Platform 9 and 3/4

[steepholm]

It's odd, isn't it? Every time LJ does something stupid (and it does), people talk about how it's the end of the platform, and they're high-tailing it off to Dreamwidth, or wherever. Sometimes they go, sometimes they stay.

By contrast, since I've been on Facebook it's been clusterfuck after clusterfuck. The arrangement of newsfeeds, privacy settings, how adverts are placed, what names people are allowed to use, all these things are regularly interfered with without warning or apparent justification, other than the whim of Zuckerberg. Imagine if LJ decided that pictures of breastfeeding mothers weren't allowed! There'd be more flouncing than in a Victorian haberdasher's. Yet FB gets away with all this and more (as well as being a vastly inferior platform in terms of threading, linking, etc.), without - well, I wouldn't say without a grumble, but certainly without a mass exodus to MySpace. Strange, n'est-ce pas?

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"Imagine if LJ decided that pictures of breastfeeding mothers weren't allowed!"

You are being sarcastic, yes? LJ did exactly that, as part of a crackdown on "pornography", over ten years ago. This was, I think, before it became Russian. There was a lot of fuss, and many protesting changes of user icons. Somehow LJ survived.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I must have just missed that (or not noticed)!

[andrewducker]

Indeed. https://fanlore.org/wiki/Nipplegate

It was things like that which pushed a load of people I know to move to DW when it sprang up.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. Yes, that predates the beginning of my LJ by a few months.

Then again, that was more than 10 years ago, and as far as I know breastfeeding is still banned from FB.

[ethelmay]

It's generally allowed now (according to https://www.facebook.com/help/340974655932193?helpref=uf_permalink , anyway), but you occasionally hear of some hoohah about it.