Existential Flame War

[filkertom]

The LJ thing is getting really ugly.

Just go here here. (Original link courtesy of ataniell93; revised link courtesy of cacie.) The very first comment is made by burr86.

A LiveJournal employee.

Using his LiveJournal professional account.

Dude couldn't even create a sock puppet to be snarky with.

I usually don't go back and patronize places that treat their customers like this. And I usually give the manager a firm and slightly loud piece of my mind before heading out the door.

Current thoughts on the unpleasantness?

(Also, hanabishirecca has created a community, fandom_action, about legal protection for fan creations.)

ETA: eleri, the mod of that community, deleted the post (reasons below in comments). Here is a good link to it, but if you don't want to load a 1 MB+ HTML page, here's the gist of it:

Captain Sassy Pants (pirate_eggie) wrote in efw:

POST DETAILING HOW IMPORTANT THE OP'S ADDICTION TO HARRY POTTER FANART IS AND HOW LJ/SA'S LATEST EGREGIOUS INSULT TO FREEDOM OF SPEECH WILL ULTIMATELY LEAD TO THE OP'S DEPARTING LIVEJOURNAL FOR MORE CHILD PORN-FRIENDLY WATERS

SOME STUPID MACRO ABOUT STRIKETHROUGH '07 AND A HACKNEYED COPYPASTA PIRATE SONG

INVOCATION OF GODWIN'S LAW

First comment in the thread, by burr86 (LJ employee Abe Hassan):

Clarification that the subjects of the drawings were at least six years old, thank you very much.

To me, the problem is not that it's fandom wank, not that it's in efw, but that an employee of LiveJournal/SixApart, using his work account -- the one in which he replies (or doesn't reply) to users' concerns -- is snarking to a user about an issue the user has with LJ/SA. And in a way that implies that anyone who likes the art is a pedophile. (I have seen the art, which doesn't do a thing for me, but it is in fact two adult characters in a consentual relationship.)

Bluntly, it's like going into Burger King, paying for the burger, and then they follow you out to the table and change your burger while you're eating it -- grab it out of your hand and take out the tomato and put in some pickles -- and you say, "Excuse me, but what the hell are you doing? I paid for that" and the BK employee doing it says, "Oh, you're one of those people who likes that kind of burger. Well, you're not welcome here, but we'll keep your money."

Or something.

If he wanted to snark along with everybody else, he should've done it from a sock-puppet account. Or said, "Listen, guys, completely outside of the situation...". Or actually tried to address the problem, as a lot of LJers have been asking LJ/SA to do.

That's why everybody was ticked off. It has nothing to do with fandom, fanfic, or even whether something is child porn -- it's that one of the only responses LJ has made over the past few days to a growing number of questions... is insulting snark.

Comments

[kengr]

In case you hadn't heard, LJ has also modified the code so that if you try doing a link to a suspended or deleted account, it no longer gets the LJ icon, is bold instead of struck thru, and isn't a link.

And such accounts don't show on the lists on your profile page anymore.

In other words, they've tried to make such deletions/suspension "invisible".

As far as I'm concerned, that's *proof* that they are acting in bad faith. They are trying to keep us from noticing rather than acting in a manner such that it doesn't matter if we notice.

[cktraveler.livejournal.com]

I agree with you -- but I've heard the alternate explanation floated that it's to do with how namespace isn't protected after deletion. A boldface account is supposedly one that can't be reinstated while a struckthrough one can.

I have no idea if this is true or not and frankly I think you've got it right. But it's an alternate explanation. Does anyone have proof it's not true, such as a freshly-deleted account that went immediately to boldface or an account that currently produces a strikethrough?

[crwilley.livejournal.com]

A journal on my flist that was previously struckthrough (like, a year ago, by user deletion) is now bolded in links, but still shows up as strikethrough in my profile. I should clean up my flist more often or something,

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

I was aware that they'd stopped people linking to deleted accounts and had removed those from profile pages. I don't think that's an immediate sign of bad faith, though, honestly, as I can see too many reasons for some people going 'Wait, why do I have links to journals which don't exist anymore?' and someone deciding that it made sense to implement. I'd rather know when one of my friends journal was deleted, but I really can see how that could have just been a legitimate change and they didn't think through how it would look in combination with this.