penpusher: (Livejournal Pencil)
Once upon a time, at the end of the previous century, there was a guy named Brad.



Brad


Brad lived in Oregon. He was headed off to college in Seattle and he wanted to stay in touch with his friends from High School. Sure, there was email and snail mail, but for a young programmer, that simply wouldn't do.

Brad's solution was to build an online journaling website so his friends could read all about his exploits and he, in turn, could read theirs. This program was called "LiveJournal."



Brad designed the program in a very specific way - the comments were "threaded," meaning that not only could someone respond to the person who posted a journal entry, but people could also read other remarks posted, then comment to other commenters and start a conversation with them.

Since everyone using Brad's program already knew each other, that was fine. But soon, this circle of friends wanted to include some of their friends in on this "journaling" thing. So the group started to slowly expand, as the people using it passed on the info about it to others.

Eventually, this became a lot more tricky as friends of friends of friends wanted to take part. Brad's solution this time was to create "invite codes," a special key to unlock LJ that were given to users already on the site that could be sent to other people to allow them to join.

This accidentally became a genius element for two reasons. The first was that everyone joining the site was being vouched for by someone who was already a part of it. Essentially that meant that all the users were approved by at least one person who was already in the group. And the second reason was that it turned the site itself into an exclusive club that you could only join, if you qualified. That made getting a "membership" that much more enticing.

Soon after, there was an explosion as people of all sorts learned about LJ and wanted to get in on the trend. The invite codes were eventually dropped and anyone could sign up make an account. Communities formed - quite literally - A "community" was a group of people who had an interest in a specific topic: from aardvarks to zebras, from ABBA to ZZ Top, from Albania to Zimbabwe... You could think of a topic you enjoyed, make an LJ about it and people would join to discuss it. friendships were forged, as people read all about the lives of each other. And people eventually met each other "in real life." Just remember to put your photos under a "cut tag" because dial up would slow your computer down to a crawl if you didn't!

There even was a new word coined for the phenomenon - "blogging," an abbreviated portmanteau for "web log." In just four years, LiveJournal went from one guy's concept of keeping his friendships going to a million accounts!

And there were the knockoffs.

Because Brad was more interested in people being able to communicate with each other, rather than profiteering, the code he wrote to create LJ was open source, meaning that anyone could come along, take that code and create their own blog site, too. And people did. And then there were other services that intended to cater to niche groups. One of the most notable of those was a site called "myspace."



About the same time as the Millionth LiveJournal Account was created, myspace began.

myspace was a direct result of one of those LJ knockoff sites: "Friendster," or rather, myspace itself was a knockoff of Friendster. And the ambitions were high. Where LiveJournal covered mostly North American territory and a bit of Europe, myspace was planned to be available, globally, and it exploded, globally.

The advantage myspace had over LiveJournal was a major corporation behind them with a whole lot of money. NewsCorp, one of Rupert Murdoch's properties, purchased myspace and were using every trick in the book to get more and more people to sign up. In the same length of time it took LJ to acquire a million different accounts, myspace got one-hundred million.

The problem was myspace was awkwardly designed, had an unattractive color palette, had a difficult to negotiate interface, added a very unpleasant web log that made just writing an entry a challenge and everyone got a friend named "Tom" as soon as they signed up.



Tom


But myspace had something LJ didn't seem to have: celebrities.

Stars from the world of music, film, television, comedy were all creating accounts on myspace. And these celebrities were "interacting" with "regular people." There was a lot of self-promotion as these luminaries would talk about their projects, post photos, list off tour dates and even write blog posts on that clunky blog. People would post the accounts they liked best in their "Top 8," a list of myspace users that could be seen by anyone who visited your myspace.

And as myspace began to take off, Facebook opened to the general public.



TheFacebook, as it was originally known, sprung from what some might consider a sordid place. "Hot or Not dot com" was a site that let you look at photographs of people and asked you to select a score for each person from 10, being Hot down to 1, being not. It was, essentially, a "ranking" website and it's simplicity helped make its popularity.



A typical "Hot or Not" Page


That site inspired Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg to create "Facemash," where he placed two photos next to each other and asked the user to select the one they thought was "hotter."



Zuckerberg - did he post his photo on Facemash?


This evolved into an online version of something that already existed. A "facebook," as it is often referred to by collegians, is a guide to students of a university class year, showing a submitted photo, a name, hometown and perhaps name of high school for each enrollee. It was a way of getting to know your fellow undergrads.

Zuckerberg wanted to create a version of that for the web, but when Harvard dragged their feet, he just went ahead and did it, himself. The resulting website became an instant hit. After it went viral at Harvard, the other seven Ivy League Schools joined, then other elite schools such as MIT and Stanford were included, eventually leading to all Colleges being added and elite high schools were also permitted to join.

Again, like LiveJournal's "invite codes," the requirement of being part of the scholastic community gave the site a certain cachet that made people want to join. And, like LJ, Facebook eventually opened to anyone who wanted to create an account, over the age of thirteen.

Last, but certainly not least was the arrival of Twitter.




As the blogging craze peaked, there had to be a backlash. Not everyone was a writer but they still wanted the jolt of having people hear what they had to say. Enter twitter. With a strict limit of 140 characters per entry, you had to be brief. Essentially twitter was the blog for people who hated blogging.

And a celebrity couple helped to catapult the site, nearly immediately. Ashton Kutcher was at the height of his pop culture power, starring in the popular Fox sitcom, "That '70s Show" and was creator and host of MTV's celebrity prank show "Punk'd." His then wife, actress Demi Moore, (AplusK and MrsKutcher as they called themselves on the site), joined twitter and got a lot of their celebrity friends to open accounts there, too.

Where myspace had the potential for celebrity interaction, Twitter promised direct contact with the stars. Of course, millions scrambled to join, and Kutcher was the first person to reach a million followers, something that seemed incredibly impressive at the time.

But let's get back to the old El Jay. Right before Twitter was about to begin and as these other sites where people began interacting with each other were growing, Brad was approached by a group that wanted to purchase LiveJournal.

SixApart, a company that already had a kind of web log service on its roster (Moveable Type), purchased Danga Interactive (the company that owned LiveJournal) from Brad at the start of 2005. But as soon as the purchase was announced, there was a severe sense of foreboding from the userbase.

Brad had previously made a promise to the users: no ads anywhere, ever on LiveJournal. Most other sites had text ads or photo ads as a part of their presentation. LJ was never designed for that. It, like the internet itself, was created to be a communications outlet first, not an advertising one. So, when 6A came in, the users knew that ads were going to arrive with them. After all, no one buys a social media site to NOT make money.

SixApart's purchase of LJ, and their attempts to monetize the platform were hampered by a series of missteps that caused many users to recoil. One of 6A's early actions dealt directly with censorship - the ability to use icons to show what you want as you post an entry or comment.

Attempting to dictate what was permissible for the already established userbase may have been fine to make the platform safe for advertisers, but it did not sit well at all with the people active on LiveJournal. This happened several times, created a lot of strife and caused many users to want to preserve their journals before leaving the platform for some other, less controlling service.

6A frequently issued changes in policy without consulting the users first. Though it was clear they were harming the very people who were what they purchased the website for, they pressed ahead. They even created a brand new blogging service that they called "VOX" to siphon users off of LJ. In that way they could ignore the "no ads on LiveJournal" rule that Brad had promised, because anyone joining VOX would no longer be on LJ.

The people at 6A made so many blunders that they eventually created an anonymous account which they called "theljstaff," their way of attempting to correct things without attaching a particular person to it. Let's call that what it was: an attempt to hide from the users, never a good sign. They even held an election to create a user/staff liaison from candidates who used the site, and that went as well as everything else they attempted.

But there was something else going on with LiveJournal that most people in the West weren't aware of.

Russia was starting to change under their leader, Vladimir Putin. Putin was the Russian leader from 2000 to 2008, and a number of Russian citizens were not fond of his rule. Though the country was claimed to be a "democracy," it seemed quite clear that this was a front and that Putin was controlling elections, eliminating contenders, preventing any opposition and blocking any criticism of his government.

In Russia, LiveJournal was, in fact, the place where Russian celebrities, political figures and other luminaries had accounts. Known as Zhivoy Zhurnal, or ZheZhe for short, It was, essentially what Twitter was in the United States: the place where everyone wanted to be.

It was also the platform where those that opposed Russian rule communicated with each other.

After completely botching just about everything to do with LiveJournal, 6A finally decided to offload it to the only interested buyer that would match their price: A company in Russia called SUP.

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to realize that *someone* in Russia was trying to find and weed out the dissidents that were coming for Putin and his government, and soon after this Russian company took control of the site, the organization built on that platform to go against Putin had severely diminished and essentially ended.

And now we flash ahead to 2022, when another takeover of another social media site happened. Elon Musk, long time head of Tesla, the man behind SpaceX and the efforts to get humans to Mars suddenly, and almost defiantly said he would purchase twitter for the tidy sum of 44 Billion dollars. People were curious as to why Musk seemed intent on purchasing this platform, as he had no experience in social media, except for using it, like anyone else on the site.

After some haggling and jockeying, the purchase finally went through and Musk took ownership of twitter in October 2022: a new toy. He had revealed his intentions to revamp the entirety of twitter, for his own gratification.



Musk


Musk has stated that he feels that "free speech" has been harmed and claimed to want to rectify this. One of the hinted actions included reinstating accounts of twitter users that were banned; the most prominent of these being former President of the United States trump.

Though that hasn't happened, so far, a whole lot of wild actions have taken place, none of which has improved the usage for those people with accounts nor has it helped his stated goals. Just what is going on here?

When examining SixApart's purchase of LiveJournal and relating it to Musk's acquisition of twitter. The community is what they were buying. It's the community that makes any social media platform. Without the people, all you have is the hardware and software. Brad never would have created that original site if there were no people to write to - and that site never would have grown into something a company wanted to purchase if an enormous mass of people didn't find it worthwhile.

But how do you "control" the community once you own the site?

At the very least, Musk has been trying to cease all criticism of himself by anyone on twitter. Accounts have been banned or shadowbanned or simply quashed.

But, when you reveal your weakness to any trolls on the internet, they exploit it, so more and more parody accounts, more jokes, more insults and more slams started coming as soon as it was clear this was what Musk didn't want. And that led to more action against the offenders.

Away from the online parodies and reactions that were starting to explode, something to remember about twitter is that, similarly to the Russian part of LiveJournal, people were using that platform in a very serious way: to communicate and to organize.

Over the years, time and again, in Moldova, in Iran, in Tunisia, and even in Ukraine, after LJ was all but dismantled in the Cyrillic world, twitter became to go-to place to keep track of what was happening, of police state circumstances, of human rights violations. And it was the place to record video clips and photographs of offenses for anyone who had an account to view.

So the question must be asked:

Does Elon Musk realize that his personal antics on this site could potentially cause harm to populations who rely on the site to stay in touch, or, perhaps, was that his intention? Is he trying to, as the Russians essentially did with their version of LiveJournal, dismantle the platform to prevent any more action from the rank and file against the upper echelon?

But is Musk actively and knowingly attempting to help particular rulers who see revolution in their futures and want a helping hand to stop it? Who can know?

It's been a long strange trip from a high school coder in the Pacific Northwest to the richest man on the planet. And this ride isn't over. It's just a matter of where we are collectively going next.

The one important lesson we need to learn is, we must keep control of our communities, not have them taken over by those who don't care about them, or us. It's through communication that we have our greatest strength, and that's what those in power fear most.

Let's keep the conversation going.

UPDATE: Musk reinstated trump's twitter account as of November 19, 2022 based on a popularity poll he conducted.
penpusher: (Flag)
I previously mentioned I quit Facebook again this past week. It's not the first time I quit but hopefully it will be the last (in that I'll never go back). I can't foresee returning but I never thought I was going to return about a year ago when I did, so there is a slim possibility.

One of my friends from the juggling group that I regularly attend talked with me about leaving. See, there is a Facebook group for our juggling community and one of the things that is lost when you leave that platform is that you are removed from all of those groups as well.

I mentioned the time suck that Facebook requires, and frankly it is a bigger time suck than LJ could ever be, if only because there are so many people that you feel compelled to interact with on a regular basis, and there are news sources and other stuff and the app constantly sends notifications about what stuff your friends are sending. Insidious doesn't even begin to cover it.

But then I also mentioned how being on Facebook really wasn't all that much fun for me. Really, if something is taking up a portion of your life, you better be having fun in somewhat equal proportions to the amount of time you're spending. Otherwise, that's time badly spent. And my friend said something interesting. He said "You like to post those social change issues. I don't think that stuff really plays on there."

He went on to say that "you can't change anyone's mind about things, certainly not in a format like that." That wasn't specifically why I quit, but I was taken somewhat aback by the statement anyway. He typically didn't comment on anything in my feed at all, sticking with just commenting to things in the juggling group. It was rather an interesting insight specifically because he obviously saw what I posted but never commented. And that's a reflection on the nature of social media, generally. I think when I post comments, it is going to rub some people the wrong way, specifically because that is the nature of politics and the nature of what our politics is doing to the people of this country. Life isn't as simple as many believe it is for many citizens of this land.

I responded that the problem when we talk about "social change" issues is that there are a lot of people that don't even know a problem exists. People live their lives with the assumption that everyone is dealing with the circumstances they face in about the same way.

THAT ISN'T TRUE.

And the first step in hoping to fix that is through discussing it, because why would anyone who has been insulated and is busy trying to live their life know or understand the circumstances of someone else who has a very different experience? The only way to start is by talking about the facts of a situation, at least letting people hear about it, seeing if they understand it and reaching out to others for help and support. It's how we erase assumptions and replace those with facts.

He agreed with my points, so that was a small victory, but it made me think about everything to do with social media and how difficult it can be. I'm sure there are people on LJ who do not agree with my politics. Certainly at least one person removed me from their LJ specifically because of that element, and likely others have as well along the way. And that's the segregation of social media. People who do not share the same thoughts and values as you do typically don't belong on your feed because that will just cause annoyance or anger. It will make you upset and you don't use social media to get upset. Unless you do. But that's a different kind of circumstance.

I do visit a couple of message boards that are specifically political and are mostly conservative. I go there for a couple of reasons. First, I like to read what someone who has a different point of view is saying about various topics. If I want some culture shock, I visit Breitbart, a site that I guess is back under the control of former Trump aide, Steve Bannon, but was run in the interim by a guy who graduated from my Alma Mater, much to my shame and regret.

I never comment to anything at that board because that would be begging for abuse. People there have views of reality that are so distorted, it doesn't make sense to attempt to engage them in rational discourse. Just treat it like an horrific traffic accident, slow down, view it, shake your head, say a prayer and keep moving.

But there are a couple of boards that are a little more to the center and I will bat some concepts back and forth with some of the people on those boards. The one I most frequently attend is Scott Adams' blog. Adams, who draws the "Dilbert" comic strip, has become something of a political savant after his commentary about how he thought Trump would do during the 2016 election turned him into a Cable News talking head, a year ago. He's now trying to convert his success into a payday by getting his readers to join him on some other social media platform where he'll likely get a payday for bringing new eyeballs to see ads on the other site he's coercing folks to join.

The point is that most people who post on Adams' current blog don't quite expect someone with a liberal, or as they prefer, "libtard" mindset to come to that group and start posting stuff that doesn't align with their opinions. But I've had some successes along the way, or at least the people I converse with said they understood what I was saying, which is a pretty big step, from my POV, or better, if they don't respond to the point, it means they have no response, and that's a victory, too.

This is the issue when it comes to social change. We can't stay segregated. That's helping fuel the problem. Everyone needs to hear what the aggrieved are saying when it comes to how society is treating them, and then we have to do something to help them. Unless we are not acting in the way we claim we intend to be. How do we face the view of ourselves if we're being honest about what we believe?

But at the very least, we have to keep talking with one another. Cutting off communication, choosing to insulate around only people that believe everything that you do? That's creating an echo chamber, a situation where we can only hear our own beliefs, and everything becomes warped when we have a situation like that. We have to continue to challenge each other, to be willing to state what we actually think and to listen when someone has a different view. That's the way to help the country and continue to move forward.

There's a famous quote that reads "My country, right or wrong." But there's another part to that famed phrase: "if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right."

Here's hoping.
penpusher: (Pen)
The biggest positive of disabling my Facebook, which I did this morning, is simply getting the time back that was spent on it. And that's time that I can use back here, both for posting and reading. I had disabled FB back in 2012, returned last October, and nearly lasted a year, and I would call it a "bad" year, before pulling the plug again.

It also frees up time that I need to use for writing. I have two projects I'm working on that I hope will be worth time from other folks eventually. One of those is the novel, which I already know needs a rewrite, at least the middle section which is going to go much faster than I currently have it moving. I've got a handle on it and I really almost want to go back and fix those sections now, rather than going to the end of the work and then doing a proper rewrite. But I'm resisting that urge because of the very word "rewrite." You can't rewrite until the writing has concluded. That's my approach.

I am considering a sequel novel already, but that might not be viable or useful because an idea that I thought would make an intriguing television series is, according to a contact in the industry, isn't very salable. So, that might become the next novel. And I think I'm going to want to have a change of pace from the material that I'm working with in this piece. Still haven't ruled it out for a future story tho.

And of course there's the relief of not having LJ Idol to deal with on a weekly basis, now that it has concluded. In case you hadn't heard, the winner was [livejournal.com profile] marlawentmad. I finished a very respectable second.

Idol really took a lot more time than you might imagine, as there was the issue of deciding what to write, coming up with a story, then crafting it into the piece I submitted. The great thing is that LJ Idol definitely helps with my process for preparing and executing a story, so that is invaluable, especially where I'm at right now.

Currently, there's no clear answer to if there will be another full season of Idol. Gary, the guy that runs the show, has already stated there will be a mini-season coming soon. But there are a lot of questions, not the least of which is where will it happen? LiveJournal is on the bubble since we are a Russian entity. And nobody, so far, is treating Dreamwidth like it's a reasonable replacement. It is still the attic for your old LJ entries and that's about it.

But that's not for me to figure out. I'm just back here, and, at least for the time being, glad to be back.
penpusher: (Livejournal Pencil)
Credit this one to [livejournal.com profile] dabroots who posted a piece titled: "We are not perky, here at Live Journal." The upshot is facebook is for the happy commentary and anything considered a "downer" there is quickly criticized. And that's not the flavor of LJ.

My quickie comment back was: I like to think we're "real" here at LiveJournal. Which, of course, means perky when that's appropriate, but basically not because it rarely is.

But it's a bit more than that, which is how this thinkpost came to be!

Of course, if you're looking at Facebook... )

Profile

penpusher: (Default)
penpusher

January 2023

S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
2223 2425262728
293031    

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 8th, 2025 10:01 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios