One small raspberry to SixApart

[altivo]

Not that they will understand the message, even though I gather I'm not the only one doing this.

Automatic payments have been turned off on your account, altivo.
Your current paid account item(s) will expire on the following date(s):

Paid Account: expires Oct 29, 2007

[...irrelevant details omitted...]

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LiveJournal Team

I think the only "premium" features I've used that might be missed at all are the photos in the gallery. Some number of my past posts will go photoless. But since I also am more and more convinced that LJ is doomed, that may not matter.

Comments

[mymaimary.livejournal.com]

Are you convinced LJ may be doomed because of the changes that have happened this year? Or is it because so many people have gotten on board with the other networking pages out there?

[scruff.livejournal.com]

Because the users have gone from being customers to being resources for SixApart to sell advertising-space against.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That's certainly the most obvious symptom, though it's the censorship and the pig-headed publicity coverups that trigger my reaction. Advertising is easily blocked by AdblockerPlus. Censorship I can only control by withholding my money and, potentially, my patronage.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

I have noticed a huge drop in the number of posts that are logged in my friends page. I have 179 people on my contacts list, but there are only about 20 or so folk now who seem to post with any degree of regularity. I feel that mostly it's just the novelty factor wearing out. Keeping a journal up to date requires self discipline. But I cannot ignore 6A's pig-headedness as a factor for a few as well. Especially the ones connected with fandom.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I've forced myself to make a daily post, tired or not, sick or not, for nearly two years. Fortunately, I can extract the content of those posts pretty easily. I'm not aware of a tool that will capture all the comments along with it, alas.

[ducktapeddonkey.livejournal.com]

*Ponders*

I wonder how hard it would be write a little something that could do that?

Maybe I'll try kicking at it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I imagine I'm not the only one who would find that useful.

[enteirah]

I know there's one furry already done a backup tool which is supposed to download all the included comments upon entries too, but I can't vouch for it as I've never tried it personally. =:P

http://community.livejournal.com/ljbackup_dev/

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It only runs on Windows. I avoid Windows if at all possible. ;p

[ducktapeddonkey.livejournal.com]

Haven't had much time to poke at this yet. But I'm thinking about it.

What do you think; A separate text file for each entry with comments included? Or one big, fat text file with all the entries and comments in it?

There's also things like comment indenting to consider. I could tab replies over so that if viewed in plain text it might be easier to tell whom replied to whom. But then that might make things a little ugly if you're going to import all the data somewhere else.

Another little interface I thought of once would be to read your friend's list selectively. Once upon a time a fur I know mentioned that he wished he didn't have to read all the "OMG I'm having sooo much fun at this con!" posts. But without having to un-friend the people posting.

One of these days when I feeling programmy, I'll have to take a more serious shot at it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, the first thought that pops into my mind is to use some sort of XML format for the output. That would definitely make it possible to reload at least part of the content to another site, or reformat it so that it could be viewed in a rational way.

Since a journal may contain thousands of entries, breaking the output down by months or something like that is probably desirable. Logjam will retrieve all my primary posts (but not the comments) and stores them in a hierarchical directory structure. The top level is divided by server (e.g. Livejournal or Greatestjournal,) then within server by year of post, then within year by month of post.

[ducktapeddonkey.livejournal.com]

I got thinking about this a little more today and I realize that if I were to proceed the way I was planning, my solution would be Windows only as well. Unless I could find someone that had the Linux "builder" I would need. Even then, I have a feeling it wouldn't be very portable to other platforms without some rework.

XML is also something I've not really worked with yet. But it would probably be a better format than just raw text.

Unfortunately, a "web" guy I ain't. My plan was to basically use the same tools I use to write automated data acquisition and controls to write a Post Grabber. It certainly wasn't meant to do those kinds of things. But I've used it for all sorts of things it wasn't meant for. So what's one more?

I still may try to make something, just to see if I can do it. But anything I made would require a pretty heavy run-time engine, and the compiled code becomes platform specific. I'd give away the source code. But the development tool isn't exactly cheap and I would bet that only a very few people I know in LJ land have it or would buy it.

*le sigh*

Guess I just need to learn Python or Ruby or something?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yep. This is a job for something like Java or some similar cross-platform interpreted language.

[hellmutt.livejournal.com]

I belieeeeve LJArchive does comments too, but I can't vouch for its effectiveness.

[hellmutt.livejournal.com]

Oops, disregard that; I thought LJA worked on *nix too, but apparently not yet.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That's often the show stopper. It's not hard to write programs that are portable across operating systems, but it does require forethought as in not using a language or compiler that is Microsoft dependent. This seems to be unconsidered by most software authors. Either they believe that everyone uses Windows (Macintoshes must be a figment of someone's imagination) or else they believe that everyone SHOULD use Windows and anyone who doesn't is unworthy of their efforts.

[hellmutt.livejournal.com]

Yeah; like I said, I mistakenly thought there was a cross-platform version. After another glance at the page, it seems to use the .NET framework, so not very non-Windows-friendly.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, not even very Windows-friendly. I avoid installing .NET on Windows machines. It's had a bad security record and is a bulky, cumbersome thing to deal with if you don't really need it. Generally, you don't.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Windows only. I can do it, but I'd have to borrow a Windows machine.

[hrrunka]

The changes that have happened this year (and most especially the strikeout campaigns) have caused quite a few folks in my f-list to go set up alternatives on other LJ-like (and not-so-LJ-like) sites. I can only track so many sites, but I can see a time approaching when I will have to either lose track of some folks completely or go set up accounts in places they frequent. I suspect there was a trend towards diversity before, but the strikeout campaigns have sure encouraged it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

If I move, it will be to a site that offers RSS. It's pretty easy to track stuff all over the place with RSS, if it is properly implemented. Unfortunately, I'm not too happy with the way that works on Google's Blogspot/Blogger product, though Google so far seems to be the most censorship free of the locations I've examined.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of factors behind this, and I first began to consider cutting off my financial support with the censorship campaign against people who were merely suspected of harboring zoophile interests last spring. SixApart minions purged hundreds of journals, including many I know were innocent, without warning and without any written terms of service document to justify it. At that time I called for Barak Berkowitz to resign. They were saying that Brad (LJ's original CEO) was on a "well deserved vacation" but that vacation turned permanent. After Berkowitz apologized and some of the purged journals were reinstated, he promptly launched another censorship campaign. This one was against child porn, but included even cartoon artwork of animals. It was another overboard and excessive attack. A clear terms of service document still did not appear, despite promises that it would.

I anticipate with the latest changes, which have included censorship of some comments critical of SixApart management, that the next round of attacks will be political, and those who are "too liberal" or whatever management finds offensive will also be kicked off. I am not eager to abandon LJ yet, because I have a lot of friends and a lot of my own writing invested here. However, I will not give them any more of my money. Most of the privileges of paid membership were things I never used anyway. Those that I valued most were given away by SixApart when they instituted the "Plus" account level, where they traded what had been reserved for paid users for the ability to post obnoxious advertising in journals.

Paid users have been exempt from seeing those ads, so I don't know how bad they actually are. However, I absolutely hate web advertising, and if they start dumping obnoxious ads on me I will surely be completely out of here.

I use AdblockerPlus, which does a good job of concealing such garbage, but some sites block your access completely if you are running Firefox precisely because they fear AdblockerPlus so much. Such a tactic, if LJ were to institute it, would certainly send me elsewhere completely.

Berkowitz' tardy resignation does nothing to change this trend. His replacement appears to be a corporate numbnutz of even less perception than Berkowitz himself. Livejournal was once a star in the so-called blogoverse, but it is rapidly being turned into a cash cow that will be simply starved and milked until it dies.

[mymaimary.livejournal.com]

Hm. I came from xanga when a friend moved her blog here. The ads are annoying on my flist, but I don't use any special features that require them on my pages. That means that I only have to see a relatively few advertisements.

The deletions had caused a lot of problems, though. You are right about the fansites getting hit the hardest, even those with innocent content.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The deletions have been arbitrary and poorly thought out. Much like Bush's invasion of Iraq, they are only intended to show that "we're doing something" rather than that they can actually achieve a goal or that the goal is genuinely worthy.

The 6A management are demonstrating their lack of comprehension repeatedly, and I predict the kind of floundering that has killed merchandisers like Sears and K-Mart. They do the MBA thing and look at numbers without understanding the significance of the numbers. Then they rearrange their policies and merchandise based solely on those numbers. This results in absurdities such as carrying a power drill or router but not stocking the bits required to keep operating it (because the profit margin on the small bits isn't large enough and they take up display space.) Likewise, we watched here in Chicago as Sears studied their buyer population, concluded that more women than men entered the stores, and moved all the tools and other so-called "male-oriented" goods to the basements or far back reaches. This forced their blue-collar customers to wade through acres of perfume, lingerie, and women's shoes to find the tool department. Tool sales dropped. Sears cut back the amount of tool merchandise being stocked, and sales dropped farther. They killed their own market share by MBA stupidity, losing ground to Home Depot, Menard's, and Lowe's. I predict SixApart is going to commit the same kind of stupidity.

[quickcasey.livejournal.com]

Oh noes! There goes my social life.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Heh. Back to IRC and Usenet with all of us. As you yourself have pointed out, there are other blogging sites that so far have resisted the urge to sell out their users for advertising and political prejudice, but how long will that last? The most sharp-tongued of commentators have been operating their own private sites for some time, and I'm sure that is one reason for it.

[lobowolf.livejournal.com]

There does seem to be just a general downhill slide going on ever since LJ sold out to SixApart. It's like anything that gets taken over by a large corporation..all of a sudden there's this big concern about "image" (translation: I can't offend anyone with my product because that will affect saleability and also who much my investors are willing to invest in my company).

I think you're seeing that kind of mentality..."We better just delete anything offensive"..and of course, they're taking the whole "better safe than sorry" position and just doing wholesale deletions without taking the actual time to determine if there's an issue. That might be okay for a privately owned website, but I don't think SixApart sees the difference between what is supposed to be a personal blog and a corporate asset.

I wouldn't have any problems ditching LJ/SixApart, but what bothers me is that it would cause half of my friends to go to one place, and half to go to another (or some portion of them to just say "screw this" and not migrate to another blogging site)...it's the whole Furnet/Anthrochat thing all over again :(

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's exactly why I resisted the temptation to migrate in May and held on to see what was going to happen. Unfortunately, I'm inclined to predict that 6A is going to go further with the pogroms, and gays and furries are both very likely to become targets sometime in the future. This will be especially true for the non-paid accounts that make up the bulk of the usership.

The IRC split you mention is a relevant analogy, but only up to a point. It's true that the only way to be on two IRC networks at once is to have two windows or tabs open and flip back and forth to keep up with two or more channels. That's the nature of IRC. Art sites have had the same problems, FurAffinity being one of the worst for political disagreements and schisms (why I never really returned there after their first big bustup.)

Blogs are a little different because we can usually track them through e-mail notifications or RSS. So by applying a little RSS wizardry (Damn, I'm going to have to start using Thunderbird again) we can still read all our friends even if they scatter to half a dozen sites.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

If you move to another place let me know :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, I haven't exactly moved (yet) but I've opened a second residence to see how it goes. And I'll probably try a third as well.

I actually should say those are third and fourth, as I have a presence on Google's Blogspot but only as a member of several communities. I don't write personal postings there.

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

They're doomed... DOOMED!!!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Hardly that. But I predict a long and painful decline for LJ as the intelligent and thoughtful users bail out leaving only the kiddies and the trolls behind.

^^

[(Anonymous)]

Hee :P I always wanted to do that, so pardon me for seeming extremist :P

[dragon-moon.livejournal.com]

My sister's been reading the news comments, and many people are complaining that they turned off the automated renewals and yet they were back on this week. So you may want to keep an eye on it and make sure it stays off. ;D

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads up. Why am I not surprised?