Excerpt from:
apophenia: The Cultural Divide Between LiveJournal and Six Apart
If Brad is willing to sell, i suspect that this rumor is definitely true. It doesn’t require a brain to know that buying LiveJournal would be a brilliant move on Six Apart’s part. That said, i’m not sure that i like this move at all.
Live Journal is a culture, not simply a product or commodity that can be bought. From an outsider’s perspective, it might appear as though they are similar properties – they are both blogging tools, right? Wrong.
Jump inside LJ culture. People who use LJ talk about their LJs, not their blogs. They mock bloggers who want to be pundits, journalists, experts. In essence, they mock the culture of bloggers that use Six Apart’s tools. During interviews with LJ/Xanga folks, i’ve been told that MovableType is for people with no friends, people who just talk to be heard, people who are trying too hard.
LJ folks don’t see LJ as a tool, but a community. Bloggers may see the ethereal blogosphere as their community, but for LJers, it’s all about LJ. Aside from the ubergeek LJers, LJers don’t read non-LJs even though syndication is available. They post for their friends, comment excessively and constantly moderate who should have access to what.
While you cannot generalize about LJers, a vast majority of them are engaged in acts of resistance regularly (think: subcultures, activists, youth rebels, etc.). They value LJ because it values them. They value LJ because it is a tool of resistance, an act of going against mainstream and representing those already marginalized by society – the geeks, freaks and queers among us. They don’t want to be mainstream. They don’t want their parents/authorities/oppressors using the same service. At the same time, LJ provides shelter, support, community. When someone threatens to commit suicide, LJ doesn’t throw up its hand and scream “not my problem.” There are folks who actually work to help friends help each other. They’re not just an anonymous service – they care.
I would love to know why people donate to LiveJournal. My hunch is that it has to do with cultural identity. When you donate, it says so on your page. When you donate, you signify that you value LJ. Forget increased features, you’ve just made the ultimate commitment to a community – a commitment of money. And aren’t you jealous of the permanent members and early adopters?
Yeah, this guy nails it on all counts.
I’m a paid member of LJ. I don’t know if I’ll re-subscribe in April. I’ll be watching the changes very carefully.
When I started reading your blog and your link to other blogs, I was pretty baffled, having been used to the extremely tight knit communities on LJ that talk not only about politics but about deeply personal, touching, life-changing things.
LJ has a flavor that I’ve not seen in any other online community. Interestingly enough, even though most of my entries are filtered for friends or for sub-categories on my friends list…I still manage to pick up totally new readers ever few months.
LJ is a way to share your lives with people. All the other blogs I see just seem to be a way to share your thoughts. Or share someone else’s thoughts.
There are plenty(!) of non-LJ blogs out there that discuss the same issues on a person-to-person level; some even have a sort of community about them. But, like the man said, LJ is not a blog, it’s an online-diary (hence the name).
The only issue I ever had with LJ, or any other online journal (hosted by someone else), is that there’s nothing on the backend preventing someone with access going Postal(tm) and reading/stealing/mutilating/etc anyone’s content; i.e., no encryption. That said, having seen the code firsthand as of a couple of years ago, there wasn’t (and probably isn’t) any practical way of offering that bit of protection. Call it a geek thing if you like, but don’t call it irrelevant.
Additionally, but separately, I’m way too f-cking paranoid about publishing the sort of personal details generally found on LJ. Anything on the ‘net eventually gets found by Google and then it’s more or less forever. With the sorry state of affairs with identity-theft prevention — web sites using birth cities, pet names, mother’s maiden name, former addresses/phone numbers, etc for authentication — it’s a heckuva lot easier to not say anything than worry about what tidbits of information you might reveal that, collectively over the course of a year or two, would be a goldmine to some unscrupulous loser. It bugs me that I’m that paranoid about it, but maybe it’s just heightened awareness because I know what’s out there and how easy it is to get all of anyone’s personal information if you can get at least one item on your own; no sense making it too easy for them. Still… sucks bologna. :P
I agree that when you post on LJ you are trusting the admins at LJ to not be evil. Their feature to hide the public entries on your LJ from search engines has been pretty successful at hiding mine. (I show up on people’s users lists. It looks like I show up if I’m mentioned in someone else’s journal who hasn’t hidden their LJ from the bots.That’s about it.)
I heavily filter most of my entries with any identifying data, career information, or adult topics. (I have a friend filter, an adult filter, a food filter, a close filter, and a few filters that go to specific individuals. I love the filter feature of LJ) Again, that is with the faith that the admins aren’t evil.
I give my credit card numbers, social security number, and license number to a dozen people a month, though, online or off…with the same faith.
This isn’t the same as a blog site getting indexed by Google, by sheer scale alone. In your entire life, you won’t directly share sensitive personal info with as many people as can see a web site in an hour. Such as jimbala.net…, for an easy example; as far as popularity goes it’s a lame site based on the daily hit count, but since Jan 1 2005 more people have seen the front page than all the people who’ve directly obtained personal info from me in 34 years.
Imagine if you had a public blog site with a couple years of posts (minimum 1-2 posts/week on average which is really low) where you freely discussed deeply personal things. Any single post, or even three or four, containing personal details (pet name, mother’s name, etc) isn’t a huge deal, though it’s also non-trivial. Consider those 200 posts in aggregate. If just 10% of them contain sensitive personal info (assuming no duplication), that’s more than enough for some extremely easy social engineering to get access to the juicy stuff like financial info. You might be amazed just how much identity theft is initiated this way (not from blog-posted info necessarily, just from one bit of personal info being discovered somewhere).
Identity theft is already bad if the most conservative estimates are remotely accurate and of course will only get worse with time. The continued use of, for example, the last-four-digits of your SSN as the sole way to authenticate a person’s identity will within 5 years be the quickest and easiest way to become someone else. I won’t even mention how most credit card companies’ self-serve customer service lines want merely the billing zip code to authenticate you. The amount of information divulged by the self-serve lines varies from nothing useful to very useful and that’s just my personal experience with a handful of them.
Want scarier than that? Anyone with Internet access, your license plate # from your car, less than $200, and the balls to do a little social engineering can have your drivers’ license number and SSN within 24 hours without breaking a sweat. Then they get your credit report well within the next 7 days. If they work or know someone who works in the debt-collection industry, to say nothing of anything related to law enforcement, there’s even easier access to even more info in less time.
The really shitty part is that even if they get caught, you’re still screwed basically for life because there’s no real system in place to help ID theft victims recover, in part because your personal data is spread so far and wide — and as we all know, computers never lie or provide false information (yeah right) — but probably more because it’s expensive and extremely complicated to implement any such system. Ultimately, for the victim it means new SSN (along with updating/replacing anything that uses it as part of your ID), drivers’ license, credit cards, possibly refiling some tax returns under the new SSN; if you’re married, spouse needs to do some work too because the SSNs are forever connected and their credit report has probably also been damaged if the ID thief used any joint-account information.
Hopefully within 5 years there will be a better system in place to help people recover but I’m not holding my breath unless some big-wig politician or Microsoft executive gets a personal taste of ID theft; I say this simply because before that happens it won’t be important enough to become a priority for the government or any part of the corporate world that has the power to control the issue. The always-infamous “Someone Else’s Problem” syndrome.