams of terrorist threats and saving the day, or covering his ass. His employers have ordered him to approach anyone who takes pictures. This is not 1 employee acting on their own. This is the corporation dictating policy.

Re:Keep up the good work

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you're wrong. We don't care unless it happens to us? Guess again. Many have already moved. Many have already down-graded accounts to basic (free) status and stopped automatic payments. SixApart's greatest accomplishment here was inciting all the fandoms to band together over this mess. If this hadn't hit across multiple fandoms the furor wouldn't have been as great. The users hijacked a news post to demand answers. 100 pages and 5,000 comments later? We've shown we will not ignore this.

Re:Keep up the good work

[metamatic]

Feh, LJ users love to whine, but they won't actually do anything. The Abuse team has been abusive for years, but only a handful of people have upped and left. (I'm one of them.)

Re:Keep up the good work

[Ed Avis]

You're right - I looked at the Google description which said 'LiveJournal.com is a free service for all your journaling and blogging needs' but in fact this is not true.

However, how many of the accounts kicked off are paid-for accounts?

Re:Keep up the good work

[superbus1929]

You're wrong. This has infuriated a lot of people, myself included. Livejournal is heavily based around fandom. Now a lot of these fandoms are, to put it lightly, fucked up. But these are tightly knit communities, and one usually has a link to another in some way, shape or form.

As for me, I already stated my thoughts quite clearly in my own journal entry.

(Full disclosure: I'm a permanent account holder, have been since before Six Apart took over. That means I paid $150 to have paid rights for life. So I'm a regular LJ user, though I don't use it for fandom reasons).

Re:Keep up the good work

[sumdumass]

Other management comes in, bean counters start getting vocal or they realize how much they are not making after the fact.

I'm sure best buy started out with the consumer is always right attitude while now that have the consumer's are stupid attitude. And they don't care if you go somewhere else. It is more of a like it or leave it type thing where they don't want anyone who doesn't like it around.

Re:Keep up the good work

[popejeremy]

But the real question is: Who are Livejournal's customers? Is it the people who post to it every day, or the advertisers? Is Livejournal selling a blogging service to the masses, or selling a locked in market to advertisers?

In this case, they've decided that the advertisers are their real customers, since this whole pedophilia issue didn't bother them for years until just now when the advertisers complained. And as soon as the advertisers complained, they screwed over their bloggers.

So, Livejournal is in fact taking great care of their customers. It's just that people don't see who their customers really are. Livejournal doesn't work for you. Livejournal works for their advertisers.

Re:Keep up the good work

[Torvaun]

Just to be clear, if Loss Prevention tells you to do something, and you do it, that -is- covering your ass. Loss Prevention is strictly concerned with goods leaving the store without money coming in. My best guess would be that they're worried about prices changing. Take a picture of a barcode for some cheap game, turn it into a sticker, slap the sticker on the latest and greatest. Actually, that's the best reason I can come up with. My best guess is that they don't know why someone would be taking pictures of software any more than I do, but it's uncommon enough that it won't alienate a large segment of the population if they say you can't do it.

Also, allow me to be the first to say something about CD images.

Re:Keep up the good work

[ryanov]

It's a little pathetic, frankly, that so many are up in arms. There are serious real-life situaitons where shit like this happens all the time (no fly lists that you can't get off of, voting blacklists, etc. ad nauseum) and there is no outcry from these jokers.

Fandom is a hobby, right? A fucking hobby. It is clear that LiveJournal has realized they screwed up and are working to solve the problem. I very infrequently get such full explanations for problems from ISP's or the like. LiveJournal and FastMail are probably the only two, in fact. Verizon and the rest can't be bothered and really don't care about your problems.

I sympathize with them... they are a rather small company with a huge userbase to deal with, and they are human. Mistakes are often made when major searches for bad content are conducted, and clearly they fucked this one up. What bothers me is that you have these pathetic simps complaining that "Oh, I was so hurt and confused when my LJ was suspended." Jesus, write support a note and take a walk for 30 mins -- no one dies if an LJ account is suspended. If they screw you too many times, go someplace else... but the whole idea that a few days without an account (LJ is always crediting people when there is even the smallest outage, many of which I don't even notice) is like some major cause for alarm, and sounds like therapy for some of these folks, is really just lamer than lame.

Re:Keep up the good work

[smellsofbikes]

For the record, the system for figuring out who were Bad People and who weren't was scanning the users' information pages, looking for interests that fuzzily matched 'incest' (or 1nc3s+') or 'non-con' or the like. A fairly large number of people -- over 15%, given my random sampling, and that's bigger than it'd seem given that probably half the user accounts are no longer in use -- have changed their interests list to read just 'censorship' or some superset of it. (Censoring-bastard-LJ-admins, logical fallacy, and the like...)

Re:Keep up the good work

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a bulge in my pocket. Must be an evil terrorist device.

So, is that a terrorist device in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?

Re:Keep up the good work

[dglenn]

"It's a little pathetic, frankly, that so many are up in arms. There are serious real-life situaitons where shit like this happens all the time (no fly lists that you can't get off of, voting blacklists, etc. ad nauseum) and there is no outcry from these jokers."

No outcry?! I hear outcry about those (yes, more important) things all the time.

The difference here is that there was a chance of the cry being heard by the relevant authority. The TSA is not only unresponsive but kind of unreachable, the voting blacklists are implemented by folks doing it intentionally and unlikely to be swayed by complaints from the folks they intended to victimize -- in both of those cases, we have to convince others, our elected representatives, to care enough to act as intermediaries (unless we want to just skip the soapbox, the ballot box, and the jury box, and proceed directly to the ammo box). At LiveJournal, there's the possibility of directly affecting the company's well-being, either by removing our subscriptions from their revenue stream or by removing our content and thus giving their advertisers less to advertise on.

I do agree that those other outrages are more important, and that it would be good to see people get as active about them as they've been about this, but a) saying that they don't complain at all about the no-fly list and caging and such is unfair, and b) after a few cranial collisions with a brick wall, it gets harder to convince people to keep trying instead of falling prey to "learned helplessness".

Hey, who knows, maybe (putting on my biggest optimist-hat, the one with the brim that obscures my vision) maybe this episode will wind up making a bunch of LJers feel empowered and make them a little bit more likely to heed the call to push for those larger wrongs to be corrected as well...

Re:Keep up the good work

[Buran]

So you're okay with censorship, so long as it happens in a medium that you personally happen to think is lame, you're okay with the fact that it's now "supportive" of rape, incest, abuse, etc., to state that you are interested in it or that you wish your support group to be found in searches related to such topics. Got it.

I've got news for you: it's still censorship, and just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's right or acceptable. For some people, that "fucking hobby" can make a huge difference in their lives. I know several sexual abuse survivors who deal with their issues by discussing them in blogs and forums, and their support structure was torn away when some "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" asshole decided that they were offended by such things and went running to mommy screaming about some imagined slight.

Think before you open your mouth and consider the fact that sneering at other peoples' chosen form of communication just makes you look like an elitist asshole.

Re:Keep up the good work

[Buran]

15,000+ complaints about this issue (that I know of personally) do a damn good job of hinting that, if that may have been true in the past, things may very well be changing. There's always a tipping point and it looks like this may possibly have been it. (no telling yet, though).

Re:Keep up the good work

[Khyber]

The customers did not ask - it's a group called Warriors for Innocence that got this whole thing rolling.

Re:Keep up the good work

[ryanov]

It's not even censorship when the company has come out and apologized for going too far.

Hell, it's the internet -- sometimes internet connectivity goes down, sometimes websites go down. If a website is life or death, someone needs to reevaluate their support structure. If it isn't, then stop using emotional bullshit words for something that is really just what it is: a company making a mistake and screwing up your access to a service you paid for, and deal with it without putting your emotional baggage into a simple customer service complaint.

Re:Keep up the good work

[Buran]

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

That's not for us to judge.

And certainly not to sneer at and call a "fucking hobby".

Re:Keep up the good work

[Anonymous Coward]

The family that cums together, sticks together.

Re:Keep up the good work

[Lord Flipper]

Does this mean they're going to ban all of us from Kentucky?

Not sure about Kentucky, but I'd have to believe this pretty well seals it for the the Newfies.

Re:Keep up the good work

[AiToyonsNostril]

How on Earth do you know there is "no outcry from these jokers"? It's not either-or, you know. A lot of "those jokers", me included, volunteer, send money to charities, write about stuff that's socially relevant to them. I doubt you're the final authority on what's worthy and what isn't and, certainly, your self-righteous anger is waaaay unjustified in this situation. And I don't really understand how you've failed to pick up on the fact that there's an entire spectrum of people in any reasonably-large community and, yes, there will be some batsh!t ones and some drama queens, etc. Don't paint us all with the same broad strokes.

Re:Keep up the good work

[ehrichweiss]

That comment is so full of broad generalizations and lacking in facts that I'll just let you keep on believing it to be the case.

Incest is awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

My sister is hot!

Re:Incest is awesome!

[Mr. Shotgun]

Yeah, but your mom could use a little work.

Re:Incest is awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

pics or gtfo

Re:Incest is awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

MODERATORS :

The parent is not offtopic, either in the thread nest or even in relation to the news article. Troll, overrated, funny or God help us Informative, yes. Offtopic? No. Incest is very much the topic at hand.

And as I was an only child, I guess to have incest with a sibling, I have to go fuck myself :(

Re:Incest is awesome!

[Poorcku]

Pics, or she doesn't exist!

Re:Incest is awesome!

[Workaphobia]

Sorry, the sibling relation is irreflexive. You could try cloning yourself, but unless it was carried in your mother's womb I don't think the resulting being would be more sibling than offspring.

This is perhaps the most disturbing semi-serious reply I've ever had to make.

Re:Incest is awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but, I taught your girlfriend that thing you like

Re:Incest is awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Think she's taking volunteers? I'd love to "work" his mom.

Re:Incest is awesome!

[Fireflymantis]

I don't think the resulting being would be more sibling than offspring. Aye, but still your twin.

Re:Incest is awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Vice is nice, but incest is best!

Re:Incest is awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you a hot girl too?

Re:Incest is awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

We're all hot girls here on Slashdot.

Re:Incest is awesome!

[Major Blud]

"You could try cloning yourself" Would that be incest or masturbation?

Re:Incest is awesome!

[Zenaku]

How's this for disturbing? If you are male and you did want to clone yourself, and I mean clone in the sense of the word where the resulting organism has exactly the same DNA as you, it would require that the egg cell used for the cloning process come from your sister, mother, grandmother, mother's sister, sister's daughter. . . somebody with whom you share a matrilineal blood-line.

This is because you have DNA in the mitochondria in your cells, which you got from your mother, and they are not replaced by the cloning process, which merely replaces the nucleus of the donor cell.

I was disturbed when I realized this, as it means creating my army of clones to bring about my total domination of the globe would require the cooperation of my mom, who probably wouldn't approve.

Re:Incest is awesome!

[smellsofbikes]

It's not incest. It's sibling revelry!

Novel Idea

[eggman9713]

If you don't like LiveJournal censoring your stuff, why don't you just startup your own blogger community. There are umpteenmillion of them already, what's one more. There will always be a demand for them as people continue to want attention.

Re:Novel Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Let us know who has the money to do that and we'd probably do it. Thing is we've been using and supporting (through ad revenue and purchasing Paid Accounts) LiveJournal for years. Why just give up? If something can be done to change their opinion we'd like to try that route first.

Incest?

[VirusEqualsVeryYes]

Does anyone else find the Internet a rather unlikely medium for spreading incest? Incest happens within the family, one which probably doesn't think much of the Internet. And if you're convinced to commit incest because of what strangers on the interwebs say, your family's got bigger issues.

Think of the children! To hell with the rest.

Re:Incest?

[TheRealMindChild]

Like you said... it is the internet. People are much more likely to say to random internet folk "My sister sucks on my cock and I like it", than they are their buddy next door. With that, you are just as likely to have someone who encourages it/discourages it/talks to them about it.

Re:Incest?

[laejoh]

Think of the children! To hell with the rest.

Never ever a sig so appropriate!

Re:Incest?

[Kjella]

Internet is a great place if you're looking to confirm your "normality". Between a few billion people, there's almost always someone that's just as oddball as yourself. So if you start out looking to confirm that lots of people have incestrous fantasies, you'll find it. And while there, you'll find sutble hints that people have real-world experiences. And if you want to believe it, you'll "find" that lots of people do it and so could you.

I think humans aren't wired right for the Internet. If only a few decades ago you knew a few hundred people doing something, it was probably something common and (so mostly) accepted in society. Your odd desires were maybe shared by one or two, tops. Now you got the Internet, and the rules have changed completely but we haven't. On the Internet, you can find confirmation for roughly anything. There's always a social circle somewhere that agree with your practises, if you look hard enough.

For the most part, this is a good thing, the freedom to associate with people that think like you and want to live life like you. But you should be aware what happens when you let your highly distilled social circles decide your social norms as opposed to checking out what your average neighbor and townsfolk are thinking about it.

Re:Incest?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are their own buddy living next door? They have two houses and/or apartments? What the fuck are you talking about?

Re:Incest?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude. Reality check. There are rules for proper raping of your slaves in the bible. God forbid you rape your slaves in a manner Jesus didn't approve of. Deviant is the norm for the lizard brain.

Re:Incest?

[Anonymous Coward]

But you should be aware what happens when you let your highly distilled social circles decide your social norms as opposed to checking out what your average neighbor and townsfolk are thinking about it.

Essentially, the internet is changing the scale of perspective, and thus pointing out the relativity of certain norms. (No pun intended.) And in the end, when you look at it these norms from the proper distance, I think we have to come down on the side of, "Who the hell cares?" So yeah, there are a few simple rules that pretty much everyone of sane mind would agree with:

1. Don't sexually abuse children.
2. Don't breed with relatives such that recessive disorders occur.

Beyond that, what does it matter? I personally have no incestual desires whatsoever, but as far as I'm concerned, what consenting adults do should not be anyone else's business, provided it doesn't cause harm to children in either of the above two ways. And it certainly shouldn't be any of LiveJournal's business. A website like LiveJournal is in the business of providing an emotional outlet for people to be honest (sometimes irritatingly open and honest), and that doesn't seem to be in concert with drawing arbitrary lines of prohibiting discussion about abnormal behavior.

Re:Incest?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

But you should be aware what happens when you let your highly distilled social circles decide your social norms as opposed to checking out what your average neighbor and townsfolk are thinking about it.
--
Support EMI and iTunes Plus, show the big labels
that DRM-free music works. Boycott the rest. Considering just how little the average neighbor and townsfolk knows or cares about DRM, I find the juxtaposition of those two sentences quite ironic.

Re:Incest?

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds like fun, got a reference? (not that I don't believe you, just that I want to read what exactly is consider proper raping)

Re:Incest?

[fyngyrz]

Don't breed with relatives such that recessive disorders occur.

Most people would not object to two people with a genetic disability falling in love, etc. The objection - the one you might make if you believe you have the right to tell two informed, consenting adults what to do, that is - is centered around breeding. Breeding can be controlled. The problem for society is those people on the left side of the gaussian who fail to exert such control... still, if we're not going to tell people with congenital defects they can't have relationships, it pretty much torpedos the rational arguments against incest and turns them into classed prejudice instead of reason.

Re:Incest?

[Anonymous Coward]

Normal raping
Slavery (a little rape)
Incest specifically
How to properly commit warcrimes including rape
God demands animal sacrifice for menstration and ejactulation

Re:Incest?

[miruku]

It's not an IT problem, it's an HR problem.

Re:Incest?

[Stormwatch]

Never ever a sig so appropriate!

This phrase no verb.

Re:Incest?

[Opportunist]

Please remind me to kill myself should I ever be considered "normal".

What's "normal", if I may ask? Doing the same as the people around you? Individuality is ok, as long as everyone does it?

Quite a slippery slope if you ask me. Think back a few decades and tell me, what did people think about gay people? What did they think about people living together "in sin"? What about single moms? Hell, what about working women? And don't make me play the race card...

I'd be wary with judgements like "it's not normal when the average person around you doesn't think so".

Re:Incest?

[Threni]

> Internet is a great place if you're looking to confirm your "normality".

For varying values of normality...

Re:Incest?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

What's "normal", if I may ask?

"Normal" is a well defined statistical term. Specifically in most circumstances, "normal" refers to the statistical mean of some value among individuals in a population.

What most people don't understand is that the normal, in and of itself, is not really very representative of the population. In fact, in almost all cases, there are no individuals in the entire population who's value agrees with the normal or mean. Best example, families have on average 1.69 children, but there is no one family with 1 and 69 hundredths children. Normal height could be, say, 6ft, but if you went around measuring people's height with a laser, you would likely never find someone who was precisely 6ft. They'd be ~5.999ft or ~6.0001ft.

The probability of finding an individual conforming to the mean, or indeed any value, is statistically zero. (Specifically, the normal is a point on a probability distribution of Lebesgue measure zero, but I digress.)

A better statistical measure of a population is it's variance, in conjunction with its normal or mean. With both of these values, you can give accurate estimations of the probability that someone's height will be between 5.5ft and 6ft, or whether they will have 1 or two children. Variance is almost never quoted, but it is as vital a statistic as the mean itself. Without it, the mean is a relatively useless statistic.

The mean of a randomly selected number between 4 and 8 is 6, the same as the mean of height in most populations. Height is not random, and has a different variance, but most modern junk news reports essentially do not distinguish between a random variable and a normally distributed one.

Effectively, when most people hear a statistic about the normal, average or mean, they probably implicitly assume that the variance is close to zero, in other words that the vast majority of the population hugs very close to the mean. In the age of mass production, it's easy to see why people who see row upon row of identical goods would think that human beings are essentially all equivalent with only exceptionally minor difference and the occasional "dud" here and there.

But humanity is much more diverse than most people are willing to admit. Yes we mostly have two hands and two eyes, etc, but the variation in our habits, temperaments, preferences, heights, weights, talents and skills. I'm not a eugenicist who only sees a one dimensional bell curve of humanity. I see a distribution with thousands if not millions of axes, and I think that the variation and diversity in humanity is a benefit to everyone, and that everyone can potentially put their individual talents to good use. Most people don't agree with this. They think we should try to shift the mean to "improve" the whole population. Instead what we should really be trying to do is increase the variance, on all the axes.

The internet is helping to increase the variance in our populations. People are better able to find things they enjoy and are good at rather than be corralled into the bottom end of a bureaucrat's bell curve. The internet enables people. Some people don't like this. They want "normality". They want a smaller variance. They want to feel secure. They'll use examples like incest, pedophiles, terrorists, etc, etc to frighten others away from the potential of the internet. They say they want to make "the children" etc, safer, but what they really want is the entire population to have a smaller variance, to be like those rows and rows of perfectly identical widgets. They don't do this because they are evil, they do it because they are afraid.

All across the world the internet is being censored, reduced and reigned in by both governments and by companies like Livejournal. They are getting away with it because people have put their trust these entities, and by and large, support their actions. Most people don't want that higher variance. Most people you speak to will support Livejournal here. It's a depressing statement but the fact is that the majority of the population will never see the connection between the hysteria over "deviant" groups online and the slow loss of their own rights in that sphere. A great number of them simply will not care.

Re:Incest?

[Opportunist]

Not trying to introduce even more statistics into Psychology, but here's something for research: The standard deviation in deviant groups. :)

The problem is, with less variance, our species in general suffers. When you look at biology, the real leap sexual reproduction introduced was the ability to create changes, or "deviations", from the parents faster. Before sexual reproduction, the only way to procreate was essentially cloning. That will, over generations, through mutations, also create variance, of course, but much, much slower.

Now, organisms able to reproduce asexually usually have a high turnover rate, granted, with a generation being often a matter of minutes, given a beneficial environment, but given our reproduction rate of at the very least 12 years between generations already puts a biological limit to our ability to adapt. Sexual reproduction means more diversity, thus genetic changes already from generation to generation instead of a mutation every hundred generations.

When people now advocate reducing that variation and limiting it to the least possible deviation it kinda ... well, I gotta say it, it kinda smells like advocating incest...

Re:Incest?

[Anonymous Coward]

Something kind of weird I've always wondered about. www.literotica.com is a website where authors of naughty stories can post their creations to be read by others. What's weird is the number of stories in each category. Incest stories are the second most common story type, between "Erotic Couplings" and "BDSM." Can we look at this list as representative of the general population's sexual interests? If so, what does that say about us? The list of categories and the number of stories in each is below, helpfully sorted by number of stories...

Erotic Couplings - Wild one-on-one consensual sex. (21121)

Incest/Taboo - Keeping it in the family. (13935)

BDSM - Bondage, D/s, and other power games. (10890)

Loving Wives - Tales of adventurous married women & their mates. (10657)

Group Sex - Orgies, swingers, and others. (9015)

Exhibitionist & Voyeur - Watching, and being watched. (6377)

NonConsent/Reluctance - Fantasies of control. (6193)

Romance - Candlelight, wine, and a soft kiss. (5986)

Lesbian Sex - Women who love other women. (5590)

Novels and Novellas - Erotic fiction with a broader scope. (4896)

Mature - May / December lust & love affairs. (4139)

Fetish - Feet, panties, transexual love, and other kinky things. (3918)

Gay Male - Men loving men. (3801)

Celebrities - Parodies & erotic fan fiction about famous people. (3771)

Interracial Love - It's all black & white, and white & Asian, and... (3325)

Sci-Fi & Fantasy - Erotic tales set in futuristic or fantastic worlds. (2926)

First Time - Memories & stories of peoples first times. (2227)

Anal - The butt, and nothing but. (1855)

NonHuman - Aliens, ghosts, androids, and more. (1831)

Transsexuals & Crossdressers - Erotic tales of gender bending fun. (1519)

Non-Erotic - Fiction without a sexual focus. (1510)

Toys & Masturbation - Battery-operated vegetables, etc. (1397)

Humor & Satire - A humorous take on all things sex. (1172)

Mind Control - Erotic hypnosis and mind control. (1170)

Erotic Horror - Bizarre, shocking, scary, and sometimes sexy. (1001)

Letters & Transcripts - Fictional erotic correspondence. (674)

Reviews & Essays - Your take on art, films, & all things sexual. (538)

How To - Advice and suggestions from our readers/authors. (487)

Chain Stories - Collaborations between Literotica authors. (389)

Text With Audio - Erotica with aural accompaniment. (313)

Illustrated - Erotica with accompanying original visual artwork. (171)

Non-English - Erotic stories in other languages. (1)

Re:Incest?

[Anonymous Coward]

actually,it's only one of the arguments. what carries far more weight, at least imho, is that incest is often not between two consenting, independent adults, but between a stronger (father, older brother, etc.) and a weaker (daughter, younger sibling) partner. So it's prohibited by the same argument as a teacher not being allowed to have sex with school children: the possibility of abuse of power is too great.

Re:Incest?

[Virgil Tibbs]

Does anyone else find the Internet a rather unlikely medium for spreading incest? Incest happens within the family, one which probably doesn't think much of the Internet.
It's a small world....

Re:Incest?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obsessivemathsfreak, you have earned your nick.

Re:Incest?

[Rob Cypher]

Excellent point! I happen to have a genetic condition (Celiac disease) and my wife also has a genetic condition (Psoriatic Arthritis). There's a high chance that any offspring we have will have one or both of those conditions (or others). It's a large descision that we need to make considering baring children. On the one hand, the conditions are not life-threatening and are mostly controllable through diet and medications. On the other hand we could adopt a child and not promote our genes but help society by raising excellent children. A tough one for us. I don't have any rational problems with people having incestuous relationships (if they are consentual). But I still think it's icky! :)

Re:Incest?

[mwvdlee]

One person's genetic disability is another person's evolutionary step.
Just because a genetic trait is different doesn't mean it's worse.

Re:Incest?

[Pluvius]

You're obviously not familiar with 4chan.

Rob

Re:Incest?

[Dragonslicer]

The difference is that you and your wife have two different genetic conditions. If both are caused by recessive genes, and the other person does not carry that recessive gene, your children have an effectively 0% chance of having either of those conditions. With incest, both people are far more likely to carry the recessive genes, raising the probability of children having that genetic condition to 25% (if both people are carriers).

I'm not really arguing in support of either side, I just like sounding smart, and this is pretty much the only biology I remember from high school.

Re:Incest?

[alexq]

For the most part, this is a good thing, the freedom to associate with people that think like you and want to live life like you. But you should be aware what happens when you let your highly distilled social circles decide your social norms as opposed to checking out what your average neighbor and townsfolk are thinking about it.

i wonder what the average neighbor and townsfolk would think about, say, a young boy who thinks he might be gay.

Re:Incest?

[Lemmy Caution]

Please remind me to kill myself should I ever be considered "normal".

Such a fear of normalcy is completely... normal. Nothing is more typical than the belief in one's uniqueness.

My condolences to your loved ones for their loss.

Re:Incest?

[bigdavex]

"Normal" is a well defined statistical term. Specifically in most circumstances, "normal" refers to the statistical mean of some value among individuals in a population.

I don't think this has much to do with the parent's point. Normal has an everyday, layman meaning, too.

Re:Incest?

[blahplusplus]

"For the most part, this is a good thing, the freedom to associate with people that think like you and want to live life like you. But you should be aware what happens when you let your highly distilled social circles decide your social norms as opposed to checking out what your average neighbor and townsfolk are thinking about it."

Unfortunately most "normal" people border on crazy if history is anything to go by, north americans have crazy religious ancestors who would today be considered mentally ill and truly fucked in the head, so what is considered "normal" is really just peoples racist prejudice against things they percieve (irrationally) as disgusting. Rationally there is no reason to be offended by sex between a male and female regardless of their relations.

In ancient greece and other cultures pederasty and other forms of what today would be considered incest were common, it's the cultural prejudice that determines what is "ok" versus "not ok". Group sex, bi sexualism, and gay sex is ok, but somehow incest is just "wrong" or "icky", it makes no sense what-so-ever.

Incest is a taboo only because it's a taboo, it's culturally transmitted like religion. If you rewind evolution *everyone* is the result of incest, you don't have many options causally speaking from a scientific standpoint. Many evolutionists might try to "cover it up" with gene-speak gobbledygook but at some point genetics points to the fact that people are the result of incest if chimps share 98% of our DNA what does that do for the arugments *against* consensual incest between siblins or adults? In my opinion incest is more common then you might think during pre-pubescent years among families with male/female siblings during sexually experimental years, due to auto-erotic behaviour, just that kids are very good at hiding that kind of thing.

Re:Incest?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not remotely accurate that aversion to incest would not be "really very representative of the population". You have said some things that could be statistically accurate in some cases but certainly not this one.

Re:Incest?

[SatanicPuppy]

Sure, but as long as it's not serial, it's not that big a deal. The weird genetic problems that crop up through incest generally only show up after two or three generations of too-closely-related breeding. This is basically because you're reintroducing double recessive traits through the allele's, rather than dropping by out-crossing..."Genetic disorders are normally caused by the acquisition of two recessive alleles for a single-gene trait." Other genetic disorders can be passed down regardless if they happen to be dominant (and some of them are).

So if you're got a super hot cousin, and you're holding back because of worries about hemophilia or phenylketonuria or something, you needn't.

Re:Incest?

[mdielmann]

But you should be aware what happens when you let your highly distilled social circles decide your social norms as opposed to checking out what your average neighbor and townsfolk are thinking about it. But I don't want to be average. I want to be below average! The Internet is the place for me!

Re:Incest?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if the whole world was crazy except for one person, that one person would be crazy and the rest of the world normal?

Re:Incest?

[Opportunist]

You, sir, are a murderer!

Re:Incest?

[VWJedi]

What most people don't understand is that the normal, in and of itself, is not really very representative of the population. In fact, in almost all cases, there are no individuals in the entire population who's value agrees with the normal or mean. Best example, families have on average 1.69 children, but there is no one family with 1 and 69 hundredths children. Normal height could be, say, 6ft, but if you went around measuring people's height with a laser, you would likely never find someone who was precisely 6ft. They'd be ~5.999ft or ~6.0001ft.

The probability of finding an individual conforming to the mean, or indeed any value, is statistically zero. (Specifically, the normal is a point on a probability distribution of Lebesgue measure zero, but I digress.)

Your last assertion is problematic when you look at data whose posible values are a discrete set of numbers (e.g. number of children is a whole number). If the mean value of number of children a member of the set of posible values (e.g. 2 children), then the probability of finding an individual conforming to the mean is non-zero. If the mean value of number of children is not a member of the set (e.g. 1.69 children), then the probability of finding an individual conforming to the mean is exactly zero. Your assertion does not hold for all data sets; therefore, it is false.

Re:Incest?

[Abcd1234]

So it's prohibited by the same argument

Then just prohibit adults from having sex with kids.

Wait... we already do.

Re:Incest?

[vDave420]

I think humans aren't wired right for the Internet. If only a few decades ago you knew a few hundred people doing something, it was probably something common and (so mostly) accepted in society. Your odd desires were maybe shared by one or two, tops. Now you got the Internet, and the rules have changed completely but we haven't. On the Internet, you can find confirmation for roughly anything.

This statement is just an observation that the internet is a massive force for globalization, not that the internet condones incorrect beliefs.

Unless, of course, it is proportional measures, not absolute magnitudes or counts, that you care about.
In which case you'd have an interesting point, devaluing of individual beliefs and group perspectives though it may be. -dave-

Re:Incest?

[Anonymous Coward]

if you went around measuring people's height with a laser, you would likely never find someone who was precisely 6ft. They'd be ~5.999ft or ~6.0001ft.

Well, you won't find someone who is exactly 6 feet tall, but they do exist. If someone who is ~5.99 feet tall should grow ~0.02 feet taller overnight, then there must be some instant during which that person is exactly 6 feet tall.

Re:Incest?

[Anonymous Coward]

still, if we're not going to tell people with congenital defects they can't have relationships, it pretty much torpedos the rational arguments against incest and turns them into classed prejudice instead of reason.

You're requiring a bogus consistency. It is not necessary, and not a good idea, to consider congenital defects to be the same as incest.

Incest (between close blood relations) is a clearly defined type which always increases the chance of birth defects and genetic disorders in offspring.

By comparison, for a person to have (or not have) a congenital defect is not nearly so clearly defined or discovered as for two people to be (or not be) blood relations. Furthermore, not all congenital defects are genetic in origin, so they often have no effect on offspring.

[One notorious example: quite a number of people were born without arms or with other developmental problems because their mothers were prescribed thalidomide during pregnancy, which affected their prenatal development. These are by definition congenital defects, but they are not genetic in origin, they almost certainly will have no effect on offspring.]

Sure, congenital defects or other evidence of genetic problem should be taken into consideration by people who are planning to have kids. But it really is not the same as incest, and the reasons for incest to be prohibited universally do not apply.

You can see the same kind of erroneous reasoning made about marriage (m/m, m/f, f/f) and the matter of making babies. If marriage really is mainly about making babies, then it is legitimate to consider m/f to be a separate type. Not all m/f couples can make babies, but no m/m or f/f couples can. But people don't like the conclusion, so they try to use sophistry to overpower common sense.

Re:Incest?

[fyngyrz]

It is not necessary, and not a good idea, to consider congenital defects to be the same as incest.

Congenital genetic defects. It is precisely the same thing; and it is a very good (and accurate) idea to compare them. Your argument about gay marriage is even less sound and I have already destroyed it right here.

Re:Incest?

[Kjella]

Well, if Apple gives the big labels the heads-up on my profile, they'll see I only have iTunes Plus purchases on my account. Now that's rather odd, since most of the music isn't available as Plus music. It says "market you're missing out on", and I don't need the whole world to turn. It just needs to make enough of a dent for music execs to go "Hmm someone is waving their money at us, why aren't we taking them? Hell, they're even willing to pay 30% (25% actually, here) more than we're charging for the DRM tune."

Slashdot and other tech-oriented sites that care about DRM actually *are* big enough to do that, maybe with a little help from pseudo-audiophiles that prefer 256k over 128k (not that any true audiophile would care about either format). If the masses are still buying 128k DRM'd music, let them. Just show them that they could be making some extra profit. Everyone in business likes extra profit. And you get music you know can be played on Linux and BSD and format-shifted, place-shifted and backed up without hassle. I'd say it's a win-win for us if we can make it happen. Which is also why I've put it in my sig on slashdot, which isn't exactly addressing the general public.

Oh well

[smegged]

If you are really that concerned about being able to post whatever you wish, register yourself a domain name (your own name or a variation thereof should be available), learn some basic html (or get someone else to do it for you) and post your journals to your own site. Include a few google ads and use that to pay for any hosting fees.

These sites are allowed to censor whatever they wish whenever they wish because it's their site. If you're upset with the service find somewhere better or stop complaining. It's not like the users are paying for the privilege. If the journals are lost for good then it really is the users fault for not backing up their own stuff.

Re:Oh well

[Aerynvala]

It's not like the users are paying for the privilege. Well, actually, some of us are paying for the services.

Re:Oh well

[TheRealMindChild]

You say this because it is about incest... but if it were about collecting magic cards or watching star wars, wouldn't your opinion all of a sudden change?

Re:Oh well

[Anonymous Coward]

Include a few google ads and use that to pay for any hosting fees.

Unless of course Google finds your content objectionable and refuses to allow you to use their ad service.

Re:Oh well

[smegged]

Actually no, it wouldn't change. I do use free journal services occasionally, and I would probably be a little annoyed if my posts got censored, but if they DID get censored, I would simply either move to another service or pay for my own hosting (oh my gosh, using my free will to boycott products I don't like - how horrifying).

If you believe that what you say is that important that it simply has to be on the internet, then you will make it happen.

The owners of livejournal have the right to do whatever they like with their website, provided that it is within the law.

Re:Oh well

[OverlordQ]

Well, actually, some of us are paying for the services.

Easy solution. Take that money, stop paying, host your own blog. Not worry about somebody deleting your blog (Well not as much). Profit.

Re:Oh well

[Aerynvala]

If it were just a matter of having a blog, then yes. That would be an easy and perfect solution. That's not all that's at stake. LJ's method of networking journals adds another layer to the situation.

Re:Oh well

[tirerim]

Sure, that's one solution. But suppose the mayor of your town comes and burns down your house one night. Yes, you could just move to another town, but what about all your friends and connections in your old town? They can move, too, but unless you manage to get them all to move to the same place, you're going to have a harder time staying in touch. LiveJournal provides a mechanism for easy community building (whether through actual LJ communities or simply through interactions via comments on individual journals) that's difficult to achieve with individual blogs, and that many people don't want to deal with setting up for themselves. There is a value to trying to maintain the existing infrastructure.

Re:Oh well

[Anonymous Coward]

And Livejournal's customers have every right to protest when the services they paid for are taken away.

So if your cable company decides to remove all the chanels they don't particularly care for *after* you paid your bill, you're not going to complain?

Re:Oh well

[kestasjk]

Play this down if you want, but this is no small issue.
On the spectrum of free speech from the least protected to the most sacred you have:

• Yelling FIRE in a crowded theater
• Ranting about vietnam on street corners
• Ranting about sin on street corners
• Criticizing celebrities
• Criticizing political figures
• Criticizing the system of government
• 
  Sure, this is just livejournal. But then Fox will ban it, then the BBC, then they'll ban talk about it in pubs and on street corners, no more right to peaceful assembly or incest rallies, then it'll just be a goddamn Orwellian society where incest is a thought crime.
  When people in power try to enforce their warped view of morality on good, freaky citizens it's time to found a new government.

Re:Oh well

[Hal_Porter]

Serious question. My company has a site which gets a few hundred hits a day. What sort of money would Google Ads bring in? It costs £10 (about 20 US dollars) per month, mostly because I've had it for about 15 years back when that was a good deal.

More to the point it, I host open source utilities that I've written that a few hundred people download a day. Is there some way I could moneterize this? At one point I put a comment about people emailing me if they found it useful. Well I actually got more emails than I could answer. So presumably, I could say "please visit our sponsors" and I'd get a decent click rate.

Mind you, I'm not sure what Google Ads policy on this is. Maybe I should put a Paypal donation on there instead. I only want text ads too, the site has a no graphics retro feel to it.

To be honest my company pays the tenner a month because the site occasionally brings in paid work so it's not really that urgent. Mind you, I like the idea of the site being self supporting, and it seems like it could be done with a bit of thought. And it makes coding and giving away the results seem like a better use of my time.

Has anyone got any experience of this?

Re:Oh well

[smegged]

Even in the US your right to free speech constitutionally only extends to the level that the government is not allowed to interfere. It never states anything about private companies. If you are on someone else's property, they have the right to evict you. If you are using someone else's web site they have the right to cancel your account.

Having said that I will say that the paid users of the site do have a right to complain if they are the ones who are being targeted. Again, if I were banned I would be moving instantly to another service and not returning, particularly if I was a paying customer (after filing a "I was hardly done-by so you can redeem yourselves by giving me free stuff" complaint).

Re:Oh well

[OverlordQ]

LJ's method of networking journals adds another layer to the situation.

No it doesn't. It's called an opportunity cost, might take an Econ class some time. You forgo the handy networking cruft, in exchange for no censorship. Or looking at it the other way, you give up the ability to post whatever you want, in exchange for whatever these networking things you're talking about are.

Re:Oh well

[aussie_a]

Your own name or a variation thereof should be available You'd think so, wouldn't you? :( Sincerely John Smith

Re:Oh well

[Crizp]

So it's really all just a circle jerk after all -- your own content doesn't matter, as long as everyone can see how many "cool people" you're networked with. Right?

Re:Oh well

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the most nonsensical retort I've ever heard. Arsonist mayors? WTF?

I bet I know somebody who's spending the night listening to emo and writing shitty poetry on his blog about this...

LiveJournal provides a mechanism for easy community building

How useful is "community building" when LiveJournal can arbitrarily decide to delete your account with little or no oversight, without appeal? If "community building" is that important to you, you're better off buying a domain, getting a decent host and creating your own site.

Re:Oh well

[Aerynvala]

Yes. That's exactly what I said. You've got mad reading skillz there.

Re:Oh well

[Lemmy Caution]

These "just move your business" type of posts whenever there's any story about a company behaving badly with regards to its customers or employees puzzle me a little. Are you saying that they shouldn't be complaining? Just meekly folding up their journals, transcribing or exporting all the data, and finding another service and then hope that the new service behaves no differently?

I think raising a big fuss about it is actually a better response, accompanied by or followed by a move to another provider. The bigger a noise is made about, the bigger the message that is given to the industry as a whole.

Re:Oh well

[rtb61]

More accurately.

1. Create virtual community.

2. Get plenty of users by not being control freaks.

3. Sell to advertising based corporation.

4. Shit loads of profit

5. Advertising corporations are basically control freaks ie. buy what we tell you to buy, 'NOW'.

6. Marketdroids piss off all the users by trying to control them, and the users look for another site.

7. See step 1.

Some where in there, a whole bunch of share holders lose a ton of money paying way to much for a site that has now been destroyed in the name of trying to sell a whole lot of largely worthless crap. Don't you just love those marketdroids, well, as long as they can keep convincing the share holders that they know what they are doing, they will survive, and continue to flood every possible area of human interaction with - "bull shit".

Re:Oh well

[Daniel Dvorkin]

This kind of response -- "If you don't like what Company X is doing, do it yourself" -- comes up every time any kind of corporate misbehavior is discussed, and it seems to me that the people who say it don't understand the concept of "middle ground." Look, I like LJ. It's a good service for a good price. I don't have any particular desire to set up my own blog; I'd rather use theirs, and I'm willing to pay for it. So, as a paying customer, it's my hope that when they do something I don't like, I can persuade them to change their ways by complaining about it.

If every single person who was dissatisfied by every single thing every single company did just went off and did their own thing, let's face it, the economy would fall apart. Just as the "four boxes" should carefully be used in the proper order when trying to change the government -- jump ahead from soap to ammo, and you'll quickly find yourself alone and in a heap of trouble -- so there is a reasonable continuum of customer response to corporate action, from "enthusiastic recommendation" on one extreme to "boycott" on the other. And there's a whole lot in between.

Re:Oh well

[lahi]

It never ceases to amaze me how we remain bound by real-world limitation, which we carry into the virtual world of the Internet as metaphors. Although useful to make the experience digestable, it is sometimes a hindrance, and not really necessary.

On the Internet, you can have as many copies of your house as you like. This will make it a lot harder for any mayor to burn it down. And your connectivity to your friends is not limited by location, but by protocol. If you stop using a proprietary site-specific protocol to communicate with your friends, and use an open one instead, it doesn't matter where your friends are located.

Infrastructure as you call it, which is single-site only, is not really Internet Infrastructure. It's proprietary infrastructure.

Of course it isn't in the interest of blog-hosting sites to facilitate blog-site interoperability, so such an invention has to come from other parties.

I used Usenet a lot in the past, and I'm sad to admit that I don't go there much these days, although I know the groups I participated in still thrive and have strong communities. However, I have found a few webbased boards for some topics that interest me. Boards that are very useful. Also some wikis.

However, an unpleasant experience in the past caused me to think about this issue. Let me explain the experience first. I visited often a place for Danish skeptics, skeptica.dk. At one point a third interested party offered the site to host a forum for the site. However, after a while, the third party, being part of a movement that suddenly found themselves under the conspicous eyes of skepticism, and received a lot of flak on the forum, their motivation being questioned etc. Naturally, one day the forum owner shut down the forum. Poof - gone. All the other relevant debate was suddenly inaccessible.

This could never have happened with Usenet. Why? Because of the distributed nature of Usenet. This is the LOCKSS project principle at work again. Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.

We need two things:
1) A way to distribute blog hosting, so that a blog can't be shut down by a strike against a single hosting service. I don't have a solution at hand for that.

2) A way to distribute blog and web forum comments, so that the comments are distributed in a shared framework for all types of forums. I believe the existing and proven Usenet technology is easily adapted for this purpose, although RSS might also play a role. For example, a new hierarchy, similar to the IANA OID hierarchy, or the Java package hierarchy, using DNS names at the top level, could be used. This way, suppose I have myblog, and you have yourblog. So you post an entry about Java and OOP on your blog: it ends up in a newsgroup, blog.your.org.java, and perhaps you even tag it with the OOP category, so it also is crossposted to blog.your.org.oop.
I post a response on my blog: blog.my.org.programming (because I lump it all into one category), and also crosspost to your blog newsgroups. In addition, I call it to attention to the existing Usenet community by crossposting to usenet.comp.lang.java.misc.
Of course, there has to be some additions to make this work. Perhaps a way to subscribe to your blog newsfeed. Authentication and authorization. Anonymity/Pseudonymity. Etc.

I believe this could bring the known synergy effect from Usenet back into play by making a new unified, but distributed, framework for Internet-based discussion. A kind of Babel-tower project, I suppose. Discussion would again be uniformly searchable (presuming Google would carry all the groups), and foremost: a discussion would not be orphaned when the forum goes down. I visited a great Joomla forum daily until recently, but it went down for maintenance and hasn't been up for a few weeks due to problems. Terrible. What if slashdot.org went down?

Again, as for-profit hosting services will not win much - if anything - from this an approach, they will have to be forced to use it by user demand.

Any takers? This idea is free for anyone to use. But please only one project - having different models would defeat the entire purpose.

-Lasse Hillerøe Petersen

Re:Oh well

[tirerim]

You are exactly correct. I would absolutely love it if someone would come up with such a system, though it should be noted that the authentication parts are crucial—the ability to selectively lock some content is the difference between addressing the entire internet and addressing one's friends (or only one's close friends, family, etc.).

Unfortunately, such a system does not yet exist, which is why I think many other posters are missing the point by suggesting that livejournalers just get their own domains and set up Wordpress. For now, LiveJournal and similar sites are the only ways to obtain the kind of networking and communication that they provide, so users are reluctant to abandon them. The public infrastructure doesn't yet exist, so we're stuck relying on the proprietary infrastructure.

And yes, I would help to create it, but I will freely admit that I have neither the drive nor the ability to lead such a project.

Re:Oh well

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The owners of livejournal have the right to do whatever they like with their website, provided that it is within the law. You know, I am getting sick and tired of this bullshit excuse. Google does something that people don't like, just shut the fuck up it's a free service, Myspace does something people don't like, just shut the fuck up it's their business they can run it however they want too, Livejournal ... etc, etc.

I call bullshit.

Just as all those companies have the right to do whatever damn thing they please, we have the right to call them on the carpet for it, in public and out loud. Sure, go ahead and vote with your dollars, or your feet, but that doesn't mean people should not speak up for what they believe is right too. In fact, its axiomatic that your vote won't count, your boycott of a handful of dollars won't make an iota of difference, because there are another hundred thousand ignorant people standing in line to take your place.

But one voice speaking the truth can be magnified by the internet so that it makes an impression on millions. None of these companies would exist without us, the little guys, creating the content that they repackage and load up with advertising. Speaking out is the only chance we've got to actively make them sit up and behave like good internet denizens.

Not every protest will make a difference, but acquiescing into silence because it's "their website" is guaranteed to make no difference at all.

Re:Oh well

[mdwh2]

Yes, we know basic HTML thanks very much - but plenty of geeks prefer not to reinvent the wheel. I was doing that, oh, ten years ago, but just like I no longer consider writing in assembly language, I prefer to use the tools available to me.

Furthermore, you're ignoring the community aspect of LiveJournal, in that it makes it much easier to read other people's journals. All too often standalone blogs seem to be read by hardly anyone, and even supposedly popular blogs only get a comment here and there, but it's commonplace for journals on LiveJournal to have hundreds of readers (and get tens or even hundreds of comments to each post). This is because it's easy to create a list of journals which you then read, and can easily comment on.

But yes, it is a big problem that all of this is dependent on a single company - it's as if using an email account was dependent on a single company, or relying on one company for instant messaging. However, "write your own HTML" does not solve the problems.

Technologies such as RSS and OpenID go some way to fix the problem (allowing easier reading of multiple journals on different sites, and allowing authentication without having to sign up for an account, respectively), but there are still issues, such as security/privacy (LiveJournal allows you to restrict viewing of a journal entry to a set of people).

It's not like the users are paying for the privilege. If the journals are lost for good then it really is the users fault for not backing up their own stuff.

Er, yes we are. And yes I have backed up my journal.

Re:Oh well

[ttldkns]

Dont bother with the conjecture, adsense is free. Sign up and go for it, you cant lose money. :) You aren't allowed to tell people to click the ads though, its in the TOS. A paypal donate button is also free. Put one of those on too. It can't hurt and people who want to support you can. Paypal also do a text donation link if the graphical button doesn't float your boat. ;)

Re:Oh well

[Crizp]

My my. I might have replied to the wrong post. My bad, I guess.

Re:Oh well

[mdwh2]

True - but I think this does touch on constitutional issues because of the suggestion that merely talking about something is in itself illegal. In fact, merely listing "incest" in the "Interests" list on a user or community profile was enough to get suspended. Supposedly from Livejournal's abuse team:

"we have been advised that listing an interest in an illegal activity must be viewed as using LiveJournal to solicit that illegal activity."

And will they unsuspend you if you'll remove the interest? Nope:

"Our legal counsel advises us that it would increase LiveJournal's liability if we were to allow your journal to be unsuspended for you to delete the illegal interests from your profile. This is because if someone were to remove the illegal interests from his or her profile, but was in fact using LiveJournal to coordinate, solicit, or participate in illegal activity, LiveJournal would most likely be considered to have foreknowledge of that activity and thus become liable."

So although no one's being prosecuted (which itself is interesting - if we really were talking about pedophiles are, shouldn't LiveJournal and/or the 3rd party which reported the accounts to them be, I dunno, talking to the police?) they're acting under the belief that it's illegal to talk about, or write fiction about (in the case of fan-fiction, which counts for many deleted accounts) things which are illegal.

And it's people like this 3rd party ("warriors for innocence") who try to make it actually illegal to talk, write fiction or draw pictures about illegal things, and even extend that to consensual adults acts which have nothing to do with child abuse (e.g., adult incest, or things like BDSM). I'm in the UK, and I see a similar fight here with the Government and pro-censorship groups such as Mediawatch-UK wanting to criminalise possession of various adult porn.

In that sense, this is more than simply accounts on LiveJournal (although that in itself worries me, as a paid user of the service). It's a fight about freedom of speech versus censorship, and I fear the belief that freedom of speech shouldn't extend to things some people personally find distasteful when it comes to sex is all too strong.

Re:Oh well

[Anonymous Coward]

I really do quite like how you say "even in the US". You should try coming to (1st world) Europe some time - we don't let companies dictate what you can talk about without damned good reason.

Re:Oh well

[rebelcan]

Could someone explain to me how communities on livejournal are any different than say, a Blogger account that has more than one Author? Or how "friends-only" is different than using the "Only people I choose/Only blog authors" option in Blogger? I only use Blogger as an example because I've never used anything else like Wordpress.

It just seems like every time someone says the only reason that they're staying with livejournal is because of a this feature or that feature. But then I go looking through the settings for my blog on Blogger, and find that if I wanted to, I could do everything in Blogger that apparently makes livejournal so great.

Re:Oh well

[mdwh2]

So it's really all just a circle jerk after all -- your own content doesn't matter, as long as everyone can see how many "cool people" you're networked with. Right?

Yes, I know the concept of having "friends", and also using new-fangled technologies like The Internet to help communicate with them when you're not around them, may seem bizarre to many people on Slashdot, and be seen as one of those "cool" fads, but we're not all like this.

Re:Oh well

[Crizp]

The Internet is a means of communication, you say? I always thought it was some new kind of sewage system.

Re:Oh well

[butlerdi]

I kind of liked the https://paperairplane.dev.java.net/ aproach to the problem.

Re:Oh well

[SillyNickName4me]

Blahblahblah

You know what, people don't like what LJ does and talk about it. If you are not interested, don't read it.

Re:Oh well

[SillyNickName4me]

And since there is nothing wrong with saying so when you disagree with a policy, and trying to get a policy changed in a direction you like more, I fail to see the point of your posts at all.

If you don't like people doing that, there is nothing forcing you to listen to them.

What you are advocating however is a 'shut up and move on' attitude, which usually doesn't get one very far at all.

Re:Oh well

[SillyNickName4me]

Its not so much about features, but about calling something 'home', and most people not being inclined to drop whatever they decided to call 'home' that easily.

Re:Oh well

[poot_rootbeer]

If you're upset with the service find somewhere better or stop complaining.

That's nonsense. If you're upset with the service you are receiving, you always have three options:

1. Find somewhere better
2. Stop complaining
3. KEEP COMPLAINING UNTIL THEY FIX IT!

It's not like the users are paying for the privilege.

Except for the large percentage of LiveJournal users who are.

Re:Oh well

[poot_rootbeer]

I like LJ. It's a good service for a good price. I don't have any particular desire to set up my own blog; I'd rather use theirs, and I'm willing to pay for it.

Furthermore, LJ, isn't "just" a blog hosting site; it's also a bulletin board, RSS reader/aggregator, photo gallery and social network.

Good luck building something comparable to LJ on your own little $5-a-month shared web host.

Re:Oh well

[GodaiYuhsaku]

An easier example is Livejournal vs Deadjournal. Both at one point were an almost identical service, (Haven't looked at Deadjournal in a while so don't know how true it is today) Why stay with livejournal? Because while both have the ability to restrict my journal so only Friends A, B, C can read it. Only Livejournal actually HAS friends A, B, C.

Re:Oh well

[GodaiYuhsaku]

This can be done now. Why do we need a new service? Why not just build an uber-client? So I write a post in this "UC", and it has my log in information for all my journal accounts. And it will translate between corresponding journal specific tags and post the same post to each account.

Re:Oh well

[TheRaven64]

Locking content is built right into HTTP; you can, on a per-file granularity, restrict access to only people who provide the correct credentials, be they usernames / passwords or SSL client side certificates. If you want to avoid using passwords, it would be trivial to set up a mechanism whereby you could sign your friends certificates (web front end, OpenSSL back end) and only permit access to them.

Re:Oh well

[hachete]

How many times has this has to be said:

The average livejournal customer *pays* for their account. It's crap-all to do with "free". As a paying customer, I have a right to put what the fuck I want on my journal, within the terms I signed-up for.

Clearly, LJ has fucked up. Their source of income is walking elsewhere.

Re:Oh well

[hachete]

why is this post "insightful" when the poster has clearly no idea what LJ is about?

Re:Oh well

[metamatic]

Oh sure, LJ's a good service for a good price... Right up until your entire journal gets deleted because you posted a picture of your wife breastfeeding. Or a troll keeps posting your medical details and they refuse to do anything. Or your journal is deleted because you repost some info from someone's public web site.

LJ Abuse team has been abusive for ages. This is merely the latest installment. But sure, continue to pay them, so long as you're not personally involved.

Re:Oh well

[ultranova]

A way to distribute blog hosting, so that a blog can't be shut down by a strike against a single hosting service. I don't have a solution at hand for that.

What do you mean ? There's tons of distributed hosting solutions out there, from Usenet to BitTorrent.

Heck, if Freenet ever gets its act together and gets over the current "Darknet" fad (which makes it near impossible to get to the network, since you need to know someone already in it, and the end result is a huge hassle with semi-automated IRC bots forming connections) it would be nearly ideal. The routing finally seems to work, and the rising machine power makes Fred's ridiculous inefficiency less of an issue today. There already are several blog-like sites about controversial topics there.

Re:Oh well

[tirerim]

Besides what's already been mentioned, Blogger doesn't do comment threading. This is a major hindrance to communication (imagine if Slashdot was just a flat list of comments). Admittedly, LiveJournal's comment threading is sort of half-assed, but at least it's there—it has the crucial feature of email notifications when someone replies to a comment, on your own or someone else's journal, not just to a post. (And if Blogger does have comment threading, then I apologize, but I haven't been able to find it.)

I'm also not sure that Blogger offers the fine-grained control of content-locking on a post-by-post basis that LiveJournal does; I know people who regularly use a large number of different filters, depending on whether they want a given post to be visible to the public, to all aquaintances, to close friends, to people they know in a certain geographic area, to non-coworkers, etc.

Re:Oh well

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you've left that up to the government. Nice job.

Re:Oh well

[lydrex]

As a modern internet hybrid--part-geek and part-fandom nut, I can see where you're coming from with that comment, but I dislike the tone. What livejournal is to fandom now is what emailing lists were to fandom five years ago. And before emailing lists, there were fanzines and snail mail and conventions.

Livejournal became especially popular after http://www.fanfiction.net/ cleaned out their database and tossed out all the NC-17 fics. Livejournal is a weird mixture of archive sites such as http://www.fanfiction.net/and http://www.adultfanfiction.net/, and http://www.yahoogroups.com/.

And it works for those ficwriters that don't want their stuff archived all over the place.

Livejournal poses as an archive site--like ff.net and its predecessors--the various FTP sites that hosted fanfic prior to around 1995. When fandom communities and private users accounts are suspended and deleted, some of that fic may have disappeared completely as well. If it were just discussions like the teenybopper junk on myspace, then I would no problem canceling my account. I have my own blog (wordpress) on my own paid webspace...but I still pay yearly for my livejournal account.

That being said, as a paid user, I will be contemplating a move as well. Although, I will most likely follow my fandoms (which are Buffy, Angel and Harry Potter).

Re:Oh well

[lahi]

What do you mean ? There's tons of distributed hosting solutions out there, from Usenet to BitTorrent.

Usenet is distributed, yes, and file sharing is possible, and BitTorrent (which I haven't used and know next to nothing about) probably also supports distributed file sharing. That's not what I am talking about. I am talking about a way that a community can have an "ordinary" website, except that the members of the community who want to mirror the entire website, so that no single member can take down the site (on his own initiative or because autorities raid his hosting service provider and take his server - or just due to a crash.)

Of course, mirroring of ftp and websites is possible - even easy snd common - today, but if you have dynamic services, I believe things get a bit more complicated. What I am thinking about is a way to make what is effectively a distributed cluster, with redundancy, so that you have separate database copies etc, with continuous synchronization.

This should not just be a defense against shutdown of controversial sites, but also a defense against a fraction of a community that happens to run the server unilaterally taking it down. The ideal would be something like SETI@Home, where you would participate in a distributed hosting network with the cycles and space you had to spare, for redundancy as well as efficiency. Thanks for the link to freenet, it really seems to be very close.

-Lasse

Re:Oh well

[LowbrowDeluxe]

Man I'm tired of this logic. Yes, you're right, but for almost a full decade the users and Livejournal had something of a tacit agreement about who was responsible for what. Then Lj was sold, and the new owners have engaged in screwover after screwover. I don't really are about the Lj issue itself, it's the right-wing neo-fascist Warriors for Innocence who are using this as their first salvo in 'cleansing' the internet of the 'gay agenda' that I'm bothered by, but your logic is getting repeated ad nauseum by every Tom, Dick, and Harry who doesn't bother with a blog of their own. This *is* a problem, because prior to now Livejournal and their Users, who create all of the content in the User-Created Content website that is Livejournal, had an understanding. That understanding has been violated. Does Livejournal/Six Apart have that right? Yes, they do. Does it still suck like some sort of barely-human sub-social pig-creature suckling at the warm teat of capitalism? Yes, yes it does. It was a lousy way to treat their users, and they deserve every bit of backlash they get from it. I will agree that anyone that talks about 'Freedom of speech' is a whackjob, except in relation to where Lj says they did it because having incest as an interest would be ZMORG illegalz. If Lj wants to ban it from their servers they can, but just like idiots can't claim free-speech on private property, Livejournal can't claim they're doing it because it's 'illegalz'. They're doing it because they don't like the subject and want to censor it. Fine. Well within their rights. But they need to man up about it.

Re:Oh well

[Anonymous Coward]

the program you are talking about exist under the name I2p Syndie. It is a distributed content engine which works with tor/freenet/no encryption. It is java, so you can run it everywhere.

When I used it, it hadn't much content, and the composition engine sucked. But give it a try, it is what you are looking for.

Re:Oh well

[lydrex]

Yeah, but you're assuming a couple of things. First of all, a lot of the fandom users are paid users...meaning, they paid for their account. It's not free...it costs them money yearly to keep that journal.

I know, because I am one.

If this were concerning just free accounts, there wouldn't be near the hooplah over this. Anyone who has been on the web long enough knows that when you take advantage of something that is free, you take risks in utilizing that said service.

Remember the days of geocities and tripod clearing out all the sites that they deemed inappropriate waaay back when? That, and the dotcom bust taught a lot of us not to depend on free sites and we began to make decisions that reflected those unfortunate times. Paid accounts, URLs and web-hosting became a norm.

No, what this is about (at least for me) is a company that has decided to put its paying customers on notice without any feedback from their said customers.

Re:Oh well

[lydrex]

And private corporations are any better?

As an American, I have to say no. Either one is bad, because most of the time they're in bed with one another. What one can't do, the other will do by picking up the slack.

Re:Oh well

[rebelcan]

I don't think Blogger has comment threading. Then again, I'd be surprised livejournal was the only blogging software that had comment threading. If that was really something I ( or anyone ) was looking for, then it probably wouldn't be too hard to find. But I guess that shows part of the difference between the types of people who use Blogger vs LiveJournal. People who use LiveJournal are probably looking to create discussions ( whether they admit it or not ), whereas people who use Blogger might just be posting in a notice-board sort of way. For example, I have a Blogger account and I used to also have a LiveJournal account. I use my Blogger account as a place to throw out thoughts. Sometimes I post about things that I found interesting, or sometimes I'll write about something that I feel is important. On the flip side, my LiveJournal was just a place to whine about things, like losing a job or girlfriend, or to rant about something that really doesn't matter, like one annoying coworker. I stopped using my LiveJournal though, because I found that I like my style and the things I write about on Blogger better. Plus, the web definitely doesn't need anymore whiny geeks.

As for the fine-grained control for content, that's just something I don't understand. To me, it seems like trying to be a different person when around different friends. Like talking with a British accent and saying that vodka martinis are your favorite drink with one group of friends, and speaking with a Texan accent and preferring Jack Daniels. To me, when you write something ( in a blog, or anywhere else ), it should be as yourself. Not as how other people see you, or how you wish other people would see you. I can understand only letting friends view a blog, eg: a blog about a new baby in the family with lots of pictures might be something you only want relatives to see, as opposed to the whole wide world. But the fine-grained control that LiveJournal gives just makes me wary.

Re:Oh well

[Anonymous Coward]

****** This post deleted by the Department of Homeland Security for your own good ******

Re:Oh well

[Stormy Dragon]

I've heard Penn & Teller often begin their stage shows by have Penn walk out on to the middle of the stage with a microphone, turn to the audience, and then scream 'FIRE!' Nothing happens.

Digg-style rebellion?

[UbuntuDupe]

LiveJournal's official news blog has filled up with hundreds of complaints protesting the decision, so we could have another Digg-style user rebellion brewing.

Let's show solidarity with them:

09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0

Re:Digg-style rebellion?

[forkazoo]

LiveJournal's official news blog has filled up with hundreds of complaints protesting the decision, so we could have another Digg-style user rebellion brewing.

Let's show solidarity with them:

09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0

Dude, that's a disgusting way to show solidarity. 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 totally sleeps with 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c1.

Re:Digg-style rebellion?

[Anonymous Coward]

Were you trying to say 455FE10422CA29C4933F95052B792AB2 ? [digg]

Actually you know what? Just post both of them... LiveJournal will have plenty of spare space now for both of these special numbers.

Re:Digg-style rebellion?

[Anonymous Coward]

That isn't digg style rebellion, thats doggy style rebellion.

Re:Digg-style rebellion?

[n5vb]

Always thought 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c1 was a little odd that way ..

Yeah,

[Anonymous Coward]

tight too.

Re:Yeah,

[Anonymous Coward]

oops, wrong spot

Re:Yeah,

[Anonymous Coward]

wait im confused is this /b/?

"Warriors for Innocence"?

[sehlat]

Apparently it started with a group of professional trolls who call themselves "Warriors for Innocence" and whose website, I am told, is baited with enough spyware and malware to lay waste to a continent. They complained and LiveJournal caved without so much as a whisper of investigation.

Who are this bunch, exactly? Anything like those "family-friendly" folks who complain en masse to the FCC whenever the word "sex" is so much as whispered on the television or radio?

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[Lucan Varo]

Mod parent up. I was about to ask the same qeustion.

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[seasleepy]

They're even worse than that -- they seem to be buddy-buddy with a lot of hard right wing Christian dominionist type groups. The same community has a bit of peeking through records in an attempt to get some info about the site's servers (and thus location), but it looks like all they came up with is that they're hosted through GoDaddy.

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[Mr. Shotgun]

Well, here is their response to the complaints about the live journal mass deletion:

Let the caterwauling and complaining continue; LJ has chosen to enforce rules that WERE ALREADY IN PLACE for all to see. "I finally got held accountable, and it's all your fault" won't fly here.

I am not sure about the whole malware thing, but their website is here. It is kind of interesting to see the dichotomy of their response to this whole fiasco, on one hand you got the response of "Gunny John" above who seems to be trying to say that anything that did get deleted deserves it, while "Sues" is trying to say that they did not call for the survivor/support pages and lolita discussions to be deleted, that it was Live journals doing. Odd statements from two "people" supposedly united in a cause.

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[Frogbert]

Yes they are exactly like that.

I vote we all go register "Raping WfI members and their children" as an interest on our LJ's :P

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[Mr. Shotgun]

There seems to be a lot of reports of malware on the site so he is the cached text for IE users : http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:mbDxkMwOuxUJ: www.warriorsforinnocence.org/+warriors+for+innocen ce&hl=en&strip=1
Sorry about that.

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[Anonymous Coward]

And here are some quotes from that group,

"It's time to value child safety above free speech."

"I recently told LiveJournal: 'I suggest you contact your local law enforcement before they have to go and look for you. It will save them a lot of time and trouble and might possibly make you appear more willing to cooperate with them. Although your negligent responses to this matter prove otherwise.'"

"LiveJournal - Pedophile Sympathizers"

Internet: tool of the pedophile!

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[ozbird]

... GoDaddy.

OMG - incest!</satire>

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[FlyingSquidStudios]

Do you think they see the irony in their name?

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[Endymion]

"Every single one of you are indeed pedophiles."

That's a fairly directed statement, that they should know to be untrue, and therefor it should be a rather simple libel case for the people it was directed at...

I mean, if idiots can bring libel cases against forum posts for just making them look bad, I would think wrongfully accusing someone of being a pedophile would be an open-and-shut case.

of course, that's applying logic to law...

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about thsi Warriors group but I could be sympathetic.I mod at a 10,000 member psychology forum in the UK and there are always people looking to promote homosexuality, pan-sexuality, transgedner ( Gender Identity Disorder still in DSM as of now - sure the homosexual pressure groups are working hard to blot that out) and yes even incest. It's a sick world and getting sicker. They are going heavy after the kids and the ones in psychology groups tend to have identity issues already. But nobody tells them homosexuals etc show 30 - 40% sexual abuse rates as kids in many studies. Most psychologists know this is true but have to work around the homosexual Propagandaministerium. I can bet LJ was full of garbage.

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[Shipwack]

AC posts: "But nobody tells them homosexuals etc show 30 - 40% sexual abuse rates as kids in many studies." Sources? Oh never mind, you're an AC, as well as a troll. Leave, and go back to feeling guilty over masturbating to what you probably think are "dirty, dirty thoughts".

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[mdwh2]

Bearing in mind that these deletions were based on having a keyword such as "incest" in the "Interests" list...

I see that Warriors for Innocence itself has several naughty words listed in the META tags, including "pedophile", "child love", "nambla", "abuse", "molestation", "boy lover", "girl lover", "grooming".

Perhaps we all need to complain Blogger about that...? (Although they have a domain name, the site is hosted on blogger, username warriorsforinnocence - unfortunately the "Flag as Objectionable" button isn't visible, and I'm not sure how to do that for them...?)

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[ScrewMaster]

No no, you're confusing "GoDaddy" with "HoDaddy".

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Gunny John" and "Sues" are brother and sister, he's a Marine and they describe themselves as patriots. Their respective blogs are full of heinous posts against Illegal Immigrants (namely Mexicans), Gays, Democrats, Michael Moore, you get my drift. They even have banners condemning the UN and defending Nationalists Serbs (you know, the ones accused of crimes against humanity). This people are extreme right wing.
Hence the outcry when LJ decided to listen to them while a few months ago Perverted Justice, a respected site who really brings pedophiles to justice, was ignored by LJ. Perverted justice makes a difference between real pedophiles sites and Fandom communities were fictional characters have underage sex. The "warriors" just wanna ban everything they disagree with.

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[Altus]

I could be wrong but I think you have to show that damage was done to ones reputation to claim libel. While I agree that this is a reprehensible thing to say to a group of people, I'm not sure that one can make a direct connection to damage to the individuals this was directed at.

The stretch argument is that a future employer, doing a search on one of these people, might find this statement and not hire them, but that is probably too much of a stretch.

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[Brian Ribbon]

First of all, in case anyone is wondering, the "TexasFred" who was mentioned is Fred Witzell. I had a full address and phone # at one point and I'll consider posting it if I can actually find where I saved it. He hasn't always used DomainsByProxy.

"Gunny John" is actually Mark Spence of Tampa Pirate, a blog you can visit if you want to read about those evil homosexuals, how all Islamic people are terrorists, and how paedophiles are sure to be hiding in a bush outside your house.

WfI is just an excuse to make bigotry popular.

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[makomk]

Perhaps we all need to complain Blogger about that...? (Although they have a domain name, the site is hosted on blogger, username warriorsforinnocence - unfortunately the "Flag as Objectionable" button isn't visible, and I'm not sure how to do that for them...?)

Just follow the instructions on their other blog

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[Achromatic1978]

I'm fairly sure using CSS to hide the "Flag as Objectionable" button is a violation of Blogger's ToS, too ...

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[Brian Ribbon]

""Gunny John" and "Sues" are brother and sister"

I wasn't aware of that.

"Hence the outcry when LJ decided to listen to them while a few months ago Perverted Justice, a respected site who really brings pedophiles to justice, was ignored by LJ. Perverted justice makes a difference between real pedophiles sites and Fandom communities were fictional characters have underage sex. The "warriors" just wanna ban everything they disagree with.

Perverted Justice aren't much better, to be honest. I'm attracted to children, making me a paedophile, but I'm strongly opposed to adult-child sex. That didn't stop PJ referring to my websites as "pro-child rape."

I don't see why LiveJournal is doing this.

[Virak]

I mean, with so many people screaming "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" all the time, you'd think they'd be happy to have someone finally actually listening and doing it. But no, they ban them all? None of this makes sense.

Re:I don't see why LiveJournal is doing this.

[Smight]

I think they need to be more specific in the future.

"Think of the children... not THAT way!?!"

Re:I don't see why LiveJournal is doing this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sex Cauldron! I thought they closed that place down.

No daddy no...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh noes... :'(

I hope they deleted my old account!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't even know my old username (gf blah blah etc...) I never really used it. Suicide Girls provides a better blog than LJ.

User-created sites

[evanbd]

When a site derives its content entirely from its users, that site ceases to be entirely under the control of its creators. Somehow it seems to be taking a while for some people to figure this out, but when the users want something badly enough, well... you better give it to them. You know how some people keep saying the internet will empower the people by giving them a voice? Well, it turns out they mean it -- especially when it's in relation to things on the internet.

Re:User-created sites

[rayvd]

True, but somehow I doubt that the vast majority of LJ users want/need to post about incest.

We're talking about a small minority of the LJ community here.

Re:User-created sites

[evanbd]

They may be small, but they would appear to be vocal enough to get themselves posted on Slashdot...

Re:User-created sites

[Opportunist]

And that makes it less worthy of protection of free speech? Actually, what a right is worth is seen when a minority wants to exercise it.

dupe!

[coaxial]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/30/205022 4

Re:dupe!

[Anonymous Coward]

Different incidents (unless you subscribe to some conspiracy theories), though closely spaced in time.

Shopping mall analogy

[femto]

MySpace, LiveJournal, ... They are the Internet equivalent of the mega shopping mall. They represent convenience but convenience comes at the price of freedom. Have you ever tried protesting outside a shop in a mall? You can't. The mall is private land and you will get removed by security. Similarly with LiveJournal and the other "communities" based on a centralised website, they are private space and the owner can boot you out on a whim.

Why not stick with the public spaces on the Internet? If you need a chat room: use an email list, Usenet or run an IRC server. If you want to share your photos: put them on your web server. If you want a pretty home page with lots of "friends" put a home page on your web server with a guest book. These are the online equivalent of the local shopping strip. It's a public place and no-one can force you to bend to their whim. The public spaces of the net are better than web2.0. They are just as customisable, do the job as well or better and you don't have to take it on trust that your freedom will be respected.

Re:Shopping mall analogy

[SolitaryMan]

MySpace, LiveJournal, ... They are the Internet equivalent of the mega shopping mall.

Nope. They are closer to some kind of Eastern bazaar, where everyone sells and buys. LJ depends on users' postings, or it is better to say LJ is its users. Ban some topics/users and it will be discussed somewhere else. There is nothing unique in LJ

Re:Shopping mall analogy

[hachete]

Yeah, that's right. Let's herd these people into a ghetto where they can be easily contained, controlled, and rounded up when the time comes. That's the spirit. We see an example of precisely that, bending the web to meet a pressure group's whims.

Web2.0 makes it easier for people to do these things, so now we're excluding a whole class of people who want to take advantage of web2.0's ease of use? LJ got where it is today precisely because it had a liberal policy. And where do the exclusions stop? Who's to say what the nutjobs will take a dislike to tomorrow?

Re:Shopping mall analogy

[femto]

The analogy holds. The "sellers" still need permission from the owner of the "mall" to sell their wares.

You seem to be arguing that the shoppers and shopkeepers control the mall. This would only be true if (almost) every shopper or shopkeeper boycotted the mall. That would never happen as the mall owner is too smart to boot everyone out of the mall, only the minority whose presence is inconvenient. It doesn't matter if the minority who are kicked out happen to be innocent, as they are just a minority and will not affect the owner's control.

Re:Shopping mall analogy

[the unbeliever]

Livejournal is no longer the company that it was was.

once danga got bought out by sixapart, things started falling to shit.

Re:Shopping mall analogy

[QuoteMstr]

Funny, that's how it always is. Somebody comes up with a new idea, and it's successful. Sooner or later, the price is right, the person is sold out, and the idea becomes monetized and censorsed. It seems to be the natural order of things.

Re:Shopping mall analogy

[quantaman]

MySpace, LiveJournal, ... They are the Internet equivalent of the mega shopping mall. They represent convenience but convenience comes at the price of freedom. Have you ever tried protesting outside a shop in a mall? You can't. The mall is private land and you will get removed by security. Similarly with LiveJournal and the other "communities" based on a centralised website, they are private space and the owner can boot you out on a whim.

Just because the owner is allowed to do something doesn't mean they should.

Say the mall owner kicks you out because he doesn't like your anti-war t-shirt, yes it's his right, and yes I have the right to complain about it, and I will. This is what's happening here, a bunch of people got kicked out for possibly saying something the owner didn't like, yes it was the owner's right to do so but we're sure not under any obligation to agree with the owner's actions.

Why not stick with the public spaces on the Internet? If you need a chat room: use an email list, Usenet or run an IRC server. If you want to share your photos: put them on your web server. If you want a pretty home page with lots of "friends" put a home page on your web server with a guest book. These are the online equivalent of the local shopping strip. It's a public place and no-one can force you to bend to their whim. The public spaces of the net are better than web2.0. They are just as customisable, do the job as well or better and you don't have to take it on trust that your freedom will be respected.

I'm curious what happens when your ISP becomes uncomfortable with the message coming from the IP they assigned you? There can be a lot of variance both in what is considered public and how you can reach it.

Re:Shopping mall analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, most people don't have the technical knowledge to "run an IRC server" or have their own web server. They probably don't even know it's possible.

Re:Shopping mall analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Find another ISP and point your domain name to the new IP address.

Re:Shopping mall analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Then the solution is to make such software easier to install and keep running.

Re:Shopping mall analogy

[Cro Magnon]

That assumes that the mall owner IS smart enough not to piss off too many shoppers. In the case of LJ, that is questionable.

This Thread...

[Anonymous Coward]

This thread... is USELESS without pics!

As much as I would like to NOT think about this

[patio11]

>>
Fourteen-year-olds hook up together all the time. It's called high school.
>>

Yes, and when fourty year olds are emotionally invested in watching, reading, or writing about it? That creeps me the heck out. Oh sure, I get it, when you're talking about Harry and Snape taking a disciplinary infraction to a whole new level, thats fantasy. Yes, understood. Its just pretty freaking creepy. Am I that worried that Livejournal doesn't want to be associated with you? No. Many sane people, you know, the kinds who don't have to make up a semi-Japanese word to describe their sexual perversions, do not want to be associated with you. I wouldn't be touching your business with a ten-foot pole... and why does that sound suddenly pornographic in this context.

Re:As much as I would like to NOT think about this

[15Bit]

I know many people who would dispute your implied definition of sanity. "Sexual perversion" is all around you, and all over the web too. How many "funny" comments are put up here about porn downloads? Well, there's more than an element of truth in those comments. Look around at your neighbours and friends - more than one of them is a "sexual pervert" and you just don't know it.

As for the 40-somethings who want to read/write about this stuff, well thats fine. Writing about sex with a 14 year old is a long way from actually doing it, and the large number of people who have written and read such fiction indicates that it is far from abnormal for the healthy imagination to wander in this respect. I would say that writing or reading about paedophilia/incest/bestiality etc no more makes you a pervert or a threat to society than playing Quake makes you a murderer.

Re:As much as I would like to NOT think about this

[Intrinsic]

You might want to take a good look at why it creeps you out, there is good evidence in the psychological department that suggests when you have an negative emotional reaction to something like this it usually has to do with some type of deep repression about something close to or of similar taboo located in a dark place inside where people don't want to usually go.

Its similar to hate crimes against gay men. for the most part straight guys that have such a violent reaction usually are struggling with that beast inside of them selfs. They cant recognize or express their sexual desire because owning up to that possibility would destroy the identity they allowed society to impose on them throughout their lives.

If this sounds far fetched to you, you can be sure its not as far from the truth as you think.

Personally, I think sex is taken way to seriously in this country.

Re:As much as I would like to NOT think about this

[Original Replica]

Writing about sex with a 14 year old is a long way from actually doing it, and the large number of people who have written and read such fiction indicates that it is far from abnormal for the healthy imagination to wander in this respect.

I would say it is largely made up of reliveing "the glory days" when said 40 year old was actually fairly attractive. Most people are never more physically attractive than they were when they were 16-17. Now they are fat and old and want to imagine that they and/or their lover are still young and buff. And if finding girls in their late teens sexy is so rare as to be a perversion, why is the working age of female models 16-25? http://forums.models.com/viewmessages.cfm?Forum=20 2&Topic=29096

Re:As much as I would like to NOT think about this

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people are never more physically attractive than they were when they were 16-17.

I'm ACing this so it won't come back to haunt me: At least for girls, their body is the finest just as their tits have grown to full size and their hips widened for that tight ass. For the rest of their life, women try to avoid sagging and hanging but at best they stay on the level a while. Rest of the body isn't that obvious, but it rarely gets better than young unblemished skin anyway. Sorry, but I just call it like I see it. -- Whale biologist

Re:As much as I would like to NOT think about this

[Anonymous Coward]

As for the 40-somethings who want to read/write about this stuff

Judging by the people in the fanfic community, it's mostly 15-25-year-olds who are writing fanfic of dubious repute.

Its sad but...

[stoneycoder]

What do you expect? I feel the same way about this as I do about the story earlier today regarding fanfic. If you don't want your content being controled, censored, changed, mangled, sold, etc, host it on your own domain on your own dedicated server. You could still get screwed, your hosting provider can sqaush you out if they feel the push. So whats next, you install a lamp stack on some spare box with a sad 30k upload cap; Even so you're not protected because your ISP could get wind of your server from some fanatics claiming its content evil and wrong, and they'll shut your account down for sake of the children.

Now there is a missing option from the most hated cliches poll : "think of the children"

Deleting content based on keywords?

[Talez]

Nothing could ever go wrong with that strategy.

So, who's the next LiveJournal?

[Evil Poot Cat]

It looks like LJ pacified our taliban. This is the point where you take your posts elsewhere. Standing around and bitching about it indicates that you'd like to remain a member, so it's a matter of pacification to retain your eyes and bytes.

Reminds me of an old saying...

[thephotoman]

Nec eos omnes. Deus suos agnocet.

Seriously, I've been an LJ user since 2003. Never before have I been this pissed at them. Thank goodness I'm getting my own webspace soon. Yeah, I know, with the spare parts I've got lying around the place, I could set up my own Apache server, but I'm too lazy, and my current Internet provider forbids webservers.

Re:Reminds me of an old saying...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually "Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet," and for the vast majority of people who don't speak this particular dead language, it means, "kill them all. God will know his own."

Re:Reminds me of an old saying...

[thephotoman]

Damn typos.

WTF?

[interiot]

From the LJ abuse team:

We recognize that many people list these types of interests for shock value, as a method of expressing opposition for these illegal activities, or to indicate fictional activity. Unfortunately, the Abuse team does not have any discretion in these cases; if a journal profile contains interests that support illegal activity, we must suspend the journal. Journals, on the other hand, may express or imply interest in illegal activity or express or imply a desire to meet and/or interact with others with similar interests, but only if the journal clearly (1) is in opposition to or condemnation of the illegal activity, (2) does not encourage the illegal activity and (3) is not used in furtherance of any illegal activity.

So now every time mentions something that might be illegal, they have to pause, look at the camera, put on their most convincing "I'm serious now" face, and say "this is fiction, not real life, we're not encouraging anyone do this in real life, and if you do this illegal act, you'll be in big trouble"? Does LJ really expect people to say things like this with a straight face for very long? I mean, yeah, many actual real-life illegal activities are real downers, but when people have to start saying a blurb after things that are almost certainly legal, but they still have to say the blurb so they don't get caught up in suspensions where LJ has "no discretion", then those blurbs aren't going to be something anyone takes seriously, but instead will be an outlet for users to continually mock LJ's policies.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

We recognize that many people list these types of interests for shock value, as a method of expressing opposition for these illegal activities, or to indicate fictional activity. Unfortunately, the Abuse team does not have any discretion in these cases; if a journal profile contains interests that support illegal activity, we must suspend the journal. Journals, on the other hand, may express or imply interest in illegal activity or express or imply a desire to meet and/or interact with others with similar interests, but only if the journal clearly (1) is in opposition to or condemnation of the illegal activity, (2) does not encourage the illegal activity and (3) is not used in furtherance of any illegal activity. and yet all those posts about murder, drugs and terrorism still exist.

Re:WTF?

[Lord Ender]

if a journal profile contains interests that support illegal activity, we must suspend the journal.

Wow, I'm glad LiveJournal didn't exist during the civil rights movement! I can imagine Martin Luther King Jr.'s account being suspended for encouraging people NOT to sit in the back of the bus, or for encouraging a black student to attend a white school.

Incest has been around since the dawn of time

[ConfusedSelfHating]

Everyone has a legitimate concern about parents molesting their children. And it would be great if there was an easy solution. But this appears to be blindly striking out at the problem. This is several steps worse than banning novels which have a fictional murder because some people may be inspired by it. This would be similar to sending people to prison for saying that they're "killing time" because someone has a last name of "Tyme". Blind stupid methods for solving problems never work, they just impair the ability of regular people to live their lives. You know that the pedophiles are just going to adopt codewords and continue their pedophile ways.

I would be much happier if this was a regular pedophile hunt. Of course, malware is going to be downloading horrific stuff to unknowing people, leading to innocent people being dragged off to jail by techno-impaired judges and juries.

Re:Incest has been around since the dawn of time

[ArsenneLupin]

Of course, malware is going to be downloading horrific stuff to unknowing people, leading to innocent people being dragged off to jail by techno-impaired judges and juries. And, incidentally, the warriorsforinnocence site is just full of such spyware. I can only wonder what this spyware might be doing... Somebody should report that site to the relevant attorney general.

Exactly

[Frosty Piss]

Easy solution. Take that money, stop paying, host your own blog. Not worry about somebody deleting your blog (Well not as much). Profit.

Exactly. A cheap hosting account and WordPress. Problem solved. NEXT.

Re:Exactly

[asninn]

That fails to take into account what Livejournal is actually about. It's not just a blogging service, it's a huge community (or maybe meta-community); I don't want to call it a social networking site, since it actually predates that particular fad, but while it all revolves around journals/blogging, slapping WP on your own web space and using that would mean that you'd miss out on all the stuff that actually makes Livejournal worthwhile and sets it apart from other blogging services.

Re:Exactly

[bhtooefr]

There is always FOAF...

Re:Exactly

[metamatic]

Not so much, actually. I moved from LiveJournal after being abused by the abuse team. With WordPress and OpenID, LJ users can log in on my site with their LJ accounts to comment. I can have friends-locked postings. They can get e-mail notifications or subscribe to threads via Atom. I can subscribe to their journals and read them in Google Reader, and log in and comment on their journals with my WordPress system's OpenID.

Re:Exactly

[Loke the Dog]

Actually, there are social networking sites about as old as livejournal, so I'd say they belong to the same fad.

Re:Exactly

[Doctor Faustus]

Do your posts show up on their friends lists?

Re:Exactly

[metamatic]

Yes. LJ pulls in my Atom feed, and they friend the feed.

Re:Exactly

[lydrex]

Yeah, but you're still depending on a livejournal community...a community that could get cauled just for the hell of it...much like what has happened on ff.net over the past few years.

The problem, as I see it, is for SA to pay attention to whom they're hurting in order to keep the fandom community happy. No matter how many hoops we can individually jump through, we're still (as it stands now) dependant upon the haphazard policies of SA/Livejournal in order to keep functioning.

Or, if they really do want to clean house of their fandom base, just tell us so, and then we can make a decision based upon that fact.

I say we should just do a great exodus and move over to greatestjournal or journalfen.net.

Re:Exactly

[metamatic]

No, I'm not depending on LJ at all. People who choose to continue to use LJ as their feed reader and OpenID provider are depending on it, but if LJ vanished tomorrow everything on my site would continue to work--people could still log in, post comments, subscribe to my postings, etc.

Re:Exactly

[lydrex]

No, you missed my point. As it stands now, your arrangement works because there's a livejournal community you're adding to even if you're not a member of livejournal itself. The analogy I would say is that you moved from this big apartment complex where all your family and friends live at to this house just down the street from it. Although you sleep and eat (for the most part), in your home, you're still able to go over to the complex and visit and participate in that community. Or, occasionally, one or two of them may come over to your house. But, it's two separate places...and your home (or blog) is an addendum to the apartment complex (livejournal community) down the street.

Unless we can figure out how to start communities without the infrastructure that places like livejournal provides, communities that flourish at places like livejournal will always be somehow beholden to the corporate or company owners--despite paid accounts.

That's what ticks me off the most about situations like this one...the helplessness. Today, greatestjournal and other lj knock-offs may sound good, but whose to say they won't eventually evolve into what is now livejournal?

Re:Exactly

[premchai21]

How do locked posts translate then? If your server returns every locked post in every feed read, obviously the locking is no good. Does it return something specific to LiveJournal (perhaps conditionalized on some site authentication from their servers) that says which LJ users get to see what, and then everyone else doesn't see any of that or has some other arrangement? Does each LJ user reading the feed get passed through with separate authentication somehow? I don't see anything in the LJ documentation or the Atom format that would make this work.

Re:Exactly

[metamatic]

People who use LJ as a feed reader won't get locked posts in the feed. People who use another feed reader may or may not get the locked post, it depends on how the feed reader works.

Re:Exactly

[metamatic]

No, my arrangement works even without LiveJournal or anything like it. If everyone I know on LJ left LJ and moved to a setup like mine, I'd be very happy. They could all run on different ISPs, and everything would work.

Re:Exactly

[premchai21]

So that just confirms that there isn't a known way to interoperate with access control. Which is not to say that it's LiveJournal's fault, or anyone's fault, but it causes a certain amount of difficulty, and network-effect lock-in. The age of automated, federated cross-publishing has not arrived.

discussing incest is illegal?

[Adult film producer]

Is it illegal in the u.s. to talk about or to even write stories about incest? I ask because apparently this all started when the "warriors for innocence" project said they have been reporting live journal blogs to law enforcement. I always figured it was the act, not story writing that was the problem.

Re:discussing incest is illegal?

[Frogbert]

Just a warning about the above link. The WfI site is loaded with spyware, Firefox only folks.

Re:discussing incest is illegal?

[Anonymous Coward]

s it illegal in the u.s. to talk about or to even write stories about incest?

(No karma for me!)

No, but there's a lot of people that think it should be- along with criticism of the current administration, questioning the Administration's handling of the situation in Iraq, teaching evolution, homosexuality, liberalism, whether Haliburton might not be war-profiteering, disagreeing with Rush Limbaugh...

You know, one of the subsets of humanity: assholes. The above are just the American version, with most nations having their own variety bothering the regular folks.

The good thing is that the most vocal of the lot are in the minority. The problem is that a few of them seem to have snuck into the Attorney General's office while all the reasonable people's back was turned.

Re:discussing incest is illegal?

[LTB_Enterprises]

I by no means condone discussion of this topic for titillation but this whole "Warriors for Innocence" thing to me reeks of "Warriors for Ignorance", that special breed of people who pretend that if you don't write about it, talk about it, educate about it then it will just go away. There are so many children out there suffering horrendous abuse because the person abusing them has convinced them that it's wrong to tell, that it's "just our little secret". These kids need to know that it is wrong and they have a right to tell someone and have it stopped. Don't let them suffer in silence....

Re:discussing incest is illegal?

[Adult film producer]

sorry about including that link.. I'm running firefox+adblock, nothing really stood out when I loaded it.. i'll try to be careful with those.

Re:discussing incest is illegal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it illegal in the u.s. to talk about or to even write stories about incest?

Indeed it is not, but with the credence given to the "think of the children" movement in the U.S., that has not stopped widespread oppression of any writings or blogs even tangentially related to incest or pedophilia. Many Americans have difficulty understanding that "pedophilia" in and of itself is not illegal; sexual abuse is illegal, not thinking about it.

Re:discussing incest is illegal?

[buxton2k]

Just a warning about the above link. The WfI site is loaded with spyware, Firefox only folks.

For some reason this triggered a bizarre visual.

Bad guys, operating from a secret base, have shut down freedom-loving LiveJournal. A team of hero-geeks infiltrates Warriors for Innocence.

Hero-Geek, crouching in the darkness, scans the base, and flips down a high-tech visored helmet: "It's loaded with spyware. We'd better go Firefox only."

I've got to stop reading Neal Stephenson...

Re:discussing incest is illegal?

[n5vb]

Rumor has it that a couple of IP's at SixApart and LJ themselves got hit with some, been seeing reports of port 1122 and 1121 hits on firewall logs in some places from those IP's. To be taken with a grain of salt, but keep your wits about you and check your firewall logs if you have a firewall or NAT router that does logging ..

Re:discussing incest is illegal?

[Captain Sarcastic]

My handle notwithstanding, I applaud you for your rational thought.

There are people with whom I am very close who had to live through the nightmare described. Some have dealt with it well, and others are still struggling.

It reminds me of when AOL decided to put some keyword controls in their chat rooms, and so to get around them, various breast cancer survivor/support groups had to call their rooms "boob cancer" because "breast" was one of the keywords that AOL was using to mark potentially adult content.

Incest is relative

[Anonymous Coward]

but only if you keep it in the family.












Yah, i know, it's a bad joke. But this is slashdot, and i'm posting A/C

Re:Incest is relative

[doesnothingwell]

from Milton Bradley the game the whole family can play! To hell with karma.

DO NOT CLICK THAT LINK

[Anonymous Coward]

Warning: the "Warriors for Innocence" site will infect you with malware if you're not careful.

USE LINKS OR LYNX FOR THAT LINK

[SaidinUnleashed]

That link will slow down IE, Firefox, or Opera to a crawl for a looooong time while it loads all the spyware crap. Use a text-only browser to read it. It actually has some interesting (though still not capable of justifying this, imo) posts.

Re:USE LINKS OR LYNX FOR THAT LINK

[Knara]

FF+No-Script ext seemed to result in an uneventful visit, just fyi

Proving once again,

[MrPerfekt]

that if you want no censorship on your postings, you need to own the server and even in some cases, the network!

Honestly, I understand why alot of people subscribe to these free blog services but you truly are at their mercy. At any given moment, a) your account could be deleted, b) the hosting service could disappear or c) your account could be hacked through no fault of your own. Hosting your blog on your own servers don't guarantee that those won't happen but at least it puts it in your hands. Until then, you'll always be at somebody else's mercy and you should deal with that.

Spuller

[cobbaut]

I liked the livejournal of user spuller a lot: http://spuller.livejournal.com/
Anyone know where he moved to ?

Warren Ellis said it best

[dswensen]

Warren Ellis said it best on his site (warrenellis.com):

For what it's worth: Warriors For Innocence come off a little weird, to say the least. Mind you, so does Andrew Vachss. But LiveJournal's response bears more study. Their sloppy, blanket response indicates that they simply don't have a process in place to differentiate between nonce-news and people writing about furry widdle brother and sister unicorns who love each other very much. The outcome, therefore, has been pure comedy, with comments that read very much like "I love spending all day reading about forced underage incestuous sex with squirrel fisting on top, but of course I'm not interested in that in real life -- that'd make me a pervert!" LiveJournal is part of Six Apart, which has in times past proved itself to be, shall we say, socially backwards. They're not good at dealing with people. The questions of importance are less about the somewhat gung-ho and poorly informed Warriors For Innocence, and more about the panicked spasm LiveJournal had, that appears to have had very little thought put into it. All that said: if you listed "rape" as an interest on your LiveJournal user profile, you must have known that someday someone was coming to see you about that.

What kills me is that many of these people are acting like they're political refugees or Holocaust survivors. Talk about a lack of perspective. They're also seriously ignorants of what "rights" they have to post on a privately-owned website (hint: none whatsoever).

I'm not saying Six Apart hasn't acted with bad judgment, but some of the outcry smacks of a seriously out-of-control sense of entitlement.

Re:Warren Ellis said it best

[Detritus]

This sort of thing does remind me of Germany in the 1930s. Jews were demonized, fired from their jobs, expelled from schools, isolated from society, subjected to boycotts and violence, much of it done by private individuals and institutions. Who needs the power of the government when you can accomplish the same thing with groups of "concerned citizens" who are on a crusade to purify society of its undesirable elements. The fact that the government isn't persecuting you is slight comfort when you are being pursued by a well-organized and fanatical gang of zealots who will not tolerate your presence in their society. How would you like it, if every time you got a new job or apartment, the employer/landlord was told to get rid of you or suffer the consequences. For a modern example, look at the situation with the radical animal rights groups and Huntingdon Life Sciences in the UK and USA.

Re:Warren Ellis said it best

[dswensen]

Call me uncharitable, but I don't see being able to post your underage incest rape fantasies on an Internet community site as being remotely similar to any of that in terms of scale or significance.

Re:Warren Ellis said it best

[Anonymous Coward]

You are clinically insane.

Re:Warren Ellis said it best

[dswensen]

Good argument.

What do your call your act?

[Anonymous Coward]

The aristocrats!

Go here to export your Livejournal content

[MrMista_B]

http://www.livejournal.com/export.bml

If their deletion policy is this random, then it'd be a good idea to get out now.

Me, I'm going somewhere else - if this is the way lj acts, they've seriously lost my trust, and therefore my financial support.

Re:Go here to export your Livejournal content

[the unbeliever]

http://www.ljbook.com/

Go there instead. Makes a nice, pdf posting, including userpics and comments. Granted, you do have to give them your login/pw, but I use them every six months and haven't seen anything out of sorts with them yet.

Re:Go here to export your Livejournal content

[hsqueak]

Or you could follow LJ's suggestions and change your password before using any other service, run the backup, and then change your password again.

Livejournal is a fool.

[acherusia]

I've been watching this since it started, and what continually amazes me is how poorly livejournal is handling this. Over 24 hours into this, there is no announcement. Nothing reassuring users that their journal won't be next. Nothing apologizing for wiping out the incest survivor's livejournal in their witchhunt. Not even something saying "This is business, deal." The only news livejournallers have heard from livejournal came from an outside news source.

Forget the deletions. People were upset, but would have forgotten it quickly if livejournal had just said "We purged some pedophile rings, but some other stuff may have gotten caught in it. If there are any livejournals purged that were genuinely innocent, tell us." People would've bitched, would have said the sky was falling down, that Livejournal had gone down the tubes since Six Apart bought them, but there wouldn't have been this sort of mass hysteria.

Now, I'm anticipating the next great fandom migration will be happening a few years sooner than otherwise, and this makes me grumpy, because migrations are a pain in the ass. And it wouldn't be happening any time soon if Livejournal weren't currently doing their level best to make fandom - a group of people who in my experience pay a great deal of money for their playspace - feel unwelcome.

Re:Livejournal is a fool.

[lrucker]

Actually it was worse than that - people *did* tell them that yes, their RPG journals listed dodgy interests, but the profile page also had big disclaimers saying "this is a fictional villian, yes we know he's bad, that's the point, but this RPG doesn't allow actually writing about those things, and anyone who shares his interests needs to stay far away from us" and yet got the same boilerplate "your journal is being permanently suspended for encouraging illegal activities" response.

One of the so-called illegal activites was "beating people up" - which bad guys *do* (and for that matter, so did I, when I took karate. But it was all consentual).

Re:Livejournal is a fool.

[dbIII]

Nothing apologizing for wiping out the incest survivor's livejournal in their witchhunt.

They would not care. Remember that extremists that call themselves conservative like to blame the victims too. There's lots of rightous anger anainst rapists but rarely anything resembling sympathy for victims and often rightous anger against those victim too. It's all about think you are better than other people - none of this "there but for the grace of God go I" that you get in groups that care for poor and disadvantaged people.

Re:Livejournal is a fool.

[StrawberryFrog]

Over 24 hours into this, there is no announcement.

Not anymore. 48 Hours in there is an announcement, with a big apology. Which would you rather have - a quick announcement or a correct announcement? And you know, 48 hours is pretty quick.

Re:Livejournal is a fool.

[kabocox]

Forget the deletions. People were upset, but would have forgotten it quickly if livejournal had just said "We purged some pedophile rings, but some other stuff may have gotten caught in it. If there are any livejournals purged that were genuinely innocent, tell us." People would've bitched, would have said the sky was falling down, that Livejournal had gone down the tubes since Six Apart bought them, but there wouldn't have been this sort of mass hysteria.

Um, how is this any different from the MySpace Sex Offender thing yesterday? Yesterday, it seemed that most of slashdot thought using the government provided sex offender data to filter and attempt to ID users as wrong if any users were miss IDed as Sex Offenders.

Today, LiveJournal does mass deletions of accounts that they think are pedophiles? I've not read any news sources other than slashdot comments on this. Several questions pop up. Was Live Jorunal using Sex Offender registery data to ID accounts for deletion? If not, was LiveJournal going through all their accounts scanning for anything incent relating (fiction, survivors, and those that actually do it) and deleting the account? How does LiveJournal actually know that any of these accounts should be tagged?

Yesterday, there was a big ruckus on slashdot for MySpace IDing Sex Offenders. Today, LiveJournal deletes anyone that they think might be involved in incest an its o.k.? Where is the slashdot outrage? It seems the only ones that are upset are the incest survivors that had their LiveJournal accounts deleted.

Revolt unlikely

[davecl]

Judging from LJ's response to the Nipplegate controversy (a troll started complaining about images of breastfeeding mothers and LJ/6Apart started deleting these accounts on the basis that they were sexually explicit) I think its very unlikely that they'll respond to users' complaints. LJ/6Apart has demonstrated itself incapable of responding to user complaints once a 'policy' has been set in spite of evidence and argument to the contrary. If you want to set up a support group for the victims of rape, incest or other abuse, LJ is not the place any longer because they can't (don't want to?) tell the difference between opposition and advocacy.

What about the rest?

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have deleted all the LJ's...

Law != ethics

[Geof]

The owners of livejournal have the right to do whatever they like with their website, provided that it is within the law.

So basically you're saying that the law is the law? That's rather unhelpful... Do you really mean to suggest that if something is legal, it is not wrong? Or that even if it is wrong, attempting to change it is a waste of time? (Never mind that the statement collapses the rather important distinction between rights and freedoms.)

I just want to clarify, becuase I often see this legalistic claim on Slashdot. I think it's incredibly harmful, but I'm not certain how many of those who make the argument fully understand what they're saying (I hope not many).

local information center

[tirerim]

For anyone interested in knowing exactly what's been happening, what's been deleted, and also some useful information for livejournalers about things like how to make backups, one user has been keeping track of the news:

http://catrinella.livejournal.com/151812.html

The truth

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello, I know that I am posting as an anonymous, but do forgive me, for I am doing this for my own protection.

WFI is not at all what they claim to be, but rather, they are a front.
For what, you may ask?

Well, it's actually, a front for the same organization that runs http://www.teens-4-christ.org/, a small, but extremely fanatical christian group that seeks ultimate control.
This entire operation is also in part funded by pervertedjustice (See: Dateline: to catch a predator) and the church of scientology.

Yes folks, this is bigger than just a bunch of nutcases getting livejournal to delete a few accounts by crazed fans of boy love.

This is bigger.

One day, they came for the livejournal abusers
But I was not a livejournal abuser

One day they came for the pirates
But I was not a pirate

One day they came for slashdot
But I was not a slashdotter

And one day they came for me
And I was all that was left.

war is better than sex

[Karaman]

People like to kill one another but not fuck with each other!

Re:war is better than sex

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, but rape is a all too common weapon in war; thus war==sex.

i wonder what would happen if there was real FOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been interested in this kind of thing for a long time. I'm a fairly high-level exec at an internet company, suffice to say - money to burn. I'm a very strong believer in freedom of speech - TOTAL freedom of speech.

I've been considering setting up a blog/homepage service whose whole raison d'etat is absolute freedom of speech. No terms and conditions. No censorship whatsoever. Does not keep IP records of posters or visitors. No takedowns without a court order, that kind of thing. Nothing like that exists as far as I know.

I'd love for knowledgable people to clue me in on subjects like:

- domain name providers who won't buckle (i've thought about just building my own - only $50k or so) - or can they cut you off at the root authority? has this ever been done?
- datacenters/transit providers who won't buckle to pressure, with examples
- the best countries for hosting if it looks impossible in USA

I'm wondering what slashdot denizens think of a plan like this. Any suggestions for how to go about it? Where to host? I can spare $10k a month pretty much indefinitely but any ideas how to go about setting it up? I'd love to brainstorm with knowledgable people but as you can imagine am not too happy associating myself with such a project too publicly. Any suggestions welcome.

Insightful? That was a troll...

[Walkingshark]

Why someone would mod a post insightful when its obviously a troll perplexes me. No one really has this kind of immature "shut up and take it like a man" attitude. Right?

Re:Insightful? That was a troll...

[smegged]

Look I can understand if people are upset about it. But really the extremes that are being mentioned in the article are just way too much in my opinion. I found the whole digg revolt amusing, yet since then I don't visit the site any more and I'm sure that I'm not the only one. Digg's business is suffering because they made a stupid decision. Even if LiveJournal reinstated all of the blogs that they deleted, do they really deserve our business? No. Which is why I feel a protest against a company in an essentially commoditized market is not exactly the most productive use of time.

Granted I was wrong about people paying for the service. That does not mean that there are not similar, viable businesses out there that aren't more deserving of your business than LJ. Instead LiveJournal get a massive amount of hits and publicity and when they reinstate the posts they might even have more users than before. A protest campaign is never the way to deal with a business you don't like (look at what protesting "Deep Throat" and "Baise Moire" did in the US and Australia respectively).

Re:Insightful? That was a troll...

[Lemmy Caution]

A protest campaign is never the way to deal with a business you don't like (look at what protesting "Deep Throat" and "Baise Moire" did in the US and Australia respectively).

Look what the anti-Nestle protests did.

They worked.

Look what the Digg revolt did.

It worked.

Re:Insightful? That was a troll...

[dylan_-]

Look what the anti-Nestle protests did.

They worked.

Kind of...Nestle no longer directly promote their products in hospitals. But there's still this. Nestle are still bastards.

Sue is crazy!

[svunt]

Wow, the woman who made the complaints for "Warriors for Innocence", whose blog is here is quite articulate...see if you can find the excellent new English word she's coined from this blog excerpt (hint - bold):

If there is any doubt in your mind about who your "representatives" are really representing, watch the vote for cloture on the immigration bill today - or, as I like to call it, the "Unexclusive-ing of United States Citizenship" bill.

Re:i wonder what would happen if there was real FO

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no provider within America that is usable for this. The pressure they will come under from fringe group is immense. Your best bet would be Russia or non-EU East-European states. Good luck though, it's a wonderful idea.

Six Apart board home addrs and SSNs

[Anonymous Coward]

BARAK BERKIOWITZ
  210 TENNYSON AVE
  PALO ALTO CA, 94301
  (650) 322-8031
  118-46-3088
  Mena Trott
  (415) 821-2073
  4338 26TH ST
  SAN FRANCISCO CA 94131-1810
  DAVID F MARQUARDT
  2480 SAND HILL RD APT 101
  MENLO PARK CA 94025-6940
  (650) 233-3333
  (650) 692-2883
  086-44-2677
  DAVID MARTIN HORNIK
  137 PARK AVE # 419
  PALO ALTO CA 94306-1108
  (650) 327-8757
  (650) 328-1380
  014-48-8392
  Jun Makihara
  579-86-3910
  1601 RISING GLEN RD
  LOS ANGELES CA 90069-1227
  REID HOFFMAN
  516-84-6565
  2042 LEAVENWORTH ST
  SAN FRANCISCO CA 94133-2518
  BENJAMIN J TROTT
  567-49-0571
  4338 26TH ST
  SAN FRANCISCO CA 94131-1810
  (415) 821-2073

Clubs

[Romwell]

"There's always a social circle somewhere that agree with your practises, if you look hard enough." Just as it used to be before the Internet.

The Livejournal users are revolting!

[Draconix]

"You said it! They stink on ice!"

Re:i wonder what would happen if there was real FO

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got support mate, plenty of it.
Heck, if you could get it running, I know a few sites that would be more than willing to fuck, even PAY you some sort of cash for that kind of service.

Don't forget discussing rape

[Zibblsnrt]

At least one (that I directly know of) and probably several things like rape survivors' support groups/blogs got nailed in this because they had the word 'rape' in their interests list. It was right next to "rape prevention," but that didn't stop 6A from nuking the account.

Because, of course, discussing something must mean actively encouraging and promoting it, right? If the context of the post/account/community says otherwise clearly enough that anyone without anencephaly could figure it out, why, that could be a ruse and we shouldn't take chances!

(God, won't someone please stop thinking of the children?)

Better Headline

[bmo]

Submitters really should think of good headlines. A better headline for this story would have been "LiveJournal Bloggers Are Revolting"

or, to be really attention grabbing:

"Incest Bloggers in Revolting Ferment"

--
BMO

Suggest Alternatives Here

[Knara]

Obviously LiveJournal is no longer a viable website for fandom and other non-mainstream (omg britney!) journals. Here's a good time and place to suggest an alternative (and "an alternative" isn't "stfu get your own domain and install wordpress", it needs to have good networking and community features already in-place).

Re:Suggest Alternatives Here

[Verte]

I had some good experiences with Diaryland a while back. This is making me consider moving back there. I can't think of one thing LJ does better than DL.

Re:Suggest Alternatives Here

[Anonymous Coward]

and "an alternative" isn't "stfu get your own domain and install wordpress", it needs to have good networking and community features already in-place

STFU, get your own domain, install WordPress, and run the feed through your Facebook.

Or, hey, here's a throwback idea: Start your own community with good networking features that's tailored to your interests. The technology has never been better suited for doing that on your own.

Stop being so lazy. Lazy solutions to things that are important to you always, always end up like this. If you want something, and you want it done well, you're going to have to work.

Re:Suggest Alternatives Here

[Knara]

I wonder how serious I'm supposed to take this advice from someone too lazy to even register for a slashdot account.

Six Apart's CEO Speaks Out...

[Valen0]

Repost from http://news.livejournal.com/99159.html ...

Well we really screwed this one up...

For reasons we are still trying to figure out what was supposed to be a well planned attempt to clean up a few journals that were violating LiveJournal's policies that protect minors turned into a total mess. I can only say I'm sorry, explain what we did wrong and what we are doing to correct these problems and explain what we were trying to do but messed up so completely.

What we did wrong;

1) Over the last couple of days we have suspended (not deleted) about 500 journals out of many millions on LJ.
2) It is now clear that in an unfortunate number of cases these journals were suspended for easily correctable problems in their profiles that would then allow them to be reinstated and that this was not communicated to the journal or community owners at all.
3) Further, because of miscommunication these journals were taken down before review could be completed to avoid mistakes.

How we are fixing it.

1) Over the next few hours we will review the journals that were taken down and wherever appropriate we will restore these journals or communities before 12 noon PDT. Sorry it will take that long but we do not want to reinstate true and clear violators of community policy.
2) In some cases Journals that were restored will be asked to clarify their profiles to avoid the appearance that they are soliciting or encouraging illegal activities.
3) Journals that we do not restore will be journals that we are fairly sure are actually intended to encourage activities that put minors at risk but we will review them if requested by their owner to be certain that we did not make a mistake.
4) In cases that we ask owners to clarify their profiles and they fail to do so within 7 days we will suspend their journals again.

So what were we trying to do when we messed up so badly?

As most of you know, LJ has a zero tolerance policy toward content that supports child abuse, pedophilia, or sexual violence. In implementation of this zero tolerance policy there were two issues that made it hard to apply these policies consistently;

Issue one was profiles.

There were a number of profiles that expressed "interest" in activities that most of us would agree put children at risk, notably pedophilia and child rape. Both in the instructions for profiles and in other places on the site we make it clear that interests listed should be evaluated within the context of "I like x", "I'm in favor of x" or "I support x". As many profiles are the only public part of a private journal and profiles serve partly as an advertisement for people of like interests, it is important that the content of a profile can be evaluated as if it stands alone. If your profile were to express interest in pedophilia with no other content that describes this interest as in helping survivors or protecting children from it we must read the profile as "I like or I support or I'm in favor of it." For this reason we suspended profiles that meet this criteria.

Another issue we needed to deal with was journals that used a thin veneer of fictional or academic interest in events and storylines that include child rape, pedophilia, and similar themes in order to actually promote these activities. While there are stories, essays, and discussions that include discussion of these issues in an effort to understand and prevent them, others use a pretext to promote these activities. It's often very hard to tell the difference. As such, we have suspended reported journals that do not clearly and substantially object to these activities while at the same time portraying them.

We recently received a complaint from outside the community about a number of journals. When we receive such complaints it is our obligation to look into them but it is our sta

Re:Six Apart's CEO Speaks Out...

[Knara]

Translation: "Aw, crap, it hit C|Net and Slashdot, we'd better do something or we're fucked."

Unfortunately for them, from what I can tell the various groups/communities/fandoms are already migrating or planning to migrate, regardless of their actions.

Re:Six Apart's CEO Speaks Out...

[Knara]

Also get a load of the comments in reply to that post.

I think that qualifies as an "unsatisfied" user community

Re:Six Apart's CEO Speaks Out...

[lrucker]

Actually, by the time it hit Slashdot, the apology was only an hour or so away.

Have you actually read those?

[Moraelin]

No offense, but have you actually read those? Heck, _can_ you read? Because after flipping through it a little, most of that stuff is along the lines of "don't do X, we'll kill you if you do X." Where X can be incest, rape, etc. It's fucking stupid to present a "don't do incest" commandment as "instructions on how to do incest."

I know that baiting christians is a popular sport, and I have indulged in a bit of that too at times, but the thing is: you have to end up looking like you're the smart one, and they're the illogical ones. If you just manage to look like a rabid retard who can't even read or follow the most simple logic, sad to say, you may have missed the whole point of that sport.

Re:Have you actually read those?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did ANYONE say the Bible provided a proper prescription for incest? Anywhere Captain Literacy? The bible does indeed provide a prescription for proper raping, and the raping of slaves, and what amounts to kidnapp victims who's family you've murdered. Also, eating shrimp is an abomination. Next time, take your own advice, twit. You're an embarassment to your outrage.

Re:Have you actually read those?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you're the one who didn't do any reading.

Summary:

1) It's OK to rape women who aren't engaged or and who aren't virgins (widows, wives, unmarried women who have had sex/been raped before).
2) It's OK to rape your female slave as long as *YOU* enjoy it. If you don't enjoy it, you have to sell her back so she can be resold to someone else so they can rape her.
3) While it specifies no sex with father's wife whether she's your mom or your stepmom, no sex with father's or mother's sister, no sex with sisters or stepsisters, no sex with granddaughters, and no sex with your wife's sister, the woman and daughter clause has a loophole: in early Jewish culture men were expected to marry their dead brother's wives, so apparently father on stepdaughter is OK if you're not interested in boinking your late brother's wife. Also, it seems to be OK to boink your brother's wife while he's alive.
4) It's perfectly fine to rape a woman once you've killed the people who would protect her from you, you just can't sell her as a slave afterwards.
5) No comments on the rape or incest fronts.

It helps to actually check your sources before you accuse someone else of being a rabid retard for not having read them. It might turn out they did a better job than you.

New Trend for User Created Content Sites?

[Ammishdave]

I think this may be a new phenomena for sites that are primarily hosts of user created content. If site owners try to steer a site away from what (some) users want, the users may rebel. Especially after the success of the Digg revolt, they may become more common. I'm not saying that either site in this incident is right or wrong, but I think this demonstrates that users control user created content sites.

Apology Out

[dancingmad]

Barak Berkowitz, of Six Apart, Livejournal's parent company, posted a reply a little while ago. Unlike digg a few weeks ago, Berkowitz sounds both sorry and his explanations seem reasonable.

Re:Apology Out

[Knara]

For some value of "reasonable" that means "knee jerk reactionary fuckup", perhaps. Doesn't matter. As of 0237 MST there's 17 pages of comments from 80% pissed off LJ users and 20% waffling between "follow through and we'll see" and "okaythx! =)))". And those are probably just the ones that lead the communities and have been monitoring the situation.

Re:Apology Out

[the unbeliever]

we've slashdotted livejournal!

o noez, teh h0rr0r!

Re:Apology Out

[ContraBassBlack]

There is a problem with this apology.
From the apology:
There were a number of profiles that expressed "interest" in activities that most of us would agree put children at risk, notably pedophilia and child rape. Both in the instructions for profiles and in other places on the site we make it clear that interests listed should be evaluated within the context of "I like x", "I'm in favor of x" or "I support x".
I have never seen any such instruction on the site, and cannot found it now. Has anyone else seen such an instruction? The instructions that are in place simply tell users to "list your interests, separated by commas..."

Re:Apology Out

[Kelson]

The instructions that are in place simply tell users to "list your interests, separated by commas..."

Right next to the box, it continues:

Short single-word phrases are best.

Rule of thumb: You should be able to put the interest in the sentence "I like ________".

When referring to nouns, use the plural form for consistency, e.g.: "I like DVDs" instead of "I like DVD".

I'm pretty sure those have been there for a while. Of course, they read as an example of how to format it so that people with the same interests are more likely to pick the same keywords.

Re:Apology Out

[ContraBassBlack]

Maybe I'm losing my mind, but right after the statement came out, I looked and did not see that line there. I did see the words "The "interests" feature is a way to display what you like on your User Profile;" in the Interests section of the FAQ.

Being an idiot, I thought of taking a screencap in case they made some CYA changes, but didn't.

Can anyone else confirm one way or the other?

Re:Apology Out

[nlfrederick]

http://pics.livejournal.com/hpnic06/pic/0008ya61/

There's a screenshot I took of the Interests part of our Edit User Info pages. It clearly states that you should be able to fit the word or phrase into "I like ____"

Admittedly not all of my interests coherently fit that scheme, but I've no objectionable interests in my profile, either.

Re:i wonder what would happen if there was real FO

[Fireflymantis]

Heh, if you ever need a competant web/systems developer, you can count me in. Hell, I would do it for free.

I think that you invision something like Group Hug but even more open to free speach. 95% of what is on that site is meaningless drivel, but the 5% that digs deep is... well I will trust it to you to know what I am talking about.

One interesting way of presenting it could be something like a persistant slashdot-esq system, except by default new posts go to the top of the page, root 'comments' would be treated more like a forum topic and have all the 'topics' merged together in one grandious discourse with a threaded discussion under it. A sprinkle of Ajax and it could be pretty sweet, not to mention could be the heart of a new forum paridigm.

As for hosting, you may want to (quite seriously) ask existing sites like piratebay or allofmp3 that are 'on the edge' for suggestions.

Anyways, I really do wish you all the best on your idea.

I'm not sure I follow

[evanbd]

Could you perhaps provide us with a car analogy?

Give me back my blog MotherFuckers

[supersnail]

.. sorry couldnt resist

Translation

[Opportunist]

Heck, all we wanted was doing our thing in peace. And we know the religious nutjobs ain't gonna get off our back, so we thought, heck, who's gonna get ruffled 'bout a few people who enjoy to shag their sis?

And what happens? Some guys at /., digg and whatnot start a free speech campaign outta it.

Lessee... religious nutjobs vs. geeks... The latter have more LJs here and they also got the better hackers, we better back-pedal.

Eyeball$

[TapeCutter]

"You've got it wrong; they haven't pissed off their customers, they're probably in fact doing what their customers have asked. You forget that advertisers are their customers. Now they may have pissed off consumers who use their site (and thus generate the traffic they need to attract advertisers), but I'm pretty sure their customers (the advertisers) won't be at all upset about this."

If that's what is going on here then LJ has it "wrong".

The users are buying LJ's service, it's just that the users "pay" in eyeball hours and personal trivia rather than dollars. Regardless of wether LJ sells advertising on their site or not, their one major asset is a database chock full of demographically mapped eyeballs that can be exchanged for real $$$ in more ways than I can imagine.

Wether LJ choose to call the eyeballs "users" or "customers", the GP's point remains valid: failure to maintain (preferably grow/diversify) their primary assest will end badly for them.

Re:Eyeball$

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with your point, and I'm not trying to criticize.

In English, it's 'whether', not 'wether'. A wether is a castrated lamb.

Yes, I grew up on a sheep farm. I'm a sad, sad man. Hehe.

Re:Eyeball$

[memprime]

In English, it's 'whether', not 'wether'. A wether is a castrated lamb. If I were Frank, I'd be a little jittery right now.

Re:Eyeball$

[Miseph]

Aw, hey little buddy, you seem to have gotten stuck in that fence. Well don't worry, I'll help push you through...

Baaa! Baaa!

pan-sexuality?

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't somebody think of the pans?

Obligatory Red Dwarf quote

[Solandri]

Holly: Well, only if you're not busy. Would you mind erasing some of my memory banks?
Lister: What for?
Holly: Well, if you erase all the Agatha Christie novels from my memory bank, I can read 'em again tonight.
Lister: How do I do it?
Holly: Just type, "Holmem. Password override. The novels Christie, Agatha." Then press erase.
Lister: I've done it.
Holly: Done what?
Lister: Erased Agatha Christie.
Holly: Who's she, then?
Lister: Holly, you just asked me to erase all Agatha Christie novels from your memory.
Holly: Why should I do that? I've never heard of her.
Lister: You've never heard of her because I've just erased her from your smegging memory.
Holly: What'd you do that for?
Lister: You asked me to!
Holly: When?
Lister: Just now!
Holly: I don't remember this.

uhoh

[TeaSeaLancs]

This is dangerous, dangerous stuff. I have a livejournal, and I also have this thing where I accidentally mix up incest and incense. And I like candles :'(

Let me be the first to say "incest"

[TapeCutter]

This isn't aimed at you personally, but much of the discussion seems to be confusing incest with paedophilia. The only thing they really have in common is both are sexual taboos in western (and many other) cultures. On a "human behaviour" level the definition of both words varys greatly across different cultures and generations.



I suspect that now the word "terrorist" is starting to loose it's "magic spell" quality, we will be hearing more incantantions of the "sex offender" spell. The USG (as distinct from it's people) will drop Bush and Iraq at the same time and rush home for the new "war on evil sex offenders" who may be guilty of anything from "pissing on a tree" to "trading in child sex-slaves" or worse. The really sad part about this theory is that genuine "rock spiders" will be able to use a "saftey in numbers" strategy and simply dissapear into large chunk of the population collectively known as "registered sex offenders".

Re:Let me be the first to say "incest"

[metlin]

Well, in several cultures, it was (and still is) acceptable to marry within the family.

Egyptian pharaohs used to marry their own sisters. Several communities in Asia and Africa marry their own first siblings, cousins, or uncles marry their nieces.

While western culture may forbid it, the world doesn't necessarily revolve around western civilizations.

Morality is seldom absolute and in this case, it's quite relative (sorry, bad pun).

Re:Let me be the first to say "incest"

[DavidTC]

Egyptian pharaohs used to marry their own sisters.

To be fair, they didn't actually have sex with their siblings, they just married them because of obscure power-sharing rules and stuff. Both the men and the women in such arrangements had other people to share their (separate) beds.

Re:Let me be the first to say "incest"

[PopeJM]

As a student of Anthropology I can tell you that all cultures have an incest taboo for parent/child relations as well as brother/sister. The only situation in which brother/sister marriage is for marriages in the royal family to keep the bloodline pure. As you mentioned, this is practiced in Egypt and also in Hawaii. Cousin marriages are much more commonplace in other cultures and usually occur when they can provide benefits for the economic and social wellbeing of kin groups.

This isn't a question of morality being relevant or not, it's a question of ignorance of culture. There are reasons why one marries a certain person and in other countries it usually isn't for love, it's for the group as a whole. It is likely that much of what is being discussed (by western peoples, who I am assuming are in the majority) on Livejournal is not an anthropological discussion or has any similarity to the accepted practices of incest in other cultures. Therefore, it's irrelevant to discuss the marriage practices of other cultures in this context.

Re:Let me be the first to say "incest"

[PopeJM]

since I can't edit my post... I meant relative not relevant and some cultures may allow for brother/sister marriage just not many whatsoever.

Re:Let me be the first to say "incest"

[CormacJ]

Aren't most of the monarchies of Europe all pretty much closely related? Isn't that what caused the haemophilia trait in Queen Victorias kids?

Re:Let me be the first to say "incest"

[TapeCutter]

"Well, in several cultures, it was (and still is) acceptable to marry within the family."

I agree with your post and was actually thinking of Egypt when I said "(and many other) cultures" instead of "all other cultures". As you have pointed out marriage between siblings is not particularly rare, but marriage and sex are two different things (ie: marriage is cultural, sex is instinctive).

Re:Let me be the first to say "incest"

[PopeJM]

well as I pointed out, when it's a royal family the rules change rather drastically. However, the people on livejournal most likely aren't royalty or recently related to royalty and I doubt they're discussing the implications of incest within royal families anyhow. My point is that they are talking about incest more sexually than marriage related.

Re:Let me be the first to say "incest"

[ambiguous kasey]

Egyptian pharaohs used to marry their own sisters. People practised many stupid things in the name of religion. The ancient Egyptian royalty practised inbreeding because of the mythology that all Pharaohs were the direct offspring of Ra, and diluting the Ra in their Pharaohs would be blasphemy.

Several communities in Asia and Africa marry their own first siblings, cousins, or uncles marry their nieces. No large civilization has ever condoned incest as widely accepted practice.

Re:Let me be the first to say "incest"

[Anonymous Coward]

Tutankhamen was married to Ankhesenamen who was most likely a half sister. They had two childen, but both died shortly after birth or will still-born. Many or most marriages between brothers and sisters of fathers and daughters were for religious reasons. But cousins, step siblings, and half siblings were all considered OK to have children with.

Justification

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm seriously thinking that LJ wasn't wrong to lock away the communities. LJ might have gone too far, but it was necessary nonetheless.

Seriously, the moment I hear people justifying their boy x boy love-sex fetishes with garbage like "feminism" and "open discussion" when it's just their favorite characters humping each other in the bathroom with their own touches of "romance", I definitely don't want to be their host, even if my money's at stake. Some things just aren't worth it.

Download posts

[Anonymous Coward]

So, this brings the question, what's a good software to get to copy all your old posts in case you decide to leave lj in protest? Having them keep 4 years worth of diary entries is what keeps me paying for my account.

Re:Download posts

[mdwh2]

what's a good software to get to copy all your old posts in case you decide to leave lj in protest?

LJArchive (for Windows, at least).

God must like incest

[Chrisq]

God must like incest, or why would he only have created two humans to start with?

Re:God must like incest

[Anonymous Coward]

If Mary is the mother of God, and God made Mary pregnant then what does that make God?

Freedom of speech or?

[deanarue]

Frankly, I am surprised that /.er's are shocked by this. Sometimes I wonder if people read their own blogs. As a child of rape\ incest. I think that all moral adults should take a stand, not be so lazy and say "oh freedom of speech, blah blah blah, we can't take away their rights." Well look around you, not everyone who has the ability to talk, should. If you look into recent history you will find that this is changing, as well it should. Not too long ago in Florida, a publisher was charged and found guilty to accessory to murder. He contracted and published a book called the "hit man" which was used as a blueprint to kill a woman , her disabled son, and his nurse. The boy's father who hired the hit man, the hit man who used the book, and the publisher, were all found guilty. The writer, a single mom of three, had not liked the project, and would only write it after the publisher, gave her a waiver to sign. So she was never charged. Its not the dark ages anymore, not only wise\learned people have the ability to reach others in print, or other media. Any fool with access to a computer can touch thousands of other minds. We all as (hopefully) sane humans need to police the internet, consider it neighborhood watch if you like. Report abuse of other humans, in any situation.

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[QCompson]

We all as (hopefully) sane humans need to police the internet, consider it neighborhood watch if you like.

Good idea. All the humans in the world will police the internet, and try to remove any objectionable content. In fact, I think we should have this internet-neighborhood-watch group centered in one country for easy administration. I pick Iran. The Mullahs can help determine what should be off-limits. Any objections?

ps - your ideas frighten me

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to the rape/incest survivors who had their accounts deleted, while actual pedophiles got to keep theres.
I'm sure they'd be interested in hearing more about your thoughts on thoughtcrime.

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Well look around you, not everyone who has the ability to talk, should.

Hang on, for emphasis, let me quote you again.

Well look around you, not everyone who has the ability to talk, should.

Well, in a general sense, I suppose many would be better off if they thought a bit before they spoke, or didn't just blurt out any old thing, but that's not really your point is it? Your point is that we shouldn't really have freedom of speech, should we? Our declarations should be subject to approval by appropriate persons, yes?

Its not the dark ages anymore, not only wise\learned people have the ability to reach others in print, or other media. Any fool with access to a computer can touch thousands of other minds. We all as (hopefully) sane humans need to police the internet, consider it neighborhood watch if you like. Report abuse of other humans, in any situation.

So you're saying that only "wise and learned" people should have the ability to preach to the masses? That our fragile minds are too weak to resist "corruption" by unscrupulous fools with internet access? That we should all become police informants against people who don't tow the line?

Of course, I imagine you'll deny my observation's of your post. Say that I'm putting words in your mouth, etc, etc. You won't even have the integrity to come right out and say what you really believe in. I would not agree with you, but I could at least respect that you have an opinion and aren't afraid to say it.

People like you are the greatest threat to our society. You are the cancer within that gnaws at the foundations that previous generations worked so hard to build. The sad fact is you don't like our free society very much, or at least, while you may enjoy your own freedoms and luxuries, you feel uncomfortable about extending those freedoms to everyone, regardless of class, race, creed or colour.

I think the people in the world we loosely classify as "right wing" could be better described as those who believe in and desire a caste system for our society, where the "right" kind of people enjoy freedom, democracy, prosperity, etc, and where the "wrong" kind of people are "protected" or "supervised" or whatever other euphemisms for serfdom and slavery are in vogue at the moment. There's probably some kind of evolutionary psychology explanation for this. It would be interesting to explore why such a mentality exists.

You need to accept that you are such a person. You need to have the integrity to voice your opinions openly instead of hiding them behind insidious and equivocal language. That at least an honest person could respect. Sure your opinions might be unpopular, but at least they'll be your honest opinions, and not a false facade. You'll be better off in the long run, and so will society.

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[deanarue]

since when did abuses become ideas? what i sad was no one should sit by and allow abuses to those who cannot defend themselves; to go by with out comment or action! People who allow abuse without comment are not defending free speech.

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[mdwh2]

People who allow abuse without comment are not defending free speech.

Did you RTFA? No one is defending abuse.

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[alexq]

Sometimes I wonder if people read their own blogs. As a child of rape\ incest. I think that all moral adults should take a stand, not be so lazy and say "oh freedom of speech, blah blah blah, we can't take away their rights."

well, this could go the other way too.. by allowing anyone to speak, and encouraging it, we could have people create _awareness_ of problems so that children can know what is right and what is wrong - i believe it's true that in a lot of abuse cases in general, the victims don't feel they can do anything because they don't know that it is truly wrong, and that there is support out there. i think it's hard to argue that stifling that communication would be better than allowing it.

and i don't need to go down the dangerous path of censorship - other posters have done it better than me.. if we are only going to allow 'intelligent' people to speak, why not also only allow 'intelligent' people to vote? and who decides who is intelligent? the people in power?

it may be the case that a few sites are actually causing child abuse of varying kinds - just like it may be the case that a few violent movies and video games actually somehow cause violence. i don't know if i believe it's the case, but it's possible. but that argument has been made before - there was abuse, there was violence. and it is not clear to me that the benefits of freedom of speech (AWARENESS) could ever be less than the alleged problems. it may even help people to cope with their desires to do something bad, if they find the right outlet.

and, to digress a little, if the internet existed 50 years ago, might we be having these same discussions about homosexuals?

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not too long ago in Florida, a publisher was charged and found guilty to accessory to murder.

Don't you see the injustice in this story? I hope that the publisher was an accessory in some other way, otherwise this is an obvious travesty of justice.

It's rather like imprisoning Sir Arthur Conan Doyle because some nutjob copied a fictional murder from one of his Sherlock Holmes stories. I for one do not welcome our book-burning writer-imprisoning overlords.

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[Anthony Boyd]

Any fool with access to a computer can touch thousands of other minds. We all as (hopefully) sane humans need to police the internet, consider it neighborhood watch if you like.

I totally agree. I want to report you and your posts. I hope your ability to post is quickly removed. Sorry. It's not censorship, just the neighborhood watch doing its job. Nothing personal.

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[smellsofbikes]

>I think the people in the world we loosely classify as "right wing" could be better described as those who believe in and desire a caste system for our society, where the "right" kind of people enjoy freedom, democracy, prosperity, etc, and where the "wrong" kind of people are "protected" or "supervised" or whatever other euphemisms for serfdom and slavery are in vogue at the moment.

I'm not disputing your general assertion, that people who try to control what other people say, like the person you're replying to clearly was, are bastards. But -- and I'm saying this as a way left-wing borderline nutjob -- just as many people on the far left do this. The anti-porn activists are half right-wing Christian controlfreaks and half left-wing ultrafeminist controlfreaks. It's the controlfreak that's the problem. Some people believe that nobody should be allowed to talk or think about things they don't like. That's the problem, they're the problem. It has little to do with right/left, and a lot to do with the freedom/authority continuum. I'm way left, but I'm also way freedom, and fundamentally, it's the freedom to talk about anything we want, that gives us the footing to be left or right.

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you honestly not see the difference between "allowing abuse" and "allowing people to talk about abuse"?

Your own comment, in which you mentioned that you were a child of rape/incest, could have gotten your Livejournal account deleted.

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[deanarue]

and how many people heard the screams but didn't pick up the phone to call 911?

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[deanarue]

where did i say censor? I said report abuse, of anyone! not just one group. All people have the right to live without abuse. Child or adult. woman or male gay or straight. any religion at all. Do not be the one who says "its not my place to stand up for the weak and voiceless." or "I didnt want to get involved, it wasn't my business." for people to read hate messages "of any kind" and turn away with a shrug, is the same as saying it yourself.

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[alexq]

where did i say censor?

this sounds like censoring.. if it isn't, can you please explain what you meant:

Well look around you, not everyone who has the ability to talk, should. If you look into recent history you will find that this is changing, as well it should. Not too long ago in Florida, a publisher was charged and found guilty to accessory to murder.

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[deanarue]

reporting the abuse of a human being is not censorship. look the words up if you need to.

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you're so obviously new here, let me set you straight:
It's troll Tuesday, not troll Thursday.
Thank you for your attention.

fuckin pratt

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[deanarue]

I'm sorry I cited that example; if all anyone gets out of it is censorship. When it is an example of the fact that people have responsibility in what they do. And what they say. What I said was to report the abuse of others, whether it is on-line or on your street corner. Our communities have grown, because of the wonders of technology. We as people, need to have a global community, not just to the corner store. We need to watch out for each other. That could mean calling 911, when you hear screams, or it could mean objecting to and reporting abuse of others that you see on-line.

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[LowbrowDeluxe]

Well look around you, not everyone who has the ability to talk, should. Okay. You first.

Re:Freedom of speech or?

[QCompson]

look the words up if you need to.

Ha! Insults are the first refuge of idiots.

Are you advocating that we scour the internet for people who are confessing to crimes? That is not the issue in the Livejournal situation; rather, LJ has been removing journals for users that express an interest (for any reason) in undesirable activities such as incest, pedophilia, etc.

What do defenders of the First Amendment have to do with reporting abuse? If someone admits they are committing a crime, they can be investigated and arrested. If someone just writes, "I think diddling kids is cool," they have committed no crime. In your own convoluted, simple-minded way, I think you are trying to argue that we should be removing content on the internet which promotes or encourages crime. Your example of a Florida case in which a publisher was found guilty as an accessory to murder (a link or case cite would have been helpful) is vastly different from the LJ debacle. There are no impending arrests of the LJ users who have been banned. I have not read all of the banned journals, but it is highly doubtful that any criminal convictions are possible, unless they were specifically encouraging or soliciting individuals to commit crimes. My understanding is that many of the journals which were removed were purely works of fiction (that means not real).

If more people thought like you (and thankfully they do not), whole portions of our popular culture would have to be suppressed. Much of the popular fiction, video games, and movies available today could be considered to be "promoting" illegal activities of one sort or another.

ps - It's quite possible that I am misinterpreting your views. I apologize if that is the case.

Two Conflicting Responses

[ContraBassBlack]

On one hand, as a years long LJ user who has not seen a more enticing blogging community, I would like to see LJ clean up its mess, restore the suspended accounts, satisfy the outraged users, and not make a similar blunder again.

On the other hand, as a person disgusted by sites screwing their users at the first sign of outside pressure, be it from "decency" advocates or overzealous DMCA users, I would like to see them badly hurt by this blunder so that others learn the lesson, respect their own TOS, and treat their users fairly.

what's wrong with people?

[circletimessquare]

there are 2 types of responses in this thread:

1. livejournal overreacting

2. livejournal taking issue with incest

i see plenty of people in the replies here angry at #1 (right), and i see plenty angry at #2 (not right)

incest is wrong folks. for biological, developmental, psychological, moral, social... a whole range of reasons. please don't confuse people being angry with livejournal's ham handed approach to the issue as a signal that there is any reason to accept incest. it nonsense to conflate these two points, but a lot of you are doing just that

Re:what's wrong with people?

[mdwh2]

Even when children don't or can't result from it (e.g., contraception, different types of sex, same sex couples)?

And do you share the same view on people with genetic diseases?

And even if it's wrong, why does that mean talking or writing about it (or listing it as a keyword on your profile) is wrong? By that reasoning, you are wrong to be mentioning it!

Re:what's wrong with people?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll find there's a high percentage of Slashdotters who are pedophiles and/or sexual deviants. Masturbating to LJ blogs are the only action a lot of these geeks will ever get.

Re:what's wrong with people?

[QCompson]

incest is wrong folks.

Ok. Is writing about incest wrong too?

New slashdot poll...

[DeadCatX2]

If you have sex with your clone, is that

A) Masturbation
B) Incest
C) Homosexual
D) All of the above

Re:New slashdot poll...

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to have forgotten
E) Cowboy Neal

Re:New slashdot poll...

[Workaphobia]

I believe I heard a quote somewhere on television where they specifically claimed "It's not incest, it's masturbation". It might've been the Colbert Report or Harvey Birdman.

Re:New slashdot poll...

[vuffi_raa]

it would officially be incest since it is a genetic twin- and it would be homosexual since it would be the same sex- unless there was a modification during gestation- which would be interesting since you would have the same genetic information with the exception of the xx/xy chromosome- this would be interesting as well because if you had a kid together, it should as well be a clone since all of your genes would match.

(rolls eyes)

[circletimessquare]

there are a number of issues where social conservatives have it wrong: marijuana should be legalized, abortion should be an option, physical torture doesn't work, there's nothing wrong with gay marriage, euthanasia is ok if you're sound of mind, etc.

however, things like pedophilia and incest, whenever you are talking about sexual relations with someone seriously underage, you receive an automatic fail, you don't get it. "won't someone think of the children!" is a hilarious refrain, but guess what: you must actually protect children from sexual abuse. and no, a child cannot ever consent to sex because consent is informed consent, something a psychologically undeveloped naive child can never ever do with an adult

you fail it dude, big time. pick another issue to fight on, this one's a loser

Re:(rolls eyes)

[mdwh2]

with someone seriously underage

Right, this was the rather important detail missing in your original post.

Re:(rolls eyes)

[alexgieg]

there are a number of issues where social conservatives have it wrong: marijuana should be legalized, abortion should be an option, physical torture doesn't work, there's nothing wrong with gay marriage, euthanasia is ok if you're sound of mind, etc.

I consider myself a social conservative, but the "conservative" I refer myself to is of the very, very old kind. Meaning, pre-Victorian, pre-puritan, pre-modern, way down into the "Middle Age" kind of conservatism. And according to this conservatism, these are the answers to your points:

a) Marijuana should be legalized.

Yes, and other drugs too, provided three things are also done:

First: Everyone guilt of being in the drug business before legalization should still be prosecuted and incarcerated for doing so according to the previous laws, otherwise all alive drug cartel mafiosi assassins as well as all alive drug-funded guerrilla genocides would, in a matter of days, become legal and respected businessman, instead of psychopaths and sociopaths that should pay for their crimes. A complete new beginning is okay. A pardon for these guys isn't.

Second: Committing crimes while under the influence of a drug should multiply the incarcerated time, as already happens with drinking-influenced crimes.

Third: Tobacco usage should have the same freedom granted to drug usage. There's no reason in being pro-drug and anti-tobacco. Meaning: if it's not admissible for your to sue John Doe for providing you some marijuana he cultivated in his garden, it's not admissible for you to sue a multinational cigarette manufacturer for selling you tobacco.

Anything less and it simply wouldn't be a just move.

b) Abortion should be an option.

No, because there's no certainty whatsoever on when an embryo/fetus becomes a human being with human rights, only arbitrarily chosen points. For any given point in time, there are two possibilities: it's either the correct point, and the thing before that instant isn't a human being, thus having no human rights, thus his demise not being an assassination; or it's the wrong point, and you're indeed assassinating an human being. Since we don't know what's in any point we choose (3 months, 10 days, whatever, it doesn't matter), aborting is an act that always has 50% chance, minimum, of being an assassination. It's simply illogical to freely allow for something with such a high level of uncertainty. Mere common sense, devoid of any religious implication, dictates that in such a case the safe option be chosen, and the only available other option is not killing the embryo/fetus, because only by following it you're 100% sure you didn't commit an assassination.

If you disagree, then you should also follow the logical consequences of your disagreement and, for example, say that a 50% chance of one being guilty of having committed a crime given the collected evidence must be enough for him to be convicted, even when the conviction is the death penalty. If you think the correct in this case is, let's say, at least 99% certainty, the same must apply to abortion. Any divergence in approaches here would be, necessarily, a case of cognitive dissonance.

c) Physical torture doesn't work.

Usually correct. The only exception would be when you're almost 100% sure (see 'b') the victim know something he isn't willing to reveal. And even so, to torture someone would be an ethically valid act only if said knowledge were something that would allow you to immediately avoid worse things than the torture itself to happen, such as, for example, saving lives. Anything less, even possibly saving lives in a few months or years, isn't defensible in any way, shape or form.

d) There's nothing wrong with gay marriage.

The problem is not well exposed. The problem isn't in gay marriage. The problem is in marriage being a civil bound. This is a very recent development in the history of Western law. Up to some point in th

Re:(rolls eyes)

[loxosceles]

a)

First) No, legalized dealing doesn't cause a problem. Profits drop, major corporations take over drug production, and former drug kingpins, while still rich, seen their annual profits fall to small-business levels. Maybe 3rd-world drug lords can leverage cheap/coerced labor to produce coke and heroin and pot, but synthetics would be completely dominated by domestic production. Low profits would eliminate most drug-dealing-related violence. So why do you hate drug dealers again? You think when Britain lost the war of Independence, they should have said, "Hey, sorry about that. Just let us execute all those troublemaking Founding Fathers, and then we'll let you run your own country?"

Second) That might make you feel good, but it's mostly useless because it functions as an extremely attenuated deterrent. Nobody thinks they're going to go commit crimes if they take drugs. They take drugs because they like the feeling. The way to prevent drug-induced crimes is to pay attention to other people and intervene if it looks like they're addicted or are getting in over their head.

b) You're grossly misusing probability, and you evidently have never glanced at embryology. You also don't understand that human rights are a societal construct granted to make society function better, not something inherently belonging to human beings.

c) Physical torture works if the prisoner knows a bunch of things, only a few of which you're interested in, and the prisoner doesn't know how much you (as part of the interrogating agency) know. You can then set a reasonable probability bound on whether he's telling the truth. Various means of torture are used simply to get the prisoner to the point where he's telling you the truth about things you already know or can verify. At that point -- again, only if he doesn't know what you know -- you can be fairly sure he's telling you the truth about things you can't verify.

d) Absolutely agree.

e) Mostly agree, except you're thinking inside the box. If euthanasia is legal, getting witnesses would be easy. Simply get a few witnesses (with nothing to gain from the death), and that prevents most of the abuse you're worried about. Doctors or nurses would make fine witnesses.

Re:(rolls eyes)

[alexgieg]

So why do you hate drug dealers again?

I don't hate them due to the drug dealing per se, but due to the crime and violence they used for and while drug dealing. Most of the legalization talk I hear fails to take into account that the former criminal drug dealers must still pay for the violence they did, even if from the moment drugs get legalized they start behaving as honest businessmen. Their previous fortunes were built upon blood, and letting they keep this money is blatant promotion of injustice to both the (new) honest and law abiding drug dealers as well as to the former victims of the criminal ones.

You think when Britain lost the war of Independence, they should have said, "Hey, sorry about that. Just let us execute all those troublemaking Founding Fathers, and then we'll let you run your own country?"

This comparison is unfair for the sole reason that wars (true ones, not cabinet wars) reshape the interpretation of the law as well as, many times, law itself. What happens inside a stable and stably-changing legal framework cannot be easily correlated to what happens outside of any framework and is, most of the time, framework-establishing.

Second) That might make you feel good, but it's mostly useless because it functions as an extremely attenuated deterrent. Nobody thinks they're going to go commit crimes if they take drugs. They take drugs because they like the feeling. The way to prevent drug-induced crimes is to pay attention to other people and intervene if it looks like they're addicted or are getting in over their head.

You're correct in that it alone doesn't work, but it's nevertheless an important and necessary component of any effective deterrent. Drug users will try to drug themselves where there's less chance of doing something stupid. You'd end up with something akin to "drug pubs", not the middle of the street, and that's an improvement any way you look at it.

b) You're grossly misusing probability, and you evidently have never glanced at embryology.

I do know both, yes. All "embryologic starting points" for a human life are indeed arbitrary, just follow the discussion. For some, it's the moment a nervous system becomes discernible. For others, it's the moment a brain appears. For others, it's the moment there's a pulsating hearth, or merely a hearth. For others yet, it's the moment cells have started differentiating, or the moment the differentiation reaches this or that percentage, or such number of cells, or such number of cell divisions. Entering developed fetuses properly, there are those that regard it as the moment it shows voluntary movements, or the moment it has the ability to live by itself outside of the mothers. And so on, and so forth. So much, indeed, that in the end you can have someone arguing with property for it to be set at any specific second in the 23 million or so seconds that the development takes. Choosing any of these is then arbitrary simply because the other 22,999,999 are as much convincing as the one you choose. And no matter which one it is, you are objectively either right, or wrong. Because there's no 1/3, 1/2 or 9/10 human life. There's either an human life, or no human life at all.

You also don't understand that human rights are a societal construct granted to make society function better, not something inherently belonging to human beings.

I talk about human right because I'm talking about a legal framework. Remove the legal framework, and we have what I exposed above: human life or no human life. Thus, either killing a human being (short form: assassinating) or not killing a human being. The fact that the law might concede to some persons the right to assassinate others when there's a 'n%' chance they've made this or that (or be this or that, etc.) is immaterial for this argument.

It comes into play when we're trying to determine what the law ought to be, onc

Re:(rolls eyes)

[loxosceles]

a) I see no black and white distinction between reshaping law and the interpretation of law, and merely reshaping law. If we can agree that drug dealing is acceptable, do we need to cleanse society of everyone who shared that sentiment and was unwilling to abide by stupid drug laws in the past? I don't think so; evidently you do. Many of the most powerful clans in the U.S. were involved in bootlegging during the prohibition. Where would we be today if those criminals had been executed to make way for the more domesticated businesspeople who were afraid of the law even when it was stupid?

b)

Remove the legal framework, and we have what I exposed above: human life or no human life.

I dispute that dichotomy. As you point out, there is no developmental bright line. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that is difficult to characterize, and impossible to test objectively.

If we protect fertilized eggs because they're genetically human, do we protect eggs modified with somatic cell nuclear transfer? Do we protect other less-capable stem cells because they might be easy to coax into forming embryos?

If we protect a 6-week-old embryo because it has the beginnings of a brain, or a 5-month-old foetus because it has an active nervous system, why not grant equivalent human rights to all mammals? Do they not have brains and nervous systems?

The only bright line in sight is the point at which society grants human rights to a developing human. That is entirely arbitrary. Birth works perfectly well, and I see no reason to go screwing with that bright line. I don't think infants inherently deserve human rights; they are clearly less capable at birth than many other animals which we have no problem prodding with needles and killing in research labs. Nevertheless, I think there's a strong case for giving infants full rights at birth, because there are powerful psychological and sociological mechanisms (parental bonding, community outrage over killing anything that looks human and can move around on its own) for prohibiting the killing of infants. Those reasons disappear when you consider a foetus.

c) What's ethical in wartime with regard to foreigners is highly subjective. Until we have a one-world government, we have to live with the fact that every person in another country can become "the other" if there's a perceived threat to our national interest.

e) I think a large number of people who die of natural causes or diseases would choose euthanasia if they could, and I think the benefits of that would outweigh the minuscule risk of abuse. I've watched three of my grandparents degenerate in nursing homes, and it seem to me that nursing homes are full of people clinging to what they have for no reason other than to avoid upsetting the social order. There plenty of other people, elderly and not-so-elderly, who are nothing more than walking ghosts. They contribute nothing to society, nothing to their families (other than delay of grief from their passing), and don't even better themselves. I think our culture needs to change so that it's acceptable for someone not to want to live any longer. Didn't it used to be that way? Is it just in modern times that anyone who wants to die, even an octogenerian, is considered depressed? Once you admit the possibility that wanting to die is valid, I think you're obligated to provide a way for people to kill themselves.

I think the problems you mention related to legal euthanasia are not much more difficult than many other problems we live with today. People who would go to the trouble of all the trickery you propose would not have any qualms about faking suicides, arranging "accidents," or framing someone for capital murder. Any of those works just as well as euthanasia if you want someone dead. It's not easy to get away with such crimes, and it wouldn't be easy to get away with bribing people to swear that patient X wanted to die. If doctors

Re:(rolls eyes)

[alexgieg]

I see no black and white distinction between reshaping law and the interpretation of law, and merely reshaping law. If we can agree that drug dealing is acceptable, do we need to cleanse society of everyone who shared that sentiment and was unwilling to abide by stupid drug laws in the past?

No, no! You're not taking this from the correct angle. I'm not talking about they merely drug dealing, but about everything else they did while drug dealing for the sake of continuing to drug deal. For example: extortions, assassinations, thefts, putting dangerous venoms inside drugs to better profit etc. Any legalizing effort that doesn't make extremely clear that for these things they did while drug dealing they will still be persecuted and punished, with harsher punishments due to they having committed them in association with drug dealing, fails, because in the end such a legalization would reward them for the most outrageous of their wrongdoings.

I don't think so; evidently you do. Many of the most powerful clans in the U.S. were involved in bootlegging during the prohibition. Where would we be today if those criminals had been executed to make way for the more domesticated businesspeople who were afraid of the law even when it was stupid?

One thing is the guy who simply distilled some spirit. Another is the Al Capone kind who also goes around machine-gunning rivals. You cannot threat both equally when you re-legalize things.

I dispute that dichotomy. As you point out, there is no developmental bright line. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that is difficult to characterize, and impossible to test objectively.

Don't you notice that when you choose consciousness as the delimiting point you're just adding another to the many possible points, and that opting for it is as much arbitrary as opting for any other?

As it stands, your argument, or rather, the meta-structure of your argument, in fact confirms mine, for my argument is precisely about this kind of argumentation, and as such it stands without me needing to actually enter each one of the multitude of discussions on which point is better, worse and why. It works, so to speak, one "abstraction layer" above yours.

The only bright line in sight is the point at which society grants human rights to a developing human. That is entirely arbitrary. Birth works perfectly well, and I see no reason to go screwing with that bright line.

You don't see a reason because it's not your own human status that is being discussed and on the verge of being negated. The logical consequence of your line of reasoning is that, if/when the political line changes and for some arbitrary reason you're no longer thought of as human, thus losing all the human protections that (actual) humans enjoy, this is perfectly okay and you should just accept it, until some day in future when you're thought of as human again. Provided, obviously, you weren't killed by (actual) humans in the meantime, something that by definition wouldn't have been assassination, but at best cruelty to an animal. :D

c) What's ethical in wartime with regard to foreigners is highly subjective. Until we have a one-world government, we have to live with the fact that every person in another country can become "the other" if there's a perceived threat to our national interest.

Hmm... No, I don't think this is correct. There are plenty of "otherization" means under an unified government. USA is the paradigmatic example: it has lots of divisions as things are, even being a single country. Race divisions ("they, the blacks", "they, the whites", "they, the Mexicans", "they, the native Americans"), geographic divisions ("they, the rednecks", "they, the southerners", "they, the northerners"), religious divisions ("they, the atheists", "they, the religious right", "they, the pagans

How to DDOS websites

[British]

..is via social engineering. Want a website to go away?

1. Four magic letters: DMCA. Just email the webmaster saying they are in violation of it. It doesn't matter if the website consists of the Apache default page. They will quickly go into Pavlovian response and shut it down.

2. Just say some of the users are pedos & stuff. With the incredibly trendy demonizing of suspected(or real) pedos, accounts can be deleted instantly, as the article as shown. No need for pesky investigations or anything like that. It's best to shut it down.

LJ should purge Christian blogs too

[Slashcrap]

After all, the entire creation myth implies that humanity is descended from one man and one woman and therefore condones incest on a massive scale.

Let's band together and drive these sick fucks off the Internet before they poison anymore young minds.

Won't somebody please think of the fucking children?

I know someone is going to reply with some complicated explanation of how there wasn't really any incest between Adam & Eve's children, but deep down you'll know as well as I do that you're just making shit up as you go along.

Re:LJ should purge Christian blogs too

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Eve was created from Adam's body, so technically it's not incest but self-impregnation... wow. But in any case, the Bible is rife with "indecent" material, from incest to rape, soooo....

well then you don't understand me

[circletimessquare]

it's those who wonder what the big deal with incest/ pedophilia who seem to be missing the distinction on age, not me

for example:

"Even when children don't or can't result from it (e.g., contraception, different types of sex, same sex couples)?

And do you share the same view on people with genetic diseases?

And even if it's wrong, why does that mean talking or writing about it (or listing it as a keyword on your profile) is wrong? By that reasoning, you are wrong to be mentioning it!"

where's your age distinction?

Re:well then you don't understand me

[loxosceles]

Umm, no, you're the one who doesn't understand what incest is.

Your first post doesn't mention pedophilia at all. It's a rant against incest. I suggest you look up the word. It refers to sexual conduct between related individuals (typically first cousin or closer in the U.S.). It does not exclusively refer to sexual relations between parents and their children, and it has nothing to do with the age of the participants. Sex between a 60-year-old parent and 35-year-old child is incest, as is sex between 20-year-old identical twins, as is two 5-year-old first cousins playing doctor.

mdwh2 didn't provide an age distinction because your rant about incest did not include an age distinction. Most people, including myself, object to real pedophilia, regardless of whether it also happens to be incest. Complaints about parent/child sexual relationships are properly criticized because they're pedophilia, not because they're incest.

The taboo against incest is simply selective eugenics. There could be a critical, valuable and rare recessive gene somewhere, and the only way there is a significant chance of an individual expressing that trait is through incest (the alternative being a chance coupling between two carriers from separate gene lines). No educated person would deny that incest resulting in a child puts that child at greater risk of problems due to harmful recessive traits. But there are two sides to almost everything, and criticizing incest-qua-incest while not criticizing reproduction by people with known, serious genetic diseases is garbage -- emotionally-driven public policy.

ZOMGWTFBBQ?!

[Anonymous Coward]

tl;dr

Mass Deletion?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no nuclear physicist (yet) but it seems obvious even to me that any mass deletion would result in the release of tons of energy... how is this news?

Re:Mass Deletion?

[chmod a x mojo]

silly AC mass can neither be created nor destroyed ( deleted) try it localhost$: mv mass /dev/null BASH: PERMISION DENIED - PHYSICTS RESOURCE VIOLATION.

There's incest in Lolita?

[digitig]

That's not how I remember it! Well, by marriage I suppose, but not blood-relations. I don't suppose somebody got confused between incest and paedophilia? Or will they purge journals discussing The Graduate because that has sex with mother and daughter too?

Re:There's incest in Lolita?

[Anonymous Coward]

She's his step-daughter.

Pans

[jefu]

Won't somebody think of the pans?

But don't write about the pots at the same time or livejournal and the wankersforidiots will protest and get your account pulled.

Strange

[jav1231]

Funny how internet companies easily see the stupidity of their mistakes when massive amounts of customers begin to complain and threaten to leave. If only the RIAA would do the same.

Maybe because when you do that...

[Anonymous Coward]

the same people who harrassed LJ will harrass your backbone provider until they refuse to *allow* you to host your site or webserver anywhere? Do some searching and see what happened to the BoyChat and GirlCHat sites, both scruplessly legal but which were nevertheless forced offline in just thois way last year. If your speech is controversial you will find that suddenly it is no longer 'free' anymore in America or indeed in mucgh of the Western world these days....

(Posted as an anonymous coward for obvious reasons.)

Grammar errors can be costly.

[abb3w]

But suppose the mayor of your town comes and burns down your house one night.

You're falling prey to a linguistic trap in English. I refer you to Larry Niven's short story "Grammar Lesson" (collected most recently in The Draco Tavern) to help you understand the important difference between the intrinsic, extrinsic, and relation possessives in the Chirpsithra's native Lottl. Grasping that can really alter your worldview.

Now, how does one alter the climate for an internet site...?

Re: Paedophiles

[Brian Ribbon]

"I would be much happier if this was a regular pedophile hunt. Of course, malware is going to be downloading horrific stuff to unknowing people, leading to innocent people being dragged off to jail by techno-impaired judges and juries."

I'm sorry, but you have not considered that paedophiles are equally innocent unless they actually engage in sexual activity with children?

ob. Chicken Run reference

[sootman]

LiveLournal users are revolting!

Re:ob. Chicken Run reference

[mink]

Wizard of Id. Probably much older then that IMO.

zzz

[circletimessquare]

"I'm going to zealopusly prosecute you on not properly qualifying your rough sketch remark on slashdot... and completely forget the overriding issue!"

the overriding issue of course being, incest no esta bueno

comprende senor estupido?

zzz

well, when you have 2000+ members

[climbing_monkey]

well i suppose its not that different, however i don't know how realistic it would be to have well over 2,000 people author one blog on blogger (or if thats even possible) which is entirely possible on livejournal. (see this and this). that being said the friends function of livejournal is pretty comparable to only letting some people see your blogger posts.

Boo-Hoo...

[morari]

Get a real website that you control and start a webring or a forum. Stop depending on corporations to shove communities down your throat.

Not even worth mentionning

[flibuste]

500 journals out of a million. Does that qualify as newsworthy? No. Is it worth mentionning? No. Worth moving THAT much air and bytes? No.
So what's the big deal? We're on Slashdot!!!

Re:Not even worth mentionning

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations. You sound just like George W. Bush, addressing the issue of civilian casualties.

Re:Not even worth mentionning

[ContraBassBlack]

It's a big deal because of the hundreds or thousands of users responding angrily and canceling subscription renewals, high profile members denouncing it, and poor response from the company. It's a case study in "How to Screw Yourself in Internet Business."

Re:Not even worth mentionning

[twinberettas]

Admiral Matthew Dougherty: Jean-Luc, we're only moving 600 people.

Captain Picard: How many people does it take, Admiral, before it becomes wrong? Hmm? A thousand, fifty thousand, a million? How many people does it take, Admiral?

Re:Not even worth mentionning

[Captain Sarcastic]

500 journals out of a million. Does that qualify as newsworthy?

That depends on if your idea of news is number based or issue based.

Re:i wonder what would happen if there was real FO

[Goaway]

You will be overrun with pedophiles in short order.

except....

[Anubis350]

Am I that worried that Livejournal doesn't want to be associated with you? No. Many sane people, you know, the kinds who don't have to make up a semi-Japanese word to describe their sexual perversions, do not want to be associated with you. I wouldn't be touching your business with a ten-foot pole...

Unfortunately for LJ (or, actually, sixapart), a *large* percentage of their user base is the fan fic population. In the same way myspace was built by music, LJ was built by fan fic. Unlike myspace, their original clientèle still dominate. LJ's gonna loose *a lot* of business from this if they don't fix it - fast. It'd be like /. doing a mass deletion of users supporting OSS.

Fandom Count$

[Slyfoot]

Spot on. I don't even belong to any of the shipping fandom communities, and I don't care for erotic fanfic. I say good riddance to the pedophiles! But alienating the fandoms was a MAJOR screwup, because fans are, well... fanatical about their fandom interests. Fandom counts, indeed. It's a pity many LiveJournal users had to read about all this on Slashdot and C|Net before hearing anything official about it from LiveJournal news.

Sigh

[br0d]

Current Mood: Incestuous Current Music: Gary Glitter - Rock and Roll Part II

Re:i wonder what would happen if there was real FO

[Kelson]

I've been considering setting up a blog/homepage service whose whole raison d'etat is absolute freedom of speech. No terms and conditions. No censorship whatsoever. Does not keep IP records of posters or visitors. No takedowns without a court order, that kind of thing. Nothing like that exists as far as I know.

Your site would be overrun by spam. It might take a while for the spammers to catch on, but once they did, they would take aim with their botnets and flood you with advertisements for and links to pharmaceuticals of dubious quality, pornography of every sort of persuasion, get-rich-quick schemes, Nigerian scams, body enhancement products, phishing sites, malware of various sorts. And then there would be plain old vandalism of the "Lookit my name, u suk ha ha ha" variety.

Take it from someone who's run his own blog for 4.5 years, and leaves old comment threads open. The spammers are very persistent. My server blocks ~1200 POST attempts per week, plus dozens of comment spams make it past the first line to get caught by other methods.

Maybe you'd have some interesting discussions on there. But you'd need to have some way of at least sorting the wheat from the chaff.

Unless you want to create a haven for spammers, in which case you're not likely to find much help here.

They don't need you.

[Grendel Drago]

If they really needed you, they'd hop to whenever a paid member complained. Clearly this does not happen. You've already paid your money, and they're betting that there won't be a mass exodus of paid whiners--and, you know, they're probably right. When the next offer for ten icons instead of six comes around, and you hand out your money like a sucker, just remember to cry a little more, emo kid, the next time they offer you the shaft.

You're not their customer. You're their product. The pittance you pay them doesn't change that.

That's bullshit in the first place.

[Grendel Drago]

So, the LJ Abuse team has to take these things seriously? Oh, but the LJ Abuse team begs to differ!

Thank you for contacting the LiveJournal Abuse Team. While we cannot discuss any particular cases except with the individuals directly involved, we will be happy to explain our policy to you. LiveJournal is committed to the principle of free speech. This means that users are allowed to post a wide variety of content, including that which others may find objectionable. This includes the theoretical discussion of, or expressed interest in illegal activity. This discussion, even at a level of detail which others may find objectionable, is not in-and-of itself illegal, and in keeping with our commitment to free speech, we will not suspend a journal this reason. Our policy does indicate that if there is reasonable belief that a journal is being used to solicit minors, the journal will be terminated. However, theoretical discussion is not in itself illegal, and should a journal owner explicitly disclaim that their discussion is theoretical, and not intended for the purpose of soliciting minors, we will not take any action.

Take that, LJ Abuse team!

Really, this is just poor administration. Nobody knows what the rules are, not even the enforcers. It would almost be better to have a strictly-enforced asinine TOS, rather than this "fuck shit up when our advertisers get jumpy" nonsense.

Yes, you can get v&.

[Grendel Drago]

Yes, the FBI can partyvan you for text files. It's happened before. If I recall correctly, that was part of a sting that also caught Max Hardcore. Max Hardcore, of course, has a bajillion bucks to spend on legal defense, and is now doing just fine.

The hell they do.

[Grendel Drago]

his explanations seem reasonable

You mean the explanation for why they ignored Perverted-Justice's reporting of actual pedophile blogs and groups for months on end, and suddently decided to fling the banhammer at a wide swath of users, in a manner contrary to the stated policy of their abuse team? Or the explanation--and no, "I was tired" doesn't count--for why they didn't release a statement for two days after the hammer fell? An explanation of why they caved in to a batch of Dominionist rednecks?

'Cause I don't see an explanation for any of those things. I see some bland corporate pablum, carefully designed not to explain a damned thing.

Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this some kind of glorious new Dada or Surrealist art form? I can join in too!

TWINKIE HOUSE!!

Re:Wha?

[Captain Sarcastic]

Cool! Let me join in, too!

"Remember -- Zombies for Belgium!"

(With apologies to the redoubtable Mr. Griffin for ripping off Zippy so blatantly...)

Did you ever finish making that horror movie?

[Grendel Drago]

Livejournal didn't take issue with incest; Livejournal took issue with people who put incest in their interest lists, whether or not they had any real-life interest in it. While this catches pedophiles, it also catches survivors and support groups, as well as fanfiction writers who think that Fred and George Weasley go really well together. The responses which you're complaining about make a distinction between the first group and the last; you're complaining about this distinction.

I assume this horror movie you've been in the process of making for the last few years will contain violence. Nonconsensual violence, even. Gruesome, nonconsensual violence. I take it you need someone to explain to you that violence is wrong folks. for biological, developmental, psychological, moral, social... a whole range of reasons.

Yeah, that works, based on your silent assumption.

[Grendel Drago]

b) Abortion should be an option.

No, because there's no certainty whatsoever on when an embryo/fetus becomes a human being with human rights, only arbitrarily chosen points. For any given point in time, there are two possibilities: it's either the correct point, and the thing before that instant isn't a human being, thus having no human rights, thus his demise not being an assassination; or it's the wrong point, and you're indeed assassinating an human being. Since we don't know what's in any point we choose (3 months, 10 days, whatever, it doesn't matter), aborting is an act that always has 50% chance, minimum, of being an assassination. It's simply illogical to freely allow for something with such a high level of uncertainty. Mere common sense, devoid of any religious implication, dictates that in such a case the safe option be chosen, and the only available other option is not killing the embryo/fetus, because only by following it you're 100% sure you didn't commit an assassination.

If you disagree, then you should also follow the logical consequences of your disagreement and, for example, say that a 50% chance of one being guilty of having committed a crime given the collected evidence must be enough for him to be convicted, even when the conviction is the death penalty. If you think the correct in this case is, let's say, at least 99% certainty, the same must apply to abortion. Any divergence in approaches here would be, necessarily, a case of cognitive dissonance.

Yes, that all hangs together quite well. Of course, you have to assume that the fetus sort of hangs suspended in space until the mean ol' abortionist reaches in there with a claw hammer and pulls its little Jesus-lovin' soul out. It's not like someone has to actually carry the thing around, or undergo significant risk in carrying it to term, or like forced birth ever led to parents resenting their children, sometimes to the point of abusing them.

No, in your world it's a simply choice between a live fetus and a dead fetus, and the inconvenient meatsack that hauls it around for months on end just vanishes from your analysis. I suppose that's rather telling as to your opinion of women.

Well my incest fiction blog went away

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been around on live journal since 1999. I like to push the boundaries of what fiction can do. Words are there for a reason. If I'd been in Afghanistan, I'd have been writing about see through burkas probably.

Eight years. Plenty of time for a warning.

But no, no warning, no please remove the offending posts.

Blog go bye-bye.

All posts were member only, all members were thoroughly vetted. No one admitted underage, no one admitted who hadn't been around a while and no one admitted on a blank journal.

Nothing was public, and once the republicans got in, I was very careful to make sure that wandering eyes couldn't see anything that wasn't meant to be seen.

One day:

Dear LiveJournal user xxxx,

Your journal and/or its associated profile or interests has been reported to us as containing material which expresses interest in, solicits, or encourages illegal activity. As this is a violation of both LiveJournal's Terms of Service and United States law, we have permanently suspended the journal.

If we become aware of any additional violations of LiveJournal's policies or United States laws in the future, we reserve the right to permanently suspend any other journals you may have and terminate your account without warning.

Regards,

  Cassie

  LiveJournal Abuse Team So lets break it down:

Your journal and/or its associated profile or interests has been reported to us as containing material which expresses interest in, Well, duh! it's a incest fiction writing blog. It's gotta express an interest in the topics, if you don't like the topic go away. It's not like I take part in it anything. When I was a kid I wrote stories about life from the view point of an elf growing up in Manchester. A) I'm not an elf. B) I never visited Manchester until I was 23. Thats the point of fiction - its made up. solicits, or encourages illegal activity. Umm... no, and no. It's not like I was promoting the taliban, or soliciting money for the insurgents. It mostly was a text only wank journal, with the occassional discussions on the dangers of incest.

As this is a violation of both LiveJournal's Terms of Service and United States law, we have permanently suspended the journal. Fairy nuff. But after 8 years, a little warning would have been nice.

Re:Yeah, that works, based on your silent assumpti

[alexgieg]

Yes, that all hangs together quite well. Of course, you have to assume that the fetus sort of hangs suspended in space until the mean ol' abortionist reaches in there with a claw hammer and pulls its little Jesus-lovin' soul out.

Don't assume hidden intentions behind a logical argument. It's either valid or invalid, and if valid, false or true. Psychological reasoning is most of the time subject to error, as unreliable as it can get. For instance, I study Christianity and, as a Philosophy student, have much interest in the Middle Age, but I'm not Christian, and as such, the Jesus-bashing doesn't ring a bell.

It's not like someone has to actually carry the thing around, or undergo significant risk in carrying it to term, or like forced birth ever led to parents resenting their children, sometimes to the point of abusing them.

No, in your world it's a simply choice between a live fetus and a dead fetus, and the inconvenient meatsack that hauls it around for months on end just vanishes from your analysis.

If you wish you can take my previous argument and, if you conclude it's valid, take its conclusion as the main premise, the reality of the mother as the secondary premise, and start analyzing from there. Both approaches aren't opposed, they're complementary. And whatever the dialectical synthesis coming from there is, it's bound to the same prerequisites of logical consistency and rigor. Anything else can be taken as mere rhetorics.

I suppose that's rather telling as to your opinion of women.

Lol. And what your reply says about your opinion of all the (possible) women that are killed just because they're embryos and fetuses? ;)

See why this kind of "non-reasoning" doesn't work?

Noted, thanks...

[Interrobang]

I'm taking down names. It's amazing how, when you start poking at who all is behind all these weirdly-named front groups, you find some astonishingly nasty bugs under those rocks.

What are you even saying?

[Grendel Drago]

Don't assume hidden intentions behind a logical argument. It's either valid or invalid, and if valid, false or true. Psychological reasoning is most of the time subject to error, as unreliable as it can get. For instance, I study Christianity and, as a Philosophy student, have much interest in the Middle Age, but I'm not Christian, and as such, the Jesus-bashing doesn't ring a bell.

I suppose you have a better explanation for why your analysis of the issues pretends that women are at best inanimate objects? Given that the pro-life movement in the United States is inextricably tied to the right-wing religious revival that got going in the early 1980s, it's understandable why I would assume that someone arguing for the former is part of the latter. However, I didn't make it the crux of my argument, and by wailing on about how mean I am, you conveniently neglected to answer my original question: Why do you pretend that women are inanimate or nonexistent?

If you wish you can take my previous argument and, if you conclude it's valid, take its conclusion as the main premise, the reality of the mother as the secondary premise, and start analyzing from there. Both approaches aren't opposed, they're complementary. And whatever the dialectical synthesis coming from there is, it's bound to the same prerequisites of logical consistency and rigor. Anything else can be taken as mere rhetorics.

It's good to see that your education is coming in handy, in that you can wave your hands with a bit of extra glamour. Given that you think "I don't know" means the same thing as "50% chance", I don't think you've got anything else there. I can't even tell what you think it would mean to take the conclusion of your argument and work backwards from there.

And anyway, you can't just take the conclusion as read; that's begging the question. Don't you know this stuff?

Lol. And what your reply says about your opinion of all the (possible) women that are killed just because they're embryos and fetuses? ;)

See why this kind of "non-reasoning" doesn't work?

Given that I'm advocating a pro-choice point of view, did it take your entire philosophy education to whip that one out? Seriously, what is "but some fetuses are female!" supposed to accomplish? Do you think that I hold an opinion that women have a greater right to their lives than men do? That I want men to die, die, die? What are you getting at?

Re:What are you even saying?

[alexgieg]

Why do you pretend that women are inanimate or nonexistent?

Okay. It's simply: because it doesn't change the conclusion. You see: a woman being a queen, a slave, intelligent, dumb, a political active being with total self-determination and fully equal rights, or a burka-wearing 3rd class citizen in a backward 4th world country, in all cases, an abortion happening before any arbitrarily chosen point at any arbitrarily chosen scale has a 50% chance of either being an assassination, or not. Your demand has, so to speak, no logical meaning.

You can of course argue that, given that an embryo/fetus is growing inside the body of a concrete woman, although killing him being has 50% chance of being an assassination, it is nevertheless worth it. But this does not change the fact that it's a 50% chance. The two lines of argumentation have no direct relation, or contradiction. The fact stays the same no matter what one chooses to do upon it, inside or outside any given legal framework.

Given that I'm advocating a pro-choice point of view, did it take your entire philosophy education to whip that one out? Seriously, what is "but some fetuses are female!" supposed to accomplish? Do you think that I hold an opinion that women have a greater right to their lives than men do? That I want men to die, die, die? What are you getting at?

I think you're misreading what I wrote. My position is purely logical. You can call it "pro-consistency" if you wish. What I'm saying is imply this: that if in all our laws we require a higher level of certainty before taking extreme measures, then either this same principle must hold true for abortion, or we should change the remaining laws so that they work under the same level of reliability that we selected to apply to abortion. Personally I prefer the former. If you wish to give a name to this preference you can call it "pro-strictness", its opposite being then the "pro-strictlessness", or something like that. In any case, neither of these two positions contradict the logical conclusion I've stated. What I'm strongly against is the lack of consistency, the introduction of "exceptions" to the basic framework. And as they stand right now, pro-abortion laws (or judicial decisions) are extremely inconsistent.

In short: make all laws one way, or all laws the other way, not this mix of some laws being one way while others are the other way. And whatever option you choose, accept and adopt all of its logical consequences. Anything else and you're under cognitive dissonance.

"Pro-life" or "pro-choice"? That's secondary.