My opinion about the latest LJ screw up:

Due to last week's "Witch Hunt" a few innocents have gotten in the way of saving innocence. Yet...

I don't think i'll move out (and i'd be sad if you guys did too!) 

Why? Because i've invested a lot of time in this jounral, but also because, for me anyways, the is LJ's first fuck up. 

You can't judge a person according to their first major fuck up. They will learn from the experience I believe. Also, they were being pressured into doing something by a group of people who don't seem to want to compromise, which can be stressful. Also, considering that LJ doesn't have a number of workers equivalent to the number of journals, a lot of them friend locked to boot, deleting journals who listed bad things in their description was the fastest and easiest way to do something to get that charity group to shut up.

Instoring a comission to verify the contents of journals would have taken too much time and money, and i'm sure that charity group would not have settled for just "We'll look into it." To Lj's defense, I believe, since they only suspended the accounts and did not delete them, they did that in order to reduce the number of communities to verify and will re-activate those who do not present a threat.

In Lj's defense, they were pressuring into acting immediatly by a rather extremist group that doesn't seem to understand how much time and money is required to eradicate "evil" from the web. Several charity organisations do nothing BUT that, and they still only deleted maybe 1% of "evil" after 5 or so years of service. THis charity group, warriors of innocence" wanted results NOW and this was the only way LJ could do anything in a short term way. After LJ did that, the "Warriors of innocence" denied they asked LJ to do any massive shut downs. It's true, they wanted LJ to target specific communities, but they wanted it now. Hence, nobody WANTED what happened, but at the time, it was the better solution.

As mentionned before, the journals are not yet deleted, so the suspended journals can be returned.

I agree that LJ handled this poorly, obviously. It was a very rookie move. THey were probably afraid "WArriors of Innocence" where going to go to the press with this... (Check out the catchy line to hook journalists: LJ protects bad nasty icky people.) and I understand WHY they would be afraid of that, since LJ hosts a myriad of human rights and religious communities.

I'm gonna stick with the panels, and I think people should stick to their journals too. If people bail at the first offense, how can you make a website like this better? It is after all, our participation that will increase it's perfection. If anything, jumping to payed blogs will only increase the protection that icky people have since paid account can not be so freely monitored and suspended. All in all, LJ did piss off a lot of people, but if they return the innocent journals to their users, and managed to capture just one person who was doing a child wrong, it was worth it.

This is my personal opinion. I took the time to read everything people posted up, and I have come to understand it's a big misunderstanding. Therefore, I will give LJ a chance. However, next time, I might not be so forgiving. I AM a customer after all...

-secondlina