Guerilla action

[unixronin]

Don't like 6Apart's new censorship system?  Think it's another ill-conceived attempt by 6Apart to jump the shark?

Flag it as offensive.  (I did.)  It's not our jobs to be the surrogate parents of every teenager with a LiveJournal account.

Hey, 6Apart?¹  Get a life and a clue.

[1]  ObBitminesMeme:  YOU SUCK!

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Um, no. It allows you to mark your entire journal as containing ill-defined "adult concepts" or "adult content", and allows other people to flag (and report) your posts and comments as offensive or otherwise "inappropriate". The subsequent action from Six Apart will doubtless be as opaque and arbitrary as their handling of all other abuse/complaint/dispute issues has been. The potential for abuse of this "feature" should be obvious at a glance. I confidently predict that the new LJ trolling will be to go randomly marking entries as offensive.

[arasirsul.livejournal.com]

I still don't get it. I already could report your journal, I just had to use email. If I click "flag", nothing changes about who gets to read your journal. If a bunch of people flag your journal, then they go look at it. Kinda like if a bunch of people emailed them.

Basically, they've added a widget so you can flag your own content (and why the heck should they have to define if you should feel like your content is adult?), and made it so that you click a link rather than send email to invoke the opaque and arbitrary policies they already had, which is, admittedly, not a bright idea because it means their "Abuse Team" will be subject to abuse of the new widget.

Basically, though, the real problem you seem to have, the opaque and arbitrary policies, aren't anything new. If they're so bad, what are you still doing here?

[anda.livejournal.com]

Because, if enough people report it, and their Abuse Team goes to look at it, the Abuse Team can force your post to be marked as Explicit Content (which is the "NC-17" level).

Things that aren't being mentioned by people, but I know because I read the comments:

You can only flag 5 items in any 24-hour period.
Only accounts active longer than 1 month can flag items.
If someone seems to be abusing the flag, the Abuse folks can set their flags to "don't count, ignore".

Other than that, I completely agree with you.

What I don't get is why anyone thinks that flagging their post about the Flagging Stuff as "offensive" will actually do anything. It's petty childishness, as far as I can tell.