interests are back way too fast

For those following along with the popular interests controversy--short version, certain popular interests being screened from public view--they've been restored. Updated posted to the_lj_herald. Also a link to the changelog showing the code change, or so it is said.

....

Okay, I give up. SUP, you have officially lost me. Either this was:

a. real and you withdrew it due to reaction,
b. it wasn't real and was to split attention between basic account and interests, then give us one back so we would be fooled into thinking you listen to us,
c. this is a test of your local broadcast system just to see if we'd notice,
d. really weird accident of some kind.
e. social experiment! (by trobadora)

No, seriously. That's just odd. Anyone have a guess?

(Thanks to amireal for the heads up.)

ETA: Advertiser Tracking of Flist of Sponsored Accounts with BEACON. Read the entire entry. (thanks to goss for the link!)
Updated 3/17/2008, 9:04 PM - This post is locked.

ETA 2: marta of lj staff has spoken in comments here. Um, not much so far, but wow. Staff speaking to us.

Comments

[goss.livejournal.com]

I just found out about this tracking thingie going on:

http://lirren.livejournal.com/186575.html?style=mine

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Ooh, thankyou!

[goss.livejournal.com]

And now I have to go clear out my cookies for Facebook and Ebay.com, and possibly never use them again. :b

[twistedchick]

The Beacon item and the lirren post are flocked.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Updated. Thanks!

Color me unsurprised

[(Anonymous)]

This is yet another reason why I rarely log in: this kind of underhanded tactic is something I have been anticipating for a long time and I have put up with the suspicion and discrimination anonymous posts get in LJ so long that I feel like saying: 'told you so!'

Note: compare and contrast with Google announcing before launching Gmail that they would target advertising based on content to finance the free, ad-supported Gmail service.

Re: Color me unsurprised

[seperis.livejournal.com]

*g* I don't blame you. At this point, not logging in when you don't have to seems the smarter option.

[trobadora]

I'm with you on odd, and I'm just waiting for them to break out the "it's all a social experiment!" explanation.

Seriously, WTF?!

[seperis.livejournal.com]

God, I should add that to the list.

Hm. This makes me wish we had the lj_newsletter--like the sga newsletter, but concerned with problems and changes in lj. *sad*

[amireal.livejournal.com]

Um that's kinda what the lj_herald does. Sort of. It's pretty close.

[trobadora]

I thought that was what the_lj_herald was?

[bethcarielle.livejournal.com]

Social experiment. They're probably in cahoots with the Psych department here. Their building is a maze. We're pretty certain it was built so intentionally to be used as a massive mouse maze psychological experiment using people. *g*

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I love it. And it is *true*.

Also, I envy the maze. So much.

[anjak-j.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads up on the Beacon thing...shocking.

I'm hardly surprised about the interests thing. I'm inclined to think it was a. But neither b, c nor e wouldn't surprise me.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I hate to say b, but honestly, after reading on teh possibility of sponsored user accounts other than plus, I just don't trust them.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

Actually, someone on my flist had an interesting theory which connected it to an earlier attempt to filter out certain categories from advertizers (so as not to pull in certain types of ads). Apparently a list collected when sponsored accounts started looks an awful lot like this.

All conjectures, but an interesting theory nonetheless...

[gchick.livejournal.com]

This is an interesting theory indeed -- and on a gut level it feels more plausible than many others (aside from the "weird accident having soemthing to do with gnomes" theory further on down, which is (a) always true and (b) hey, gnomes!)

I'm not all that inclined to believe that SUP is acting out any grand plans, because I'm just not sure they're all that competent. On the other hand, I can totally see them thinking of something like this for the sake of the ad targeting and never even THINKING, after a million such blowups, that the users would notice or worry about it. Dumbasses.

(If anything, the so-called Beacon link above makes me believe it more -- a couple of things to point out first: it's not the infamous Beacon, and it's the same ad-tracking system that's been in place for close to two years now. But it does use interests as one of its inputs, and getting unwanted pr0n in your ads tends to make people inconveniently eager to learn about adblocking software.)

[seperis.livejournal.com]

You know, it makes me wonder about livejournal culture, if we're really that much more activist--or scary--than other userbases.

I mean, I'm half convinced 6A sold out due to terror. *grins*

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree that the Beacon might be closely related...maybe as a way to target better???

[ratcreature]

I knew about a system that tracked your usage of LJ which they claimed was to optimize their interface, but you could opt out of that, at least I remember opting out of something in the admin console after a news post about some tracking or other. I had to look up this Beacon thing (I don't have a Facebook account and only noticed the kerfuffle tangentially.), and Wikipedia (I know,not 100% reliable) lists LJ as partner site for that Beacon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon_%28Facebook%29
is this just that if you have Facebook and are tracked by Beacon there, it'll alert your Facebook contacts about new LJ posts, and doesn't affect regular LJ users? But that may be where the confusion between LJ's tracking and that beacon comes from?

[seperis.livejournal.com]

On my last entry it was mentioned, and that makes sense.

...though the mind boggles what exactly would come up terrifying when one's interests are fanfiction. Cause really.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

hat's the really silly part, yes!

Cynical side suggests they're afraid of legal issues; nice side hopes they knew how we like to stay under the radar; reality suggests it was a dumb glitch :)

[ratcreature]

Maybe they just think it's all underage HP porn since they only see us weirdoes complain about their adult content and no underage sex drawing policies whenever they make a news post... *g*

[aurora]

c. this is a test of your local broadcast system just to see if we'd notice
I'm thinking maybe this one? A test to see how quickly fandom can respond to changes (and to check what kind of shit SUP can get away with)??

[monanotlisa.livejournal.com]

I think that's mostly paranoia talking. & :-) My assumption is that it's the other way 'round: SUP doesn't care for fandom in the least, for we are just a small percentage of LJ users. It does half-assed things to up, up, up their revenue: It's all just about the money.

[aurora]

I think that's mostly paranoia talking. & :-)
Hah, I'm definitely not excluding that. :D

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Interesting on that one. I was checking my flist, and an unusually high percentage have a permanent account, and a really unusually high percentage (compared to non-fen I looked at) had paid. I mean, that's total anecdota, but I would give a lot if there were a way to get numbers. Granted, that's a tiny sampler, but it makes me wonder we're underestimating. We tend to invest in where we are more than I think other groups.

[monanotlisa.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't rely on personal checks as representative. My impression mirrors your own, but our corner in and by itself is fairly special, and I don't mean that in the Short Bus sense, for once. *g* Money-making, non-teenage, and comprehensively stable customers are a demographic they *should* in fact look for, but on the other hand, in comparison to 15 MILLION LJ users, there aren't that many of us. And even the thirty-thousand folks who spoke up in fandom_counts (not congruent with the above-mentioned folks) don't make such a huge dent. If you want to cater to a group, cater to the largest one: I'd bet that this is what SUP is thinking.

Just my two euro cents, as always.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

*g* I wasn't. That's why I called it anecdota.

Fifteen million accounts, not users. From the update level, it's a lot smaller, adn smaller still those currently active on any level.

[monanotlisa.livejournal.com]

*g* I wasn't. That's why I called it anecdota.

Yes, yes. Stop me when I'm on a roll. & ;-)

Fifteen million accounts, not users.

True. Slashing (heh) that number in half, and twice so, we'd still have almost 4 million active users. 30,000 of them make up for, um, 0,008%? (I no can haz mazmatics.)

And since I saw the discussion further down: From the posts on the flist, I take it the filter was installed deliberately; this wasn't a mistake. I just don't think fandom-as-such was targeted.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I dont' think fandom was a target. I mean, seriously don't. But for the life of me, I can't figure out what they were thinking.

[monanotlisa.livejournal.com]

I wager it was something between "HOMG THERE ARE USER INTERESTS THAT LOOK NOT AT ALL LIKE A HAPPY-PLASTIC BARBIE WORLD," "WON'T NO ONE THINK OF THE ADVERTISERS," and "LET'S CLEAN THIS PLACE UP BEFORE COMPANY COMES." Company being someone else to buy some grown moloch of a networking platform off their hands, o'course.

[monanotlisa.livejournal.com]

Oh, Jenn, READ THIS! ::dies::

http://community.livejournal.com/metaquotes/6598002.html?mode=reply

[seperis.livejournal.com]

*DIES LAUGHING* Yes.

[sobelle.livejournal.com]

Thanks, hilarious!! cherry flavored lube for Gramma indeed!!

(you know, I'd never hear any of this great stuff if I didn't stand over in the corner and listen in... I never find the good stuff by myself ::stamps foot::)

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

I'm inclined to go with "d: really weird accident of some kind," just because my SO has been moderating on-line bulletin boards and discussion groups since the early nineties, and I've had a backstage view of all the different things that can go wrong: deleted messages reappearing without warning, open messages going missing ditto, private areas suddenly becoming visible to God and the world (always, inevitably, when the people inside the private area are saying things that they would really rather not have some other people read about -- and always, inevitably, when those other people are on-line and reading) . . . all sorts of things can have an appalled sysop firing off a frantic wail of "The database is hosed!" to the system's techgnomes.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I'd agree if the results weren't so--were more random, to be honest. But the choices aren't very random(except wtf on faeries, seriously?). So--hmm.

But yes, definite possibility.

[ratcreature]

I think it's probably just due to some sort of incompetence. I mean, that probably someone somewhere wanted to make the public list look "good" for some value of "good" that puts the official stats page in line with their new content flagging visibility that per default neither "explicit adult content" nor "adult concepts" are visible on their site but you just get a warning asking for your age. Someone has to implement this somehow for the special site pages like stats, and seeing how popular interests are likely fairly stable, it's easiest to just insert a list of "problematic words" somewhere. So sex is out, bisexuality and such too as maybe explicit or because some parents whine when their kids learn that there are gays and lesbians, then some staff thinks that "depression" is probably an "adult concept", and while they're at it, they have no clue what the cyrillic ones are, and maybe assume nobody looking at the English site would want to see them anyway so those are out too, except for the one they overlooked because its cyrillic letters look like latin ones at first glance.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

*nods* That sounds very probable. *sighs* Gah.

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

Yup, this is exactly how it looks to me, too.

[wynddancer.livejournal.com]

LJ makes me uneasy these days with their actions. I know IJ isn't considered to be a great alternative either according to what I've read. I'm curious about what fandom thinks about www.deadjournal.com? It was the first LJ clone and the first LJ owner helped set it up according to their site. I'm not a member and have no idea of the features (or of LJ really either--I have 3 userpics and no photos uploaded, etc. I don't really care about those features although a lot of fandom does.).

interests

[greyhat.livejournal.com]

Holy schneikes! All it did was remove them from the "Popular Interests" list. Nothing happened to anyone's personal interests, and the interest search function was fully functional the entire time. It touched one list, and that's all. That sounds like a pretty easy thing to fix, and a really insignificant thing for folks (all across fandom, not you specifically) to get upset about. Most users don't even know how to find the "Popular Interests" list.

Re: interests

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Oh agreed. I dont' think I've ever used it. It's more the principle of the matter I think, in removing from public view things that SUP considers--well. Bisexuality, Depression, Boys, Girls, Yaoi, Fanfiction, etc... Small, definitely, but not a comforting beginning for this regime, you know?