The first LiveJournal user from Russia signed up in But he was quickly followed by many more web-savvy Russian citizens. All the time. For a lot of Russian users, LiveJournal was an early-stage social network. LiveJournal had another advantage for Russian users. Its servers were located in the United States, California to be exact, placing them well outside the jurisdiction of the Russian state, a government that was not above censorship or soliciting corporations for private user data.
The strength of the community, coupled with its geographical location, made LiveJournal the place for Russian intellectuals, activists, and journalists.
It attracted activists like Alexei Navalny and Oleg Kashin to set up their own blogs, and became an uncensored scene of dissenting editorials, free-wheeling opinions and guerrilla journalism. Then things went mainstream.
The news was followed by a wave of outrage. Many feared that as the Russian election grew close, the government may step in and interrupt the service, or worse, use personal data against its users. But at the beginning, the opposite was true. For an idea of the greater landscape: Facebook was founded a year earlier in ; Twitter would follow in As early employee Janine Costanzo remembers, staff sentiment surrounding the acquisition was high.
Some hoped that Six Apart would be able to provide a robust roadmap for keeping the service alive for the long haul. Better yet, the capital infusion allowed the company to hire longtime volunteers like Costanzo and Hassan as full-time employees, which helped boost morale. Since your default icon was used in search indexing, the site-wide policy disallowed nudity on it, though it was fine elsewhere. The team asked the user to remove it—but instead of complying, the user decided to start reporting any nudity he saw on fellow user icons, many of which belonged to a pro-breastfeeding group that liked to exhibit their children breastfeeding as part of their icons.
The LiveJournal team recognized this behavior as malicious reporting, but they felt handcuffed by their own rules. Soon, the breastfeeding groups were asked to remove their icons as well, resulting in a national PR nightmare for Six Apart. At least one major activist group protested outside their offices.
They were used to selling to businesses, not dealing with the chaos that a direct userbase can bring Today, on Facebook or Twitter, everything is a form response, or an auto-response. But early on, we set the expectation that if you wrote in to us, you would get a personalized response.
It was like, are breasts OK? No, then, done. For instance, soon after Six Apart bought the company, a conveyor belt of project managers were brought on to try to harness the chaos of the company into something more profitable. There was no trust in either direction. That antagonism is really what doomed it. LiveJournal exodus seemed to be triggered in part by actions like the mass banning of several figures in the X-rated Harry Potter fanfiction community under pressure from religious groups ostensibly for writing erotic stories about underage characters.
And as incident gave way to incident and pressure began to mount, employees began to leave the company. Eventually, all US employees were laid off in January , and today LiveJournal continues on as a site run by Russians, for Russians. Feedback We've Added New Words! Word of the Day. Meanings Meanings. Examples Origin Usage.
What's hot. Where does LiveJournal come from? Anti-social Russians. Because of LiveJournal's unique combination of platform and social media, LiveJournal has a unique personality in different parts of the world. In fact every national community in every country is unique in its own way. Where a user in the United States might focus their attention on communities dedicated to topics from the popular to the esoteric, users in the U.
In Russia LiveJournal makes up the vast majority of the blogosphere, hosting over 80 of the top Russian blogs.
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