ravan | Major Suckage

Shoot the fucking lawyers at Danga/LJ. Their new ToS sucks boulders through cocktail straws.

Examples:
* Registration "obligations": During registration, all users are required to provide accurate, complete and current information about themselves in all required fields. and Should LiveJournal.com suspect that your personal information is not complete, current, or accurate, your account may be subject to suspension or termination. So, essentially, pseudononymous users like me are fucked.
* Advertisements: No, they won't do it now, but they reserve the right to do it in the future, with or without prior notice, and you can't change your options if the do.
* Can't post "obscene, vulgar, hateful" stuff: Upload, post or otherwise transmit any content that is in LiveJournal.com's opinion to be unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive to another's privacy... , hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable; Great, there go most of my rants, and the

childfree community will get fucked over, fast, by all of the trolls and whiners who don't like it.
* Sell you your own content back: LiveJournal.com also reserves the right, without limitation, to resell any portion of a user's LiveJournal back to that individual. Sure, you retain "copyright", but they own it??
* Post content about violence: ... This may include, but is not limited to, providing instructions on how to assemble bombs, grenades and other weapons or incendiary devices; Great, you can find this type of data in a public library in the US, on the ground in other countries, but it's forbidden on LJ??
* Volunteer Enslavement: ...LiveJournal.com member agrees that the intellectual content created as a result of volunteer work for LiveJournal.com constitutes intellectual property of LiveJournal.com and that all rights in said content shall vest in LiveJournal.com at the time that it is created. ... Well, I can't volunteer on LJ, even if I wanted to. Sure, they "get" Open Source... NOT!!!

Read the thing, with all of the lawyer talk for "we let you think you have rights, but buried in the legalese is your enslavement for the 'privilege' of being allowed to use our site, and the privilege of paying for it."

FUCK YOU, DANGA LAWYERS, FUCK YOU AND THE BUYOUT YOU RODE IN ON!!!!!

Edit: Yes, a lot of this stuff was there before, but now Six Apart will be doing the enforcing from a business perspective, and in a COPPA friendly environment. This makes a difference. My gut says that allowing kids onto the site will actually fuck over the adult content, and all posts, public or not, will have to pass kiddie standards.

No, I don't trust Six Apart.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Also here from dubhain's LJ.

Frankly, I think you're all overreacting. I don't think Six Apart particularly wants to mess with what is inarguably the most successful and popular blogging service online.

Here's the question that needs to be answered before freaking over TOS: who profits? Why is Six Apart buying LiveJournal? I notice a lot of people have hit the roof over this without asking this question. Once we actually know the motive, then we can hit the roof more constructively.

They also have apparantly gutted the Social Contract, renaming it "Guiding Principles", and the Social Contract was a big moderating factor on the ToS.

Having seen how Six Apart runs their business and treats their users, and knowing the history of tech buyouts and mergers, I am very, very far from optimistic.

Who profits? Let's see:
* Brad: gets to ditch the management and business angle, which he hates enough to risk selling his project for (that and a nice bundle of cash.)
* Six Apart: gets a big, dedicated, and entrenched user base, a code stack that is only partly open source, and a stack of highly optimized servers. IOTW, a potential cash cow, if they can just milk half of the user base with ads or nickle and dime fees (assuming the other half tells them to get stuffed.)
* The users: maybe get trackbacks implemented.

6A burned a lot of their own early adopters when they changed to a fee type software. They didn't add a lot of functionality, and their pricing model was awful for software that you had to install, administer and clean out comment spam on.

I am sure there will be changes, and we won't like all of them. You're probably right about the ads, although you're also probably dead wrong on free accounts suddenly getting charged fees. They have so many free accounts that it's cheaper to slap an ad banner up at the top than it is to charge everybody even a nominal fee. Frankly, I could give a shit, I ignored banners before and I'll still ignore them; it's LiveJournal's server space, they just let me use it.

yeah, that one is a much bigger deal IMO. i wrote an analysis of what all has changed, and it's pretty clear where LJ is headed now, and that is away from being, well, different from all the others -- forget open source, and forget freedom from ads. i doubt six apart is pouring joi ito's money into LJ just to take home as relatively little as brad did.

it doesn't phase me much because i never got all that attached to LJ; i prefer my journal on my own server anyway, and am mostly here to read all the people i know who happen to have LJs. but i can see why you would be upset about those changes.

i think there might be an opportunity for deadjournal here down the road, or a similar site who wants to run LJ as LJ was run before the sale.

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