I'm writing this essay toward the end of a 24-hour "content strike" on livejournal. You will note that I'm not writing as an LJ post. Even though it will undoubtedly be finished after the strike is over, since most of the posts I want to link to are in browser tabs on another machine.
Many of the people on my flist are respecting the strike (reluctantly in some cases); many more are ignoring it either because they haven't heard about it, or because they don't believe in either its goals, its methods, or both. A few have gone on to post the reasons why they are or are not respecting it. Almost all the arguments I've seen, on both sides of the debate, are missing the point entirely. I don't think even the originators of the strike understand it fully.
Let me explain, by analyzing a few of the common statements:
The strike is an empty gesture that will have no economic effect on LJ or its owners.
Part of this is perfectly true: a handful of people, most of whom don't have ads on their blogs anyway, refraining from posting for 24 hours will have no economic effect whatever. In fact, if we all took our blogs and our gripes somewhere else, LJ's owners would probably give a loud cheer and tell their real customers, the advertisers, "see, we finally drove them off. Give us more money because now everyone is seeing your ads."
It's also basically irrelevant. There's a big difference between a long-term strike, which is intended to do economic harm to the greedy corporation it's directed against, and a one-day walkout, work slowdown, or informational picket, which has two main functions: informing the public at large about the strikers' objectives, and strengthening the resolve and solidarity of the strikers themselves.
In other words, it's not about the effect on LJ's owners, who have already expressed their contempt for the user community, but the effect on the members of the community. It's a comparatively painless way of saying "we don't like the direction LJ is heading. If it keeps heading in that direction, we may just pick up our content and leave."
We're sending a powerful message to LJ's owners, that LJ is nothing without content.
This is the flip side of the previous one: if you think LJ's owners give a damn about content, you're kidding yourself. They'd do fine if none of their users ever posted anything but birthday greetings, stupid memes YouTube links, and LOLcats. And, in fact, most of them are probably doing exactly that.
The strike, if it's sending a message at all, should be sending it to us. I'll say a little about what that message should be further on.
LJ is a business, and they have to sell ads in order to keep the servers running. Get over it.
This is simply false. There are plenty of successful web businesses that have a two-tier pricing model: a free version that gets people in the door, and a "premium" or "professional" version that enough people are happy to pay for that it makes the business as a whole profitable.
Flikr.com is just such a business. Yeah, you'll see an ad on their front page. Visit somebody's photos, though, and all you'll see are their photos. No ads.
LJ was another example, before 6A bought them. They had a soul, once, but they sold it.
LJ is a business, and they have a perfect right to maximize their profits by making it harder to avoid ads. Get over it.
True again, but irrelevant. LJ is two things: the business that runs the servers, and the community of people who use those servers. Oh, and they also have customers.
The problem is, LJ's users aren't the customers, they're the product. LJ's customers are the people buying the ads. If LJ can provide their customers a more profitable batch of consumers, they're happy.
The real problem, in other words, isn't that LJ is a business: it's that we aren't its customers.
If you don't like the direction LJ is going, you should just leave. Stop complaining.
If a business treats me like dirt, I have a perfect right to complain. Loudly and in public. Maybe they'll change their ways, though in this case it isn't likely.
What's more likely is that I'll gather a crowd of people with similar complaints, and together we'll figure out a good place to take our business.
Leaving LJ isn't really a good option right now, because there's still a community here. If we could all pull up roots and transfer our blogs, our comments, and our network of friends over to someplace better, I think most of us would do it. I think we should be figuring out how to do just that, and not by moving to another centralized service that will eventually betray us in turn, but by building a decentralized community that can keep us in touch after we all take back control of our own content and "to our scattered servers go".
I'm not ready to run lj-backup one last time and move
elsewhere, in other words, but it's looking more and more possible even as
it gets more and more desirable.