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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).