lj news and a new idea

I know we are all--*see-saws hand*--about the lj thing eleven-twelve days ago, but read the most recent news

Reproduced bit that made me slightly nervous.

One thing that people have been upset about has been the implication that the community standards would be set by Six Apart and not the community. I agree, and I was wrong to imply that. Six Apart is a critical part of the community (with the help of our paid users, we pay for bandwidth, employ the staff, and run the servers), but clearly the LiveJournal team and the LiveJournal users have a critical role in defining what is acceptable on LiveJournal. We know we can learn a lot from other communities that use a combination of reputation software and human judgment to gauge community opinion, and we are now actively exploring how we can let the community "vote" on what is acceptable content in order to create greater consistency.

When I say "vote", I don’t want people to fear that this will become the tyranny of the majority or mob justice. Metafilter, Craigslist, Flickr, Wikipedia, and many, many other sites effectively use these types of systems to make the jobs of their support teams easier and to reflect the standards of the community. Clearly law takes precedent over such votes, but in case where the line is not legal content but rather objectionable or acceptable content, community input can be a great help. Members of the team are starting to explore what is working for whom and we will share these ideas in more depth soon.

Hmm. Under ideal circumstances, I'd find this a fairly good idea. Except we do not live in utopia.



My Response

(cut quote from response)

Well, no. I thank you for the thought, but we self-police ourselves within our own diverse communities by fellow members, we contact abuse if we find something that breaks TOS, or we deal with it internally. It is flawed, but I do find it preferable to worrying not if my lj breaks TOS, but whether or not it will be voted off the island.

http://news.livejournal.com/100060.html?thread=52171484#t52171484





By mouseworks:

"we are now actively exploring how we can let the community "vote" on what is acceptable content in order to create greater consistency."

Bad idea.

You don't have a community here. You have a virtual city the size of Philadelphia (going by users active in the last month). Some of us have closed gated communities within the virtual city; some have security guards that question strangers; and it's a city of neighborhoods. Some things scale; other things don't. You need someone who has had experience with Usenet abuse issue and with LJ who is a professional, probably with help desk experience, too, who can be the equivalent of the police commissioner. You don't let Fred Phelps set policy for 13th and Walnut; you don't arrest and make martyrs of people who want to be made martyrs of, either.


Read the rest here. Very awesome response.



Hmm. I am wary.

Comments

[anjak-j.livejournal.com]

Diversity is the strength of LJ - this ideal they have come up with is only going to stifle that. If you give people that much power, inevitably they will abuse it. Abuse will stop being about dubious and/or illegal content and become about vendettas against a person or group of people based on what? A black person writing about their views of white people in a less than charitable way? Devout Christians going after homosexuals? Shippers using explicit fic as a way of getting rid of their rival ship's comm? Where do you draw the line?

I use my journal for many purposes - most people on LJ probably do. The idea that there would be some kind of panel to read the contents of my journal to assess my 'suitability' to blog on the LJ platform gives me the chills. I could write one thing that someone finds 'distasteful' and lose my whole blog because of that. That is wrong - making the non-objective masses of LJ to become it's sanitation commission will end in tears. Something Barak should take into account while he's thinking about his IPO. Investors aren't going to be interested in something that is dead in the water because people are constantly in fear of being shut down and go elsewhere.

I think they really need to step back and take a long hard look at what makes their community. LJ is made up of thousands of different types of communities, with many sub-types. You cannot police them all in the same way. Not to mention the users who make up these communities are from many different countries, with different cultural backgrounds and from different walks of life. My life experience is different from the next person - the next person's life might be a lovely bed of roses - mine certainly isn't and hasn't been.

In short, there is much in my particular microcosm of LJ that irritates and bothers me, but what kind of person would it make me if I voted, given the ability, to silence the voices of others??? I may not like what people have to say, but I don't have to listen to it. And my annoyance, or a communal vote thereof, should not be enough to take away the voice of anyone.