Advice to those upset with LJ lately

Don’t waste time and energy fighting with, yelling at, and ganging up on the people who are assigned to deal publicly with “abuse” and “content review.” You may succeed in getting some of them fired, others of them to quit, all of them to feel like shit, and most of them to dislike you, but nothing will change.

Having been on both sides of this ridiculous scene at AOL, I can tell you that people at this level do not make policy. They are not allowed to change policy. Anything they communicate to their superiors about the impossibility and insanity of the policies will be at best ignored and at worst punished. They are not the secret police. The secret police would make you shit your pants.

Yelling at support people because their bosses are behaving poorly is misguided. It’s like beating up the Wal-Mart greeter because your downtown stores went under. Throwing a rotten apple at a meter maid might feel good, but showing up at every city council meeting and being loud there might get the meters moved.

If you’re angry about oppressive censorship and double standards, a concerted effort directed at the management of Six Apart might be effective, especially if you can enlist the support of Internet freedom of speech advocates and organizations. Six Apart has behaved very poorly, and the board and management need to change that situation in public and on record, rather than letting their first-line employees get roasted alive while they let the whole thing go to voicemail.

Even a real-mail letter writing campaign would be more effective than flamewars with people who can’t make a difference.

Unhappy Anniversary: 1968-2008

There are a few reasons 2008 will be 1968 in the U.S. Notably, the Democratic Party has fallen apart and will nominate an unelectable candidate in a fixed convention. It won’t be necessary for cops to remove their badges and beat up delegates this time.

It’s likely that an unpopular war will have its worst year yet.

Let’s hope that the worldwide events of 2008 don’t match 1968, though. Let’s review, in roughly chronologic order, how much fun that year brought us:1968 blam

There were some good things that year too, but I don’t think they make up for the body count and the loss of freedom and the defeat of idealism worldwide. Let’s hope we get a better 2008.

Note: links are to Wikipedia because I am lazy.

Annals of Employment: PC Load Letter 2.0

Today I had to submit a financial form to the office. I work remotely, so I couldn’t just fill it out and drop it by the finance person’s office. The question was: how to get it there?

The form was an Acrobat PDF. Nowadays, many of these can be filled out as forms onscreen and then printed or emailed or faxed, making them easy to fill out and easy to read. Not this one. So the problem was: how to get it to the office without driving 50 miles in heavy traffic?

As I realized what was necessary, a tear rolled down my cheek.

I printed out the document and filled out both pages in black pen. Then I took them to the scanner/printer device at the other computer. I scanned each one in, which had to be done separately. The first go scanning them in greyscale produced an illegible grey smudge like a 1980s drugstore copy machine. I redid it at 48-bit RGB color and the greyscale document came out right. What the…?

Now I had two scanned-in .PDF documents, each one half of the previous .PDF document. I used Adobe Acrobat Pro to combine these into one document so that I could send it as one fax.

Now it was time to fax. This involved connecting to the other computer and using its modem as a fax printer. It should be simple, but it rarely works the first time. It’s never clear how to find the modem/fax/printer in the first place. Decisions about long-distance prefixes and area codes have to made by trial and error. Feedback from the computer sending the fax is almost nonexistent. To make the whole thing perfect, I was doing all of this over a wireless network.

Because of these things, the promise of faxing over the network with ease is a cruel lie. I walked back and forth at a ratio of five times per page trying to see the status of my fax, hear the fax modem dialing, figure out if it had been sent, etc. The first go was a failure because I’d been given the wrong fax number. The second try vanished ambiguously from my computer, but showed as “sent, okay” on the machine actually attached to the fax modem.

I decided that it had been sent, and fired off an email to the recipient, because of course anything can and will go wrong with the fax on the other end: paper jam, paper loss, toner failure, and inexplicable failure to receive a document or notify anyone that a problem has occurred.

Finally I sat down with relief to do some actual work. This was not to be. From the other room, I could hear an insistent beeping. Perhaps the fax modem hadn’t hung up? Sometimes they decide to stay on the line and one has to manually kill the connection.

I went into the other room to find the fax modem trying manfully to send the first fax, the one with the wrong number. I called up the dialog window to see fax jobs and deleted it. I went back to my desk. Three minutes later the beeping started. I marched into the other room and once again deleted the job. This time I stayed and watched. The same thing happened three more times.

Looking at other system preferences in desperation, I had to unlock one with my administrator password. A light suddenly shone upon me, and I saw the problem. Administrator privileges were required to remove a fax job. Sure enough, after I’d proved I was entitled, the fax job stayed removed. The system never told me that I wasn’t permitted to kill the bad fax without admin privileges: it just cheerfully removed and reinstated the bad fax job, forever.

Now I’m back at my desk, waiting for the email saying the fax was never received.

If anyone has extra peacock plume pens and pots of India ink, I’d be grateful for a loan. I have parchment and papyrus already.

Nostalgia and Paperwork: How LJ is like AOL

The LJ mess over censorship gives me flashbacks to AOL in the 90s.

I used to do “remote staff” work for AOL, semi-volunteer stuff. A few years were spent on the chat patrol, and later I had a full-time job for another company that included a lot of message board and chat management. I was doing this work in some way or another from 1990 to 1995.

During this time, AOL grew from a small business to a huge one. In parallel, the community of users started as a town and ended as a nation. It all happened way too fast. Growth rates of dotcom companies and online communities are a cliche now, but this was the first time, and no one knew what to do or even what was happening.

The community standards of discourse, including what was out of bounds in public communication, suffered. People with limited social experience and no background in language or youth culture suddenly had to make decisions about what was appropriate in chat, on message boards, everywhere. Staffers were supposed to chide people who broke the rules or knock them offline, but the rules kept changing. Meanwhile, so many people were pouring in that the variety of possible problems was disorienting. It was hard to get any consensus about community standards when the community was doubling in size every month. The lists of unapproved words and phrases and activities grew long and ridiculous. I wish I still had some of those lists.

Nervous chat monitors and board supervisors were presented with social and linguistic issues beyond their knowledge. GLBT people were booted for discussing their lifestyle outside GLBT forums. Discussions about the role of drug use in society were knocked offline for “drug use promotion.” The rules were applied inexpertly and unevenly, and some staffers appeared to make up their own. The flood of teenaged users brought a whole new set of problems: minors mixing with adults, incomprehensible teen culture, suicide threats.

The situation was handled poorly. Years of arbitrary decisions, ignorance, dissembling, and prejudice went by. By 1994, anyone on “chat patrol” was completely snowed under with constant reports of rule-breaking. It was impossible to catch up and clearly pointless to try.

In the end the problem was solved with money. The company had grown so much that they hired good attorneys, professional senior managers, and more people inhouse to deal with community management issues. Bad behavior that presented a legal threat was still pursued, but they wisely gave up most attempts at regulating discourse in a gigantic community.

LJ is right at that breaking point. They’ve become huge, and there’s no village any more. Large groups within LJ have their own community standards, and don’t appreciate regulation from outsiders who don’t understand the context of discussion. Pranksters and civil libertarians will test the limit of any rule. Outside pressure groups will demand the impossible, and news media will report on anything that looks odd and give it a lurid tabloid spin.

People who enjoy blogging and are good at computers can build services like LJ and make them a roaring success. These aren’t necessarily the right people to manage a community the size of a city. They will be inconsistent, arbitrary, socially inept, prejudiced, anxious, and worst of all ignorant.

LJ needs some people with professional expertise in communities and the law. They need one or more attorneys with a very good understanding of the civil and criminal liabilities of a company like this. And they need a sociologist or its near equivalent who can grasp the nature of LJ’s culture and subcultures without reflexively applying standards that don’t make sense.

Most of all they need to be consistent, which is the first thing the attorney or sociologist is likely to tell them.

With luck it won’t take three years the way it did for AOL.