Oh, LiveJournal. You never cease to amaze.

[reddragdiva]

Anyone not heard about LJ's latest privacy fuckery, in which people can easily and accidentally crosspost all LJ comments they make to Facebook and Twitter — including when they comment on a locked post? Not malicious cut'n'paste fairies, but deliberately enabling purely accidental cut'n'paste fairies?

No? Good. It's not going to get any better — this will not be backed out and the majority owner of SUP has a share in Facebook and is angling for a share in Twitter.

On Web 2.0, step 2 is "brutally violate your users' privacy as hard as possible." Step 2.5 is say "hey baby, I'm real sorry" and then do it again. You're not the customer, you're the hamburger.

I'm sure that anyone who continues in employment with LJ — going into work every day to do things that they know will endanger people's personal safety, and showing up again the next day to do it more, and showing up again the next day to do it more — does in fact have excellent and obvious justification to continue. So that's all right, then. Suggestion: a drive to find less morally reprehensible jobs for the remaining LJ staff members.

p.s.: moving a huge journal to DW is very easy and getting easier. I know. DW might go bad in the future too, but for now I consider it the most sustainably-constructed LJ clone. (You can enable access to your DW locked posts for your LJ friends, too.) Lots of account codes at dw_codesharing, and I still have six here.

p.p.s.: if you read this and promptly want to post geeky self-righteousness about your superior privacy management skills and how anyone getting their life fucked up by this must have done it to themselves, just shut the fuck up. Really.

Update: Not that the DreamWidth staff are entirely clueful. Read this, particularly to the last paragraph.

Comments

[greylock]

There are people who don't get why this is annoying.
Me? The gap between the (only response so far) of "oh, we wouldn't like it either) and the lack of response annoy me.

I'm just going to point to my last (or the one before) DW entry as questions.

I don't want to move, but the LJ fuckery seems deeply rooted. In the 130+ pages comments are all kind of "quirks" and "features" that worry me.

But: how does DW cover its costs? Any ideas? You know Wiki well enough of have sense abotu whether perm DW people can subsidise the costs.

[reddragdiva]

I'm not on yr list so can't see said entry as yet ;-)

I didn't particularly want to move. It helps that I'm quite technically competent to go somewhere else as I wish, e.g. running a blog myself. But, of course, not everyone is. And LiveJournal has attracted a lot of people who can barely work scissors, but have a very keen sense of social fuckery. That said, it was incredibly easy. Haven't tried moving all the LJ friends to "grant access" status, should probably try that next (so they can read locked posts here; though they can still read them there).

WMF is a charity; it runs on the smell of an oily rag and profound volunteer effort. DW is a business, though a small one. Invite codes for free accounts are a good sign to me, as they will let it scale reasonably. But I have no idea as to its actual financial robustness.

[greylock]

My bad, as the kids used to say.
I thought I had spruced up DW with all my LJ contacts.
Either I did (and didn't do it properly) or meant to and never did.

[reddragdiva]

I've just been adding people as they show up.

[ideological_cuddle]

They routinely post about how the business side of things are going. Last I recall, they reckoned they were on track, had enough money to keep going for a good while, and getting sufficient revenue to sustain that without going into LJ-style idiocy.

They're pretty open about this stuff.

[bob]

http://dw-biz.dreamwidth.org/332.html

[redcountess]

I note that LJ can't even get their FAQ entry straight - the FB/Twitter Connect options are on the "Extensions" tab of account settings, not "Privacy".

[lizzie_swarf]

So how do I move my huge journal to DW?

[reddragdiva]

https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/importer

Pulls across icons, groups, comments, everything. Example. Not commenters' icons.

[reddragdiva]

I haven't worked out how to give automatic access via OpenID to your friends list either, except one at a time.

[pseudomonas]

The importer does it if you tick the right boxes, at least it did for me.

[reddragdiva]

So it seems. Apparently I didn't tick the right box.

[pseudomonas]

The importer is really quite good :)

[alien8]

agreed, importer seemed to work fine :)

Impressive...

[lpetersson.livejournal.com]

So, they are actively trying to kill off LJ... Most impressiv eI have to say.

I don't really use it that much anymore anyway, but it's still a bit sad...

[denny]

I would read the linked LJ post except, hah, I can't seem to read LJ at all currently... as soon as I stray off the www sub-domain the site is unusably slow. Seems to be hanging in the cookie-setting code somewhere.

Really starting to think it's time I deleted my old content off of there.

[reddragdiva]

I haven't deleted mine. But I've moved most or all entries and comments here - and ticked the box on LJ to minimise inclusion in search engines, so Google will look on DW by preference.