Rupert Murdoch is trying to owe the world

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 21:52:47 GMT

alittlewhisper made an interesting post about the LJ mess here. I kind of disagree with her though. She says that 6A wants fandom out of LJ and she is not wrong, because the Harry Potter porn is probably deeply embarrassing to them. But that's exactly what they want gone. The porn. Meta posts and icon communities and seviet and sistermagpie and ohnotheydidnt they don't want gone at all, despite being fandom.

Fandom is a content provider. Basically what rules the net is user-provided content. No commercial anything could possibly imagine to replace it. User-based content is also what makes sites "sticky" - ruling the amount of time people spent using it. FF.net, for example, is one of the stickiest sites of the entire web, ahead of much bigger fish and sites and companies.

And as anyone knows, whoever looked at their ff.net visitor stats or any sort of fanfic-review ratio - the lurkers are legion. Fandom, and this is what makes ff.net work, is not just the active content provider - it's the passive lurkers who would never join fandom_counts lest someone will know that they read Snarry porn and liked it. But they are driving ff.net's and LJ's site stats.

I know Fandom loves to see itself as marginalized, but it's one of the most commercialized subcultures ever. (See Comic Con). Fandom is exploited three days to Sunday and back and LJ has as much of an interest in that pie as anyone else. Yet, it wants "clean fun." The same clean fun that led to the deletion of all NC-17 fic on ff.net.

LJ wants Fandom, but it wants a sanitized version of it that fandom cannot supply. Fanfiction-writing, content-providing fandom is so strongly social networked that somewhere on someone's flist someone's writing porn. You can't sanitize fandom without destroying its current social network.

On the other hand, I doubt that moving journals is doable. Neither GJ nor IJ can handle an influx of 35,000 new active members. JF is smart enough to not even provide that option. And a fandom LJ clone? I want to see that server, before even thinking about switching.

So... fandom is screwed.

Tue, 06 Apr 2004 21:18:47 GMT

Jew.

Because an anti-semitic group has google bombed the word.

Bunny

Rupert Murdoch is trying to owe the world