Torches and pitchforks

[mdlbear]

This post by siderea voices many of the LJ users' concerns over recent developments very well, and a supposedly-reassuring post by bradfitz is not really very reassuring. I think I know the reason:

We users are not LJ's customer base.

LJ's true customers are the corporations that are selling ads and sponsoring communities. People with paid accounts are paying money not to see those ads; as soon as paid accounts become a sufficiently small fraction of their revenue stream, they won't have to listen to you. Permanent account holders are already insignificant. As far as LJ's corporate sponsors are concerned, we're just a big pile of eyeballs and a source of free "content" that serves as the bait that attracts more eyeballs.

LJ has a lot of momentum; it's a huge site, host to millions of people and lots of great communities. At one point I was happy and proud to be part of it. Now I'm just another user, sticking the needle in my arm three times a day for another fix.

I still like the community -- my community, of friends and family and people who share my interests, and all their friends and family. It would take a long time and a lot of work to replace all that, and it's not likely to happen. I'll still have a place here. But it's not going to feel as much like home anymore. I'll miss that.

In my last post I mentioned planning. I want to think about what it would take to build a community like LJ out of millions of personal blogs and websites -- including LJ blogs. I want to think about ways to use sites like LJ and Blogger and Myspace, instead of having them using us. I want to figure out ways for us to take back the blogosphere web Internet, damnit. There are tools out there we can use, but no good way to integrate, not the tools, but the people. It'll happen, though.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. You're saying leverage LJ as an RSS reader, and those of us who can have our own blogs do so, kind of thing?

I'm wondering if we couldn't set up an LJ-esque kind of thing as a co-op? Say el cheapo rack space at $20/mo, ten of us go in together, $24 a year and we're covered... and we could RSS back into LJ and suck in the larger community... and LJ RSS'es outbound too.

The real bastard of all this is the stupid pant way shareholder-owned businesses work. They are legally bound to always and only maximize shareholder value. That means everybody who's not a shareholder gets screwed. Saaaaay.... if a bunch of us went out and bought onesie twosie shares of SixApart when it IPO'ed, we could by right attend the shareholder meetings, and make things Very Interesting.... just bloody co-opt the company if we got our act together...... if... meow, meow...

[mithriltabby]

I’ve never felt LJ to be a community; to me it’s a platform. It happens to be useful for keeping up with my friends and as an RSS aggregator, but I’ve never felt like anything other than a user who happens to know a bunch of other users. I agree that if it becomes annoying as a platform, it will be time to set up something else.

[mdlbear]

Something like that. There are already several free sites using the LJ code; the problem is that they're completely separate from the LJ user base. So the idea would be to make it easy to link a personal blog and an LJ in such a way that it would be easy to keep them in sync, and keep all the comments in one place. In the other direction, track your friends page and read it from your usual local aggregator (tricky because you need to keep locked posts out of public view, which means that you can't use a publicly-accessible web-based aggregator).

A co-op is, indeed, the only way out of the shareholder-owner -- really absentee owner -- trap. If Brad had sold shares of Danga to the users, instead of to 6A, we wouldn't be having this flamefest. (We'd be having others, but at least they'd be internal, between co-owners.)

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I've been advocating organizing various net.functions formally as co-operatives for about 25 years and failing to persuade. It's possible, and someone will probably do it eventually, but the idea has to be widely marketed first, and when you remember how hostile we in the USA are to co-operative solutions, I think it's going to be a long haul.

[mdlbear]

So have I. Actually there are some kinds of co-ops that are very popular in the US, notably farm co-ops and companies like REI. They tend to be low-key, but they're there.