Well, they certainly used a machete where a scalpel would have done. The thing is though, and I really think that this may be the worst - it was either kneejerk or lazy. Because they either wholesale suspended people based on a keyword alone while freaking out over WfI, et al., or they just didn’t think ahead far enough to do first what they’re doing now - see which journals are fandom or sexual abuse/violence support, contact people with profile problems, etc.

Inability to reason under pressure or laziness? It’s not much of a choice.

– Nikki on 31 May 2007 @ 5pm

Great post!

Although not entirely similar, LiveJournal’s recent actions remind me of the debate about Digg’s decision to delete posts that contained HD DVD security hacks.

Using your own questions … Could Digg do it? (Yep.) Did they have to for legal reasons? (Probably; they didn’t want to get sued.) Did the posts deserve to be deleted? (Maybe.) Did Digg handle the situation in the best way possible? (No.)

It will be interesting to see how the free speech / moderated speech stuff plays itself out on community sites in the weeks and months ahead …

– funkybrownchick on 31 May 2007 @ 5pm

I’m sure I agree with all of your points above (candidly, I skimmed) but I wanted to just emphasize one point: We may well know what to do, but problems can often arise because the mistake is that we don’t do the thing we intended to, or botch its execution. I only point it out to say that I appreciate the advice, but it’s even more frustrating that all these lessons are ones we certainly know well enough. We just needed our actions to match our intentions.

– Anil on 31 May 2007 @ 9pm

Anil, that was a very nice way of saying, “No duh!” ;-)

It’s true, it didn’t seem like the kind of thing you folks usually do (and I said that, too). I was mostly using it to make a larger point about community management. But in these situations we can only judge a company on what they do, not what they intended.

Congratulations on being the example du jour. Don’t worry, there’ll be another one soon enough.

– Derek Powazek on 31 May 2007 @ 9pm

Actually, Derek, this whole fiasco has been reminding a lot of people of the abrupt changes to Moveable Type licensing back in ‘04. Again with the lack of warning and being apparently caught flat-footed at a response that was, frankly, 100% predictable — if the people making decisions had any feel for their actual user community.

What continues to surprise me about how Strikethrough07 went down is the way 6A managed to be both too sloppy for a serious business and too close-mouthed for a project heavily dependent on volunteers. When you make a serious change in the way the TOS are applied, tell people beforehand. When your customer base melts down, tell them you’re listening. What you *don’t* do is leave a bunch of low-level volunteers as the only ones answering questions while you try to figure out what the heck you’ve done.

Whether 6A thinks of itself as a business or a community, it needs procedures or at least groundrules the users can feel confident in. If they want to keep users thinking of it as a community, then they have to actually *explain* how decisions were made, why they felt under the gun to do something Right Now, and what kind of procedures they’re going to use to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

If they’re just a business, then they don’t have to explain how they made bad decisions, because they owe us only the minimum of care — and that’s all we owe them, too.

– Doctor Science on 1 June 2007 @ 11am

Derek, I would dearly love your opinion about this post purporting to give some background to Strikethrough07. The post certainly dovetails with my observations: I posted about those rumors on May 25th, for instance. I have heard from many sources about “Warriors for Innocence” (whom I will not link to, for they are indeed scum, but you can type dot-org yourself), and also about how Perverted Justice had been trying to get LJ’s attention about *their* actually well-founded investigations for many weeks.

– Doctor Science on 1 June 2007 @ 6pm

A few reactions:

1. As the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I take claims of “neo-nazi” affiliations very seriously. And, sorry, a confederate flag does NOT a nazi make.

2. “Follow the money” is a pretty good investigative tradition. Still, I’d need more proof that they’re “thinking about an IPO” than one person’s say-so.

3. If the post is true, and they waited until Memorial Day to do this on a day when most people would be offline, then they’re both evil and stupid.

– Derek Powazek on 2 June 2007 @ 11am

The group in question is not neo-Nazi strictly speaking, but they are fascists of the classic all-American design: neo-Confederate Dominionists with the full set of racist, anti-immigrant, homophobic prejudices. Presumably including anti-Semitism, since they seem to come as a set for one low, low price, but that hasn’t been mentioned specifically. They look pretty much like the Klan in different outfits.

– Doctor Science on 2 June 2007 @ 5pm