First Think, THEN Ink.

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.

So, I'm really annoyed and disturbed by the LiveJournal Terms of Service, introduced, as far as I know, April 3rd, 2017.

First of all, the whole damn thing is in Russian, and though I suppose we all should start thinking about learning that language, based on the actions of our government's current Administration, why are we being required to answer to this? After all, we were told that the Russian side of LJ (aka Zhe-Zhe) was a separate entity from the Western version.

Then they made a note stating that you would get a bonus if you agree to the TOS... but if you choose to ignore it, they attempt to log you out of your account!

So, the obvious question here is what's going on?

And the obvious problem here is... there's no way to find out. We have no idea who the "western" directors of LiveJournal are or how to contact them, or what they are doing, or who they actually care about.

I did note that one of the translated elements of this all Russian TOS stated, and I quote:

"this translation of the User Agreement is not a legally binding document. The original User Agreement, which is valid, is located at the following address: http://www.livejournal.com/legal/tos-ru.bml."

In other words, you can't really agree to the translated version of this document. You can only agree to the Russian version.

WHERE ARE THE NON CYRILLIC LIVEJOURNAL DIRECTORS?!?!

It's been a while since I've felt the need to introduce myself HERE, since I've been on LiveJournal for almost thirteen years! My name is Dean and I am known as penpusher here, and on twitter, which are the two social media sites I use most frequently.

I am a penpusher because I am a left-handed writer... I push the pen across the page. I was kind of built to be a writer: Only child, intently observant, obsessed with facts, and not a lot of friends growing up, so left to my own, quiet devices when I wasn't being protected/observed by my mom and grandmother. Perfect dynamics for writing. And I did write, short stories and plays were my favorites, but I would toss out the occasional poem too.

Eventually, I started keeping diaries. I made the mistake of using Appointment Books which had narrow columns to write in per day, and I used a soft graphite mechanical pencil which now makes some of those entries next to impossible to decipher! I have been trying to transpose some of my paper journal entries to this LJ, just so I can preserve them!

But to give you the backstory on me, I was born in New Brunswick, NJ, at the start of ragweed season, in late August. When I was two, and then again at age seven. I was moved to New York City and have grown up here. I have a habit of attending strange schools. Bucknell University not withstanding, I am a graduate of:

Macy's Sales Manager Training Program
Connecticut School of Broadcasting
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College
New York Film Academy (I showed the first completed film in its history!)
New York Bartending School (by request)

And all of the grade schools I attended, (pre K through 12th grade) eleven more of those over the years. As you might guess, I'm used to being "The New Guy" because of all of the new schools I've attended. And this is a new experience for me, never having done an LJ Idol before. Might as well give it a go!

I'm looking forward to reading entries from other LJers that I haven't encountered before, and I hope you consider adding me on to your friendslist, if you like what you read from me.

I started talking a little bit about greed in my Writer's Block about Fairytale Endings designed by oxinterruptedxo. I firmly believe that greed destroys everything. And since everything is involved, I figure I might as well do a series of essays on how that's progressing. And I might as well start right here.

I mean, just look at LiveJournal! Humble beginnings... where Brad Fitzpatrick simply wanted to stay in touch with friends from College. But then that expanded into this communication platform. It changed and grew as people invited others to join. It became a phenomenon as the user count grew into the millions, and then Brad saw a huge payday from selling the site to SixApart. So, he did. And since that moment, LJ has spiraled down to a point where only the hardiest of users still remain.

Of course, 6A intended to use LJ as a profit making operation, plastering ads everywhere and actually trying to force the users to swap over to VOX (remember that?). That was THEIR blog platform with the ads already built in... so there were no issues about Brad's "no ads" comment from before all of that. Looking back, it all seems so obvious.

VOX has long since been deleted from the blogosphere and SixApart had long since sold LJ again. But that step definitely helped to put this site where it is now.

And now, there are new people doing new things to attract more people back to LJ; this though the changes being suggested are not to the liking of the people already here.

Here's a link to an article about it all, if you haven't heard:

http://www.fastcompany.com/1809674/the-return-of-livejournal

And here's the listing of the LiveJournal changes planned:

http://news.livejournal.com/140969.html

So, where are we now? LiveJournal is attempting to lure more users back here, so they can get more sponsors to purchase ads, which will make them money. That money will not be shared with the people who are helping to create the content, which is always the question about such a setup.

Now, I know and understand that a website does cost money to operate. There is the matter of servers and bandwidth and load time all of the elements that most of us take for granted when we go online. But this is the quandary we end up with when we start examining a situation like this one.

If there were no LiveJournal users, the site would not exist, and there would be no way of using it to generate revenue for the LiveJournal owners. So, clearly there is some power in what we, as users, can say about this, especially those that have purchased accounts here.

Now, looking back on the SixApart situation, it's pretty easy to see how they tried to manipulate LJ users. First, they introduced backgrounds that looked like the VOX backgrounds for people to decorate their LJs. This was to make the transition to VOX more subtle, more inviting. Then they tried to coerce LJ users into getting a VOX account "too." So a lot of us (me included) got one. But it was just a method of drawing people away from this place to a site where they had TOTAL control.

This really hurt LJ in a lot of ways, but not the least of which was the population was being sliced up. Now, some people were on VOX, even though most remained on LJ. But to 6A, the bottom line was the buck. They were trying to establish their own blog site and wanted to leech the LJers to come there so they could put into action their plan of big money ads and use the users to cash in with it.

SixApart started doing a lot of ridiculous stuff to make the LJ userbase angry (not coincidentally, the moves made were supposed to make the site "family friendly" which really meant "advertiser friendly"), and, I presume they hoped that people would start using VOX more as well. If they could drive more people to VOX, all the better.

Of course none of that worked, as people started to pack up their accounts and move to places like blogspot, blogger and WordPress, or just quit blogging altogether. Everybody knew that VOX was the 6A baby and nobody wanted to adopt. So, all SixApart accomplished was angering the users by trying to work their will BEFORE opening a dialog about what LiveJournal is and what the users wanted.

Then two things happened offsite to kinda destroy LJ's population: twitter hit, the celebrity angle happened with that and the rest is history. Everyone is on twitter. and Facebook went from a "college only" platform to open user platform, and everyone went there as well.

Though the LiveJournal administrators would love for people to start using LJ like they do in Russia and Singapore back here in the West, the "changes" they are planning really seem more designed for sponsors, and every LJ user is savvy enough to know, that is destined to be more suck.

I was recently dropped by a person I met in real life. This person actually wrote a post about how people were not commenting to the entries in this person's journal. In the original draft of this rant, it ended with a "fuck you" to the people who weren't replying. Later, the expletive was deleted, but the general angst remained.

I wrote a reply to the post, which I actually wanted to keep for myself for when I will inevitably come to the realization that I'm doing what this person is doing. It's a bookmark reminder which is why I'm posting this here, not really so much for any comments or replies. Of course, you're welcome to do so, if you have any other ideas about the topic.

So, if you want to talk about journal comments, click on the link below.

( CLICK )

But this actually got me thinking about my journal, and how I sometimes don't always reply to a statement or comment someone makes on one of my posts. Typically, this happens towards the end of the posts, but occasionally, a comment will go unreplied in the middle somewhere. I notice this when I go into the archives to find posts that relate to something new that is being discussed. I'll look back and see a comment and wonder why I didn't say something back.

If I have done that to you, it was not because I ignored it. I just didn't type something back. Believe me, I cherish all the comments I get to anything I write. I think sometimes I don't always have a good enough reply to make it worth your while.

In fact, I stated that I would never delete this journal, and I'll probably open it up to the public if I ever do decide to stop writing here, so people can have it to look at for themselves. To me, when you allow people to comment on your journal, it's not entirely yours anymore. I mean, it is "YOURS" in that it is your journal, but it's also a little bit of everyone who sees fit to make a comment, leave their flavor there, give their insights, and spin things differently. That's why I'm against deleting journals. You are deleting everything everyone else took the time to say, along with your entries!

But the point here is that I'm apologizing to you if you wrote me a comment and expected me to reply and I didn't.

I'm sorry!

Oh, and HAPPY FRIDAY!

(xposted to spaceagers)