InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "hello"

lavendertook (lavendertook) wrote,
@ 2008-03-20 22:43:00

Current mood:

contemplative

Strikes/Boycotts and Other Ways to Hold A Business Accountable to Communities
First off, I've seen there are some differing ideas, as well as confusion on whether we're having an LJ Content Strike or Boycott today. I've been calling it the strike/boycott, for as far as I'm concerned, it's both a breakfast cereal AND a floor cleaner.* You've got it; I'm slashing the strike/boycott.

As far as you are using LJ's platform and servers, you are a paying customer or free client of LJ and are thusly engaging in a boycott.

As far as you are a creator of content for the site that LJ can sell to advertisers as vehicles for their ads,and that attracts other users to the site, you are an employee of LJ and are engaging in a strike.

Thus it's a strike + boycott =OTP.

And that's why simple metaphors of likening LJ users to grocery store customers and LJ to the grocery store just don't work. The user's relationship to the site owner is much more complex.

I think our roles in relation to this technology and the people we engage with on all ends of its application--it's owners, maintainers, our fellow users, site visitors who read our posts, and advertisers is more complicated still than the two roles I've listed above, and we're dealing with at least an OT3.

As an always open and accessible virtual corner pub, salon, town square, meeting and assembly room, private and public party, LJ's community function makes our relationships to the platform far more complicated. We are community members, and in this relation, so are our corporate overlords, whether they think they are or not. We do hold our gathering places accountable to the rules of the communities they function in. I think saying that SUP, the owner of LJ, is a business and they don't owe us anything is not a responsible way of being a citizen of a democracy, which does not stop being part of your identity and how you operate once you walk onto commercial premises. It is important to hold business's accountable to democratic principles and there is no where this is more necessary than with a business that is hosting a community.

The LJ I would like to see would be balancing the needs and wants of the community with its desire to make money because LJ is not simply a product they are producing--it is made up of our labor as well, and the sooner we can get this across to all LJ users, the sooner we can require LJ to be accountable to us. Quite simply, I think we need an LJ Users Union. And it may not be a bad idea to make it a Pan-Social Networking Site User's Union to boot.

We need to raise consciousness among other users that they are not merely consumers of LJ's product, and that goes for IJ as well, but are part of its creation. Only then will we get people to stop paying LJ for its features en masse as a way of pressuring LJ to be accountable to the community of users.

Frankly (no pun intended), I don't think we'll have much luck with getting Citizenship 101 across to many other LJ users quickly and without that I don't think there's much chance of LJ-SUP becoming a community-friendly business, because it doesn't need to be one now, and won't become one unless user demands meet a critical mass.

However, without becoming community-friendly, I don't think LJ is going to keep growing, as the trend has been that it is shrinking. If SUP continues to run LJ the way they are doing now, I suspect they are going to lose users and become less attractive to advertisers, and this will give them a maintenance income, but nothing more. And they won't be content with that. I really don't think this kind of platform is on the rise. Its text-based format is more attractive to a niche user community--readers and writers. It's the newer flashy myspace type platforms that have larger appeal. So I'm thinking that SUP will sell LJ sooner than they will become more user-friendly; in other words, they are not going to last longer than 6A. Then maybe LJ will get a more community-oriented owner--they couldn't get a worse.

In the mean time, I really think we should think about a users union and raising user awareness of their rights, one by one.

*Reference to ooooooold SNL skit

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ciaan
2008-03-21 05:51 pm UTC (link)

Yes, I think users have a far more intimate relationship with LJ than with many other businesses. And differnt expectations - we expect our employers to be able to tell us what to wear to work, we don't expect our landlords to be able to tell us what we can wear inside our apartments. We do, however, let landlords make rules about putting nails in the walls, but if our employers told us we couldn't use nails in our houses - well, no go. So the same way, SUP may own the LJ site but I was there before SUP, and I see my journal as MINE. Obviously they have certain abilities to restrict it based on the fact that they provide it in the first place, but there is a point where those abilities end. It's just that it seems me and them are currently disagreeing on where that point is. And I have every right to stop paying them or to stop using them if that disagreement becomes too much. Especially since I certainly feel that, after $200+ and recommending a bunch of people, who in turn recommended more people, to their site, and providing loads of content and organization, I owe them nothing.

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lavendertook
2008-03-29 04:51 am UTC (link)

Yes--it isn't a simple consumer(client) /merchant relationship here between SUP and the users--it is a simple merchant/client(consumer) relationship between SUP and the advertisers. The user's position is a hybrid one.

The first step of protesting SUP's business practice is to stop paying them. Permanent account holders lose this protest power, which is why I purposely didn't buy a perm account for my main journal on LJ, and won't do so on IJ either. Though now that I'm newly employed, I'm going to upgrade to a paid account on IJ.

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