I like my metaphor, it's straight & to the point. It's concise, but I think it's an impossibly bad fit to the LJ situation. You don't collect hundreds of babies and put them in tubs throughout thousands of rooms, moving on after each baby, where they're going to be left for months and years (and never taken out unless they've drowned), and still have sole responsibility for checking on them constantly. And a baby has a good chance of drowning if left alone in a tub, so you're probably going to stay with that one baby the entire time and then take it out.
If you leave a baby alone in the tub--let alone hundreds of babies--you're almost guaranteed a dead baby, or a fat pile of them. That's not true of blog links; they might become invalid eventually, but most of them don't later change without warning to a porn site, and they certainly don't need constant undivided attention to keep them from doing so.
IMO putting a baby in a tub and leaving it there, is nothing like putting a link in one of your blog entries and moving on. There is an obvious responsibility to stay with that one baby until it is out of the tub, and not move on and do other things with your life and (wrongly/dangerously) trust that the baby will be ok on its own. There is no such responsibility for blog links, and attempting to force one is ridiculous and doomed to fail.
3) Get a new blog site; it's not like there aren't a billion floating around or anything.
Am I missing something? Yes, although you may not agree to its importance (but you'd be at odds with the people who actually use LJ and are at the heart of this issue). It's not as simple as switching from coke to pepsi; people who use LJ for extended periods of time often develop substantial roots, real-life as well as online, with peers on the site (as well as having a lot of legacy content that's difficult to copy over to a new blog, intact). Although the metaphor is too melodramatic for my taste, it's a little closer to a minor organ transplant than to changing the brand of watch you wear.
I'm sure somebody else could look at the way the site is structured, its topology, interface and content, and explain precisely why people become more deeply involved in social networks there, than is typical for random web sites; I don't know the language for precisely describing it. But from my experience, the relationships tend to be stronger, deeper and more socially layered/complex than on typical web forums (I don't have experience with other social blogging sites like facebook or myspace, but I'd assume something similar goes on with them).
It's not just a thousand forgettable aliases, blurring into each other, spitting out fire-and-forget one-liners on a news story; it's often people posting in depth about life experiences, sometimes very sensitive ones, and interacting with a small peer group. I know this isn't all the site is used for, but it's a substantial part of it, and it's those people I sympathize with in this case, when they're being forced to uproot themselves and move elsewhere, starting over in some other community.
I haven't used it in a couple of years--other priorities took over--but I still remember some of the people there in the kind of depth normally reserved for real-life friends. (And that's not counting the ones who I went on to meet in real life, and still know.) They may not have a legal right to defend their presence, or their communities on the site; although I'd put real money on this changing over the next decade or two, so that web community participants do have some kind of legal voice; Sixapart owns the software and bandwidth, NOT the people and communities which are responsible for the company's success, and that distinction isn't yet legally recognized.
But in spite of the absence of legal leverage, they have good reason to be upset about having the rug pulled out from under them, and certainly have a right to complain and try to fight it. Transplanting an entire community to another site/medium does happen, but it's difficult to hold a group together through that process, and doesn't usually happen without a lot of real-life ties to support it. People find it difficult to agree on the timing--what's the last straw that makes them all give up on a site, at once, rather than breaking off piecemeal and going in different directions--and it's hard to get people to agree on where they're going to go instead. You're better off trying to get the site to reverse its policy changes, if there's any hope of that happening.
What do you mean I'm responsible for the baby dieing in the tub, she was alive when I put her in there. I don't understand how that bizarre metaphor got modded up as insightful. (Note, it got modded back down to flamebait while I was writing this, thank heavens.)
If I'm understanding the situation (having not used livejournal in a couple of years now), a better (though still imperfect) metaphor would be the curator of a small library of up to several thousand books, not simply having to check the books when they're purchased, but also having to go through all the stacks regularly to make sure rogue publishers never sneak in and replace an existing book with a pornographic book of the same name and external appearance. Because even though it's uncommon, the library is going to be held responsible when it happens, and shut down if it happens twice.
I don't see how this is in any way a sensible practice. It would seem more reasonable for LJ to issue warnings--perhaps to automatically remove the link and send you an email explaining the situation--and not take punitive action unless there's evidence of a pattern to indicate that the violations are deliberate.
For that matter, would it be difficult for LJ to implement a list of sites you're not permitted to link to, and make it publicly available, as well as automatically checking newly submitted links against that list and giving a real-time warning?
BTW I mostly agree with the people who say "just leave for another blogging site"; that's probably what I'd do, since nearly any web community that approaches LJ's scale seems to turn to shit, following changes in policy that (nearly) always come with that kind of population.
I don't know if it's economics that makes it inevitable--that at that size, it becomes impractical to run it any other way and still survive financially; see for instance the way Fark had to adapt to satisfy their advertisers, to exist at their current scale--or just that you get so many bad apples that the policies have to be re-written to revolve around them.
But I sympathize with people who have built up extensive communities on LJ, with their own blog being part of an extended online family. People actually build deep connections that way, for better or for worse. They may not have a legal right to force LJ to accomodate them, but they have my complete support if they want to fight the changes to their online homeowner's association (so to speak), rather than nonchalantly accept the eviction and find another town.
I didn't ask him if he literally bought it off a street vendor, or from an established store, but does it matter? I was just curious. Mine I bought from a guy on the street selling out of a shopping cart and a blanket.
(or buying "pirated" CDs in the streets, etc). Do people really buy pirated software CDs in the streets? I've bought a couple of movie DVDs that way but the quality was atrocious, they looked like webcam videos from the theater.
Slashdot Mirror
If you leave a baby alone in the tub--let alone hundreds of babies--you're almost guaranteed a dead baby, or a fat pile of them. That's not true of blog links; they might become invalid eventually, but most of them don't later change without warning to a porn site, and they certainly don't need constant undivided attention to keep them from doing so.
IMO putting a baby in a tub and leaving it there, is nothing like putting a link in one of your blog entries and moving on. There is an obvious responsibility to stay with that one baby until it is out of the tub, and not move on and do other things with your life and (wrongly/dangerously) trust that the baby will be ok on its own. There is no such responsibility for blog links, and attempting to force one is ridiculous and doomed to fail.
Am I missing something? Yes, although you may not agree to its importance (but you'd be at odds with the people who actually use LJ and are at the heart of this issue). It's not as simple as switching from coke to pepsi; people who use LJ for extended periods of time often develop substantial roots, real-life as well as online, with peers on the site (as well as having a lot of legacy content that's difficult to copy over to a new blog, intact). Although the metaphor is too melodramatic for my taste, it's a little closer to a minor organ transplant than to changing the brand of watch you wear.
I'm sure somebody else could look at the way the site is structured, its topology, interface and content, and explain precisely why people become more deeply involved in social networks there, than is typical for random web sites; I don't know the language for precisely describing it. But from my experience, the relationships tend to be stronger, deeper and more socially layered/complex than on typical web forums (I don't have experience with other social blogging sites like facebook or myspace, but I'd assume something similar goes on with them).
It's not just a thousand forgettable aliases, blurring into each other, spitting out fire-and-forget one-liners on a news story; it's often people posting in depth about life experiences, sometimes very sensitive ones, and interacting with a small peer group. I know this isn't all the site is used for, but it's a substantial part of it, and it's those people I sympathize with in this case, when they're being forced to uproot themselves and move elsewhere, starting over in some other community.
I haven't used it in a couple of years--other priorities took over--but I still remember some of the people there in the kind of depth normally reserved for real-life friends. (And that's not counting the ones who I went on to meet in real life, and still know.) They may not have a legal right to defend their presence, or their communities on the site; although I'd put real money on this changing over the next decade or two, so that web community participants do have some kind of legal voice; Sixapart owns the software and bandwidth, NOT the people and communities which are responsible for the company's success, and that distinction isn't yet legally recognized.
But in spite of the absence of legal leverage, they have good reason to be upset about having the rug pulled out from under them, and certainly have a right to complain and try to fight it. Transplanting an entire community to another site/medium does happen, but it's difficult to hold a group together through that process, and doesn't usually happen without a lot of real-life ties to support it. People find it difficult to agree on the timing--what's the last straw that makes them all give up on a site, at once, rather than breaking off piecemeal and going in different directions--and it's hard to get people to agree on where they're going to go instead. You're better off trying to get the site to reverse its policy changes, if there's any hope of that happening.
If I'm understanding the situation (having not used livejournal in a couple of years now), a better (though still imperfect) metaphor would be the curator of a small library of up to several thousand books, not simply having to check the books when they're purchased, but also having to go through all the stacks regularly to make sure rogue publishers never sneak in and replace an existing book with a pornographic book of the same name and external appearance. Because even though it's uncommon, the library is going to be held responsible when it happens, and shut down if it happens twice.
I don't see how this is in any way a sensible practice. It would seem more reasonable for LJ to issue warnings--perhaps to automatically remove the link and send you an email explaining the situation--and not take punitive action unless there's evidence of a pattern to indicate that the violations are deliberate.
For that matter, would it be difficult for LJ to implement a list of sites you're not permitted to link to, and make it publicly available, as well as automatically checking newly submitted links against that list and giving a real-time warning?
BTW I mostly agree with the people who say "just leave for another blogging site"; that's probably what I'd do, since nearly any web community that approaches LJ's scale seems to turn to shit, following changes in policy that (nearly) always come with that kind of population.
I don't know if it's economics that makes it inevitable--that at that size, it becomes impractical to run it any other way and still survive financially; see for instance the way Fark had to adapt to satisfy their advertisers, to exist at their current scale--or just that you get so many bad apples that the policies have to be re-written to revolve around them.
But I sympathize with people who have built up extensive communities on LJ, with their own blog being part of an extended online family. People actually build deep connections that way, for better or for worse. They may not have a legal right to force LJ to accomodate them, but they have my complete support if they want to fight the changes to their online homeowner's association (so to speak), rather than nonchalantly accept the eviction and find another town.