LiveJournal has been so plainly busted for hypocrisy and for mendacity about the elimination of Basic accounts that they have decided to admit:

The announcement last Wednesday was a mistake in regards to Basic accounts, as the change was not clearly stated, it did not allow for you to provide feedback, and went into effect immediately. Many of you have pointed out that the decision worried you less than the way it was communicated. You should have been given a voice, and you were not; we didn’t follow our own rules, and we apologize.

Of course, if they were sincere about their own rules, then they'd roll-back the change, and run through the proper procedure. But they're not sincere; they're just trying to hold onto enough of the existing user-base to lure the sorts of users in whom they see their future.

Meanwhile, Anton Nosik has engaged in an interesting mix of denial, attack, and self-contradiction in an attempt to shut-up his American critics.

BTW, for those of you who have not been informed:

LiveJournal reports a list of its most popular interests. On 6 March, LJ snuck-in a bit of code that filtered that list so that it wouldn't report bisexuality, bondage, boys, depression, faeries, fanfiction, girls, hardcore, pain, porn, sex, or yaoi as amongst these. After the filtering was discovered on 14 March, the administration was silent on the matter for days, despite many demands for explanation and for removal. The filter was removed on 17 March.

LJ spokesperson marta declares

I don't have a statement for some of your questions. I do know that it was a mistake, and not meant to be a judgment or company opinion of any kind. I will try to have better answers as the day progresses.

(Note that with her I do know that, she insinuates that she doesn't know more than she reveals. We may thus be fairly sure that she knows significantly more. In any case, the administration is plainly stone-walling.)

While I am not surprised that a change to filter the popular interests would be effected in the same unannounced manner as was the change which filtered specific interest searches, and I am not surprised that something like this filtering of the list of most popular interests would eventually be effected, I am none-the-less surprised at just how quickly СУП has been moving.

Yester-day, the Woman of Interest alerted me to

the Jelly Belly® Dream Bean Contest

One is allowed one suggestion per diem. My two entries so far are

• Cinnergy (red shell with yellow speckles around orange-colored center) — Cinnamon and tangerine.
• Hillary (pink shell around red center) — Stale and bitter, yet preferred by many people to chocolate.

In case some of my readers could benefit by the consolidation, I here bring-together more of the reports on the elimination of LiveJournal Basic accounts.

Without prior announcement, Basic accounts ceased to be an option on 13 March.

When LJ was asked to restore the option, Jason Shellen, VP of Product Development for LiveJournal, made the ridiculous claim that the elimination was to help new subscribers:

From a product perspective it was more about creating a new registration process that was easier for new users to understand. I'm sure it's been ages since many of you signed up for an account, but it was quite confusing and included a table of options that was not very inviting to new users.

He expressed offense when he was called on having transparently lied.

Brad Fitzgerald, the original creätor of LiveJournal and a member of the Advisory Board, objected to having not been presented with the idea in advance except as a sort of trial balloon to which he had objected. Danah Boyd, another member of the Advisory Board, likewise objected to the failure to consult, and indicated some of the mentality of the present management:

When I get my feet back on the ground, I intend to talk with the folks at LJ, but I can already predict the first question: what can we monetize? how can we grow?

Fitzgerald had already told them how Basic accounts monetize:

In any case, SUP apparently sees no value in freeloaders not looking at ads, not paying, and oh wait… producing most the content for other members to read, other members who are looking at ads and paying for their accounts.

This elimination of Basic accounts isn't about actually maximizing profit; it is about a childish desire to grab money more immediately.

LiveJournal began admitting that it was a business decision:

Over the past 24 hours many of you have asked whether the changes to the account structure (removing the option of creating new basic accounts) is a business decision. It is, emphatically.

c·news, a Russian-based IT WWWeb journal, picked up the story, and reported Anton Nosik, Chief Blogging Officer for СУП, as saying:

We do not consider it necessary to inform those, who have not opened a basic account during 9 years of LiveJournal’s existence, that there is no such an opportunity any longer

Which implicitly refuses to acknowledge that all users, even those who do not plan to creäte new accounts, are affected by this change qua members of a community (and that users with existing accounts often want additional accounts). It also reveals that СУП more generally resists transparency, which resistence is also exposed in the same message in which it was admitted that the elimination of basic accounts was a business decision:

We're still working out how to strike just the right tone when communicating with such a diverse and complex collection of communities.

which is to say that previous pious words were empty, and they can't even figure out quite how to fake openness without giving away more information than they wish.

Now, while New York is weakened and distracted by scandal, New Jersey should seize Bedloe's Island!

Without prior announcement, it is no longer possible to creäte a Basic user account on LiveJournal. The change wasn't presented to the Advisory Board for prior discussion. (When I want your advice, I'll ask for it!)

Even Brad Fitzpatrick has been roused from smug complacency, albeït perhaps only because of his commitment to a business model:

In any case, SUP apparently sees no value in freeloaders not looking at ads, not paying, and oh wait… producing most the content for other members to read, other members who are looking at ads and paying for their accounts.

Presumably СУП understands that, for the time being, existing Basic accounts cannot be mandatorily converted to Plus accounts without alienating most of their content providers, but believes that a fair number of potential future subscribers who would have chosen the ad-free option will go ahead and chosen the Plus account (or perhaps now even the Paid account), such that any actual net loss of content providers will be more than off-set by greater ad-density (and by subscription fees).

Unless their model fails in sufficiently spectacular manner, when they reach the point where active Basic accounts are perceived to be a sufficiently small share of existing accounts, these will be converted to Plus accounts after some subsequent major (or ostensibly major) software change.

Half a block from where I live is Bronx Pizza, which looks like a hole-in-the-wall place, but has a really great pesto pizza, usually available by the slice. One can get two large slices and a soft drink for US$6. (The soft drink choice isn't great, but it's passable.)

To-day, I was there to get dinner. At a near-by table sat three blue-collar guys, my age or older. They looked as have white blue-collar guys for most or all of my life. But they were talking sincerely and unaffectedly about fighting a problem of sexism and racism at the place at which one of them worked, with the victim of the sexism being a woman. That's not the sort of conversation that such men would have had in my childhood.

The sun was going down, but my day brightened a bit.

Controversy has erupted over Robert Downey jr having been cast in the rôle of a black character in Tropic Thunder. By coïncidence, over the last couple of days I have been watching The Most Dangerous Game (1932) in bits and pieces. The coïncidence is in that Noble Johnson, an African-American, played a Caucasian in that earlier film.

I don't think that we should give much of a d_mn about blacks playing whites or vice versa. It should be no more than a mild curiosity.

On the other hand, Tropic Thunder stars Ben Stiller, and the fact that he still has a career in movies certainly does offend me.

Addendum (09 Mar): I am now told, distinct from the report of the Daily Mail, that Downey plays a white actor playing a black character. (So the rôle would be somewhat more like that of the main character in Soul Man (1986).)

eBay is one of those institutions that tries both to stream-line and to impair the complaint process by requiring that complainants use forms. In spite of eBay's efforts at impairment, I managed to use one of their forms to clearly report a pattern of shill feed-back, with demonstrating evidence. Thwarted, they fell-back to asking me for details in e.mail that were already provided in my initial report, as if they were lacking. At such point, many people of course give up, and others write an outraged response that eBay can then dismiss as the work of someone irrational. I instead took advantage of the fact that I was no longer confined to the earlier format, restated the case more as I would originally have stated it (if not confined by the form), adding new information that had arisen. And I concluded by making reference to the civil liability that eBay would develop by failing to act.

As I left David's Coffee Place to-night, there was a group of men out front, hugging and talking. Across the street, a drunk yelled impotently at them that they were disrespecting the male gender. At the time, I was amused enough that I laughed aloud for a while.

But it does irk me that many people think that they are entitled to invoke respect as a justification for oppression.