Six Apart's misstep: crackdown or kerfluffle?

Well, it looks like there's another blogquake going on. Six Apart's crack legal team has succumbed to vigilante pressure from the outside world and is now tracking down every LJ in which the user has one of the following (or a synonym for one of the following) in the "Interests" list: child abuse, human sacrifice, kidnapping, killing, murder, paedophiles, paedophilia, rape, and beating people up.

I doubt they're going to come for me; none of those particularly float my boat. But it does mean that Six Apart is now taking an active, editorial interest in what you write, which is different from LJAbuse's previous interest only in what you do. Six Apart's abuse policy has now become editorial: your blog is no longer your own, but is now jointly managed by you and the legal team of Six Apart, which may decide without warning to terminate your account.

The thing that irritates me most is that they're going after fiction writers. Despite the disclaimer from LJ abuse that they're not going after fictional accounts, it's become clear from the ongoing discussion that some user accounts have disappeared because they were the fictional journals of fictional, villainous characters.

Sigh. The only question is: when will the Six Apart legal team get its act together and start going after all "questionable" content? I mean, I have "sadomasochism" as an interest (no, really!?) and that's illegal in Massachusetts.

If LJ becomes a Disney Gated Community, I'm so outta here, whether they push me or not.

Folklife!

Elf & Omaha.
Flickr!

Okay, so I'm two days late with my Folklife! report. I had a lot of photographs to take care of, and they're all on my flickr account if you want to bother. I took a lot of photos of buskers, mostly because I wanted a documentary feel for what buskers look like and what they do when they're busking, at least in a setting like this.

FallenPegasus
Flickr!

We arrived very early and sat down to listen to some Indian music, which was nice, while I took random photos of the crowd. We watched the Junior Drum & Pipe band at the Mural Ampitheatre, rendezvoused with FallenPegasus (here looking lively), and did lunch: gyros for Yamaraashi-chan and I, a hot dog for Kouryou-chan, and Omaha found that wonderful crepe' place I must have missed while looking for something to eat.

Space Needle
Flickr!

Kouryou-chan snapped a photo of the Space Needle while we were there.

( More behind the cut. )

If you're going to delete Harry Potter Slash...

Okay, I'm a camel and I've found my straw.

Our decision was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what's not. We have an awful broad range of discussions and topics and other things going on in LiveJournal, and we encourage other broad-ranging conversations on all sorts of topics. This was a specific case where we felt there was not a reason for these journals to stay online.

So said Barak Berkowitz, Six Apart's chairman. Having a moral panic over some slimeball vigilante group's overeager wankfest is one thing, but refusing to admit that you've screwed up and instead saying that you're creating the kind of community you want is just sad. Don't tell me you're doing that with blind cancellations based upon a user's tagcloud; I believe that as much as I believe this bullshit will turn into gold sometime soon.

What are some alternatives? I hate to lose the connectivity I have here; many of the people I care about are only an flist away, and the granted access I've been able to give others is just as valuable. It's knowledge I have little idea how to make portable, and that makes moving problematic.

Back to normal, conditionally.

I can kinda see what King County Metro was trying to say with their latest "Oh boy! Work for us, drive a bus!" campaign, and maybe I'm in a morbid mood today, but when I saw this banner on the side of the bus this morning my first reaction was, "How do I know those toes aren't swinging from a noose?"