Slashdot Mirror
SixApart Sells LiveJournal to Russian Media Company
molrak writes "SixApart tonight announced the sale of journal/blogging service Livejournal to Russia-based SUP. Original LJ founder Brad Fitzpatrick has chimed in on the situation: 'This is pretty cool because - They're ridiculously excited about LiveJournal, and have been for awhile (they previous purchased advertising rights in Russia, but ended up doing a bunch of Russia-specific LJ development as well). They want to throw a lot of resources at LiveJournal in terms of product development and engineers. "LiveJournal.com, Inc." now stands alone again, focusing on nothing but LJ. Sounds like I'll have more LJ influence (via new role as advisory board member) than I've had recently.'"
It seems like +85% of LJ pages are Russian anyways, so this makes sense.
Yeah it's called "caucasian". Note that the Caucasus mountains, the origin of the word, are IN Russia.
You may be joking, but there appears to have been a considerable amount of concern about this when SUP first got involved with LJ -- Alexander Mamut, one of SUP's main investors (or possibly its owner -- I've seen both descriptions in articles), apparently has some ties to Putin. Brad had tried to assuage fears about it at the time, but I unfortunately don't really know how the situation stands on the Russian side after those initial reactions.
As a longtime LJ user, I'm encouraged that Brad's still optimistic about SUP today, and I don't think Six Apart ever really knew exactly what to make of LJ, but I'm still having a hard time getting over a vaguely uneasy feeling about the whole thing.
So I'm sure a lot of American Slashdotters are thinking: "What? A Russian Company buying an American Company? Where did they get the dough?"
From : http://www.econstats.com/weo/V012.htm
Share of World Economy %
country 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
United States 21.68 21.34 21.13 20.97 20.85 20.71 20.57
Russia 2.36 2.42 2.46 2.55 2.60 2.66 2.69
Italy 3.22 3.20 3.12 3.01 2.91 2.84 2.79
France 3.34 3.33 3.27 3.17 3.10 3.04 2.98
Spain 1.81 1.82 1.81 1.78 1.75 1.72 1.70
China 10.92 11.47 12.07 12.68 13.18 13.59 13.99
India 5.45 5.54 5.65 5.83 5.91 6.05 6.17
I wish this chart went back further to really accentuate how much has changed over the past 15 years. The point being... Slowly but surely the world economy is getting more evenly distributed around the globe.
If you look at the backstory for the rise of SUP, the whole thing started when the abuse team tried to apply American standards to Russian bloggers. You see, the Russian internets culture is different. You post whatever you want to post. For example, if you feel that you want to personally execute every member of [insert group of people here], burn the corpses in a fire, and piss in the ashes, then you should definitely blog about it. Self-censorship is for wimps and politicians. A few years ago, American lj abuse members attempted to ban some Russian bloggers (for posting something about murdering NATO soldiers, iirc). The Russian blogosphere exploded in indignation, and the lj management decided that the only way to sort out what was going on with its Russian-speaking users was to offload them to a Russian company. Hence, SUP, which acquired the rights to the Russian-speaking part of lj last year - and now, has bought the whole service.
If the behavior that SUP has found acceptable in its segment of lj is anything to go by, lj filtering and censorship may be set to disappear entirely.
As a linguist studying minority languages of Russia, I do field work in places where the Putin-aligned local government has had no qualms sending goons to beat women and the elderly with pipes just for speaking or singing songs in the local indigenous language, and opposition figures still get sent to psychiatric hospitals whenever they dare to challenge the ruling party. When has that last happened in the US? Certainly there are some worrying developments in civil liberties, but people can breathe a lot more freely there than in Russia, which is truly one of the scariest places I've visited.
While not disagreeing with the concerns that Russian ownerships of LJ may bring censorship and repressions, especially against Russian-based bloggers, I do want to voice some perspective.
The Other Russia is a social group broadly aligned against Putin. This places them on board with people like Novodvorskaya, who is so rabidly anti-Russian (and thereby anti-Putin) as to practically be a maniac, and Politkovskaya, who was essentially an apologist for Chechen terrorists.
It also frequently engages in spin and disinformation.
Two examples from the above rhetoric:
1) "authoritarian governments of Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine". Yes, those evil authoritarian governments were toppled, and were replaced by responsive, representative democratic governments we have today....like say, those of Saakashvilli - who is a little demented creep with Napoleonic ambitions who has driven the Georgian economy into the sewer and engages in repression of dissenting voices with an ardor of a pitbull on PCP. And this is not even the 'gentle repression' we have with Putin. This is the hardcore, 'jackboots in broad daylight' kind of deal. Or, for that matter, the government of Ukraine, headed by Yushenko and Yulia Timoshenko. Timoshenko herself appears to be channeling Rockefeller, with her unbounded "captains-of-industry" greed which she's been able to promote thanks to her political ties. Let's not get started on Yushenko who is essentially a bumbling pawn for his American string pullers.
Which brings us to the important point: those "authoritarian governments" were "toppled" by the same model - that our friend is correct about - what he disingenuously fails to state is that they were carefully engineering by American influences, with American money and American advisers. Effectively, what you are saying is that Putin is at fault for learning from the past and desiring to prevent an American-based revolution. How evil of him.
2) "...he doesn't care how something looks to the West" Oh I'm sorry, he doesn't? Oh say it ain't so! This wouldn't resemble a certain Western democracy that unilaterally invaded a sovereign nation under false pretenses, all the while ignoring the UN, the world, and its own people saying 'There are no WMDs in Iraq'. Surely not. No, Russia is the only evil nation to "ignore" the rest of the World's opinions. Give me break.
I do not fundamentally understand why you, as a Russian citizen have so much sympathy for the US. If you like it so much, move there. But stop applying double standards to Putin. Yes he has done bad things, yes his people have been repressive, and for all I know he may in fact be evil - though I hope what we've seen is overzealous assistants. But you're acting like a brainless cheerleader for the West, and that's why you have the image of a hack writer and shill. You want to criticize the regime - good for you. Just do it honestly.