My attention was drawn to a recent news story, which reported that bullying can be good for children. Oh, really? Assuming for a moment that the Daily Fail story was accurately representing the results of the research, I drew a very different conclusion from the one in the headline (and URL). A study has shown that youngsters are more popular and more admired by teachers and friends if they return schoolyard hostility in kind.
Another user gets suspended from TrollJournal for posting public information, info that had been made public by the person detailed. The backstory is that LiveJournal has introduced advertising in the form of “sponsored communities” with third party identity tracking. To quote the LiveJournal “contract” back in 2004: It may be because it’s one of our biggest pet peeves, or it may be because they don’t garner a lot of money, but nonetheless, we promise to never offer advertising space in our service or on our pages.
The latest LiveJournal Abuse Team abuse is “nipplegate”. Someone on the Abuse team decided that female nipples were offensive. When this was challenged, the terms of service were promptly rewritten to retroactively justify the decision. (Which, if you’ll recall, is something I suggested as a resolution for my disagreement with the abuse team, and something they rejected out of hand and claimed wasn’t possible.) If anyone had any hopes that the purchase by sixapart would lead to a little more maturity and professionalism from LJ Abuse, it seems like that day is a long way off.
[For more cases of LiveJournal Abuse Team behaving abusively, check out http://ljabuse.blogspot.com/.]
For several years I was a paying user of LiveJournal. Now I pay for web hosting and run my own content management system. It’s not by choice; this is the story.
In a nutshell, following an altercation with a racist troll, LiveJournal suspended my account without warning, even though I had not breached their Terms Of Service. They didn’t suspend the troll’s account–instead, they announced that (contrary to their written terms of service) racist comments were in fact perfectly acceptable on LiveJournal.
Attempts at compromise to resolve the issue were ignored and rejected, even when I offered to delete offending comments. The money I had paid for the service they were refusing to provide was not refunded.