Daily EM

I can’t say that I had much joy when reading the news of SUP taking over the whole of LiveJournal back in December. There is something fishy about SUP and I wrote about that way back in 2006 in IHT. That their funder has very tight links to the Kremlin is, of course, deplorable, but now it turns out they are trying to re-classify the quirky LiveJournal demographics to make it more appealing to advertisers. A LJ user Stewardess reports here and here about SUP’s recent reclassification of user interests on LiveJournal. It seems like just a minor thing until you look at the categories that they decided to remove (those who are not familiar with LiveJournal: most users specify what they are interested in on their profile page; this then also helps to find new people).

So, SUP removed the following: Sex, Boys, Guys, Girls, Fanfiction, Yaoi, Hardcore, Porn, Bondage, Faeries, Pain, Depression, and Bisexuality. Some of them were actually quite popular (”porn” and “fanfiction” were both over 80,000). Here is table reproduced from the Stewardess’s post (the comments in the table are from the original post):

Well, porn and boys&girls aside, the remove of “fan fiction” is a serious blunder, all the more surprising that now SUP has recruited a top-notch advisory board which includes the likes of Lawrence Lessig and danah boyd (I wonder if she has been aware of this?). I understand SUP’s logic: they want to make their users more appealing to advertisers. It’s kind of hard to sign up great brands to advertise to people who state “bondage”, “depression” and “bisexuality” among their interests. But it’s hard to deny that it’s precisely the “freaks and geeks” who have shaped the LiveJournal culture over many years, particularly outside of the former Soviet Union, where LiveJournal is the platform for choice even for the elites.

That SUP may not really understand this is obvious; it’s a Russian company with a local outlook, so I can forgive them for not knowing what “doujinshi” is, but I am still wondering what use they then make of all these fancy international advisors that they signed up…During the previous turmoil about fanfiction, Ethan Zuckerman wrote a nice post about the need to recognize the norms of the communities before making a blunt “delete” decision, particularly of communities as complex as the “fanfic” ones, where the obscene often borders on the artsy and vice versa. It seems that SUP didn’t really heed that advice..

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