Regarding the fuss around the latest TOS announcement

[blackfyr]

I'm about to go on a bit of a rant

The CEO of Six Apart, the owners of LiveJournal, has made a good-faith attempt at a plain language explanation of what the current stance on the TOS is. You can read it in the lj_biz community in this postWhy am I going to rant? Not because of what he did or didn't say. I'm going to rant over the number of people who a

Comments

[iampunha]

With all due respect (which is currently more than I give 6a), I think it's entirely understandable that the masses want 6a to specifically enumerate those things they will and/or will not allow, given that the whole reason this shitstorm started is that 6a decided to enforce things with randomness that would embarrass an RNG. If I am a teenager or a 20something (and I am the latter), and I am a writer of fan fiction (and I used to be), I want a pretty strong assurance that my $150 is not going to a company so entirely undereducated about one of its biggest constituents that it will ignorantly suspend accounts and communities it mistakenly thinks are advocating incest and rape.

[blackfyr]

As I noted in my post, it is impossible to list every possible thing that they won't allow due to illegality. Some things can't be covered until they come up due to simple fact that no group of people can come up with examples of everything another person (or group thereof) could do that was illegal.

And since they're trying to clarify to their internal people how the rules should be applied (which they said they were doing in that post I linked to), we already know that they are doing what they can not to be "undereducated". They've also said they were adding an easier mechanism for reporting problems and doing what they can to make the whole process more transparent.

[iampunha]

"As I noted in my post, it is impossible to list every possible thing that they won't allow due to illegality

[blackfyr]

It is also possible to summarily suspend journals because your own people are acting like chickens with more than their heads cut off.

Which they have repeatedly apologized for and admitted was a fuck-up. Berating them about this continually says more about the people doing the berating than about whar 6A did.

And given that the latest reaction to "Oh, wow, we should have thought of this before" was to suspend first and ask questions later, you still feel that user reactions to this whole mess are unreasonable?

I think it's out of proportion, yes. And since they have reinstated most of those accounts, the only thing I think 6A owes those people is an apology and damages of some kind, whether it be to give them a year-long paid account or some other mutually-agreeable benefit.

What they don't owe anyone who wasn't directly affected is anything more than an apology and a promise to do better, along with a demonstraqtion that they are trying to do so. All of which they have provided.

No, we know they think they are doing what they

[circuit_four]

Er... no. Sorry. Given that previously 6A asserted that having a single-word interest listed was evidence of advocacy, on no stronger grounds than a bit of archaic helptext saying interests should fit the grammatical form of "I like X..." I think people have a pretty damned reasonable incentive to get a very straight, very explicit answer out of the new TOS. I think you're being dismissive way the hell out of proportion here.

[blackfyr]

Given that they have, in various answers to comments on the post I linked to, repeatedly said that this has changed, repeatedly asking the same, already answered question is way out of proportion. I have seen so many people posting questions saying some variant of, "I, too, would like to know if..." with posting times long after those very questions they're repeating have had answers posted to them. This indicates to me that people aren't reading those answer chains to see if there's been an answer to their question before adding to the dogpile.

No, I'm not being out of proportion. I've only made one post about it, and that after reading through over half the comments and comment chains on that post.

[blackfyr]

BTW, they have, more than once in replies to comments in that post, said that interests will not be read as likes unless the context of the bio and/or the rest of the journal makes it clear that that is what they mean. They admit that that was how it was handled in the past but have expressly, and repeatedly, stated that that is not how it will be handled from this point on.

[bovil]

It's a start, but It's flawed and unclear on a number of points. I don't think enumerating a list, though, is an answer. Simplification is the answer.

I suggested that they change the "hate crimes, the abuse of children, or rape" to "violent crime." It's much simpler.

I also kind of wonder about "serious illegal activities" in their following point. I'd remove "serious" (its meaning is unclear) and put some slack in there for civil disobedience and acts of protest (not that anybody understands "civil disobedience" anymore).

[blackfyr]

I think the problem we're running into is that most of them are 'people of good will' who are trying to cope with trying to come up with rules to exclude things that peopl not of good will do. This tends to mean that the PoGW have failures of imagination when trying to set up the rules. They are also hampered in that, if they exercise too much editorial control, they will lose their information carrier status and drift into information publisher, which would make them liable for fines in the tens of thousands of dollars every day that offending items aren't removed.

IOW, they're stuck between Scylla and Charybdis.

[bovil]

Ultimately, they have to come up with a complaint/evaluation/suspend/appeal process that makes sense. The policy and supporting statements are useless without it.

[blackfyr]

Pretty much what I said in one of my comments on that post. I'm not saying that what they've said is perfect in any way. I'm simply saying the people need to not dogpile them with repetitions of questions that have already been answered, and that they should use either a) common sense, or b) a dictionary before asking for a definition.

And learn to read English. It's amazing how many of those questions and comments show a basic lack of comprehension of the writers' native tongue.

[shulamuth]

I spent almost 25 years administering the law according to the facts and circumstances of the individual cases, and two things were apparent all along: People want everything spelled out because they don't trust the administrators of the law not to play gotcha, and it is absolutely impossible to spell things out in such detail that it will cover every possible action.

Add to that the fact that this country has gone entirely irrational on anything to do with child sexuality, and expecting intelligent and rational behavior demonstrates an optimism I no longer feel about the world.

[mdlbear]

Well said.

And 6A have left themselves plenty of room to jump from child pornography to whatever the latest irrationally-demonized hot-button topic may be. IMHO the only sane policy is to take down journals only in response to a court order valid in whatever jurisdiction their servers are located in. Anything else can be -- and from what I've seen of 6A is likely to be -- abused.

[shulamuth]

I think you're making a mistake here, another one common in modern American Culture, which is to move all judgment calls in the realm of law. This is simplistic, equally abusable and ends up justifying some pretty vile things that are "not illegal". Things can be legal and still wrong (and for that matter, things that are not wrong may be illegal == there is nothing intrinsically evil about driving on the left side of the road, but it's illegal to do so in the US).

People (and organizations) have a perfect right to make judgments about what is and is not acceptable based on other standards, as long as they are not discriminatory under the law, and as long as they are clear about what those judgments are based on.

Can this be abused? Yes, of course. The defense against such abuse isn't legal, though; if the rules are sufficiently arbitrary and capricious, vote with your feet and your dollars. Or bitch, but don't be surprised if people bitch about your bitching.

[mdlbear]

If they're trying to stay in the safe harbor for service providers, they do not have that right. Or rather, if they exercise that right, they risk losing their privileges. Right now they're trying to have it both ways, and a lot of people (me included) are trying to pin them down so we know how much effort we need to spend on our footgear

[beckyzoole]

AMEN!

I can't believe the level of detail some of the commenters want. There are over 1800 separate crimes delineated in the US federal code alone, much less state and local regulations. 6A was very clear that the only topics they're going to get uptight about even if a post is technically legal are hate crimes, rape, and child abuse. I don't think there's any need for them to list all 1800+ possible crimes and naughty deeds that they're not going to bother about.

[mdlbear]

Part of the problem is that they were very clear about that in one place, and a good deal less clear in another. It may be obvious to a person of good will and high intelligence what they intended to say, but we have plenty of evidence that 6A contains many people who are neither, and they have a long history of making stupid decisions and not listening to their users.

[blackfyr]

In the specific instance that you brought up there, they were very clear. Advocating that the laws surrounding single-gender marriage be changed is not illegal. Discussing this is not covered in what's banned. The discussions aren't illegal. The activity of trying to change the laws and society's misapprehensions aren't illegal, and even two people of the same gender living together as a couple isn't illegal (except in Virginia until that law is tested and, hopefully, struck down in the US Supreme Court).

So the whole question comes down to whether they would take action against someone talking about legal activities and the answer is, no.