azurelunatic | LJ meta, planned

LJ meta, planned

So, if there were to be a "care and feeding of the LJ user" document written for actual LJ higher-ups, what sort of things should go in it?

For starters: you're going to want as low a bullshit content as is practical (for no company, especially no company involved in IT amirite is going to be operating without a certain level of bullshit). LJ users, the ones that make themselves known, feel like they should be treated more like stockholders, entirely possibly because they are the creators of the content that fuels the whole shebang, see

synecdochic's excellent treatise on advertising in social media and how it can go sour fast. Except unlike stockholders, LJ users collectively have the spare time to shred any and every public statement to pieces, spot logical inconsistencies, and generally fling cat macros (and other forms of unhappiness) if displeased. (Because, seriously, we write for fun. If we feel something endangers our fun...)

LJ users operate on LJ time, not on business time. Overnight is enough time for five tabloids to get involved, including Slashdot, The Register, and the Valley Wag.

Since LJ users act like stockholders, don't present something as a fiat unless you're prepared to stand hard on it. Instead, stand pretty firmly in a spot you think you probably won't have to or want to back down from, but have some room for negotiating.

This one is going to take at least a week of hacking on and brainstorming, maybe more of polishing.

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Hysterically dead on. Especially the part about LJers and spare time. And the inevitable involvement of upstanding media such as Slashdot and Valley Wag.

What am I missing?

Hm. Why it's a bad thing to spring major, negative changes right at the start of a holiday weekend when all the college students just got out and the Best Pirate Movie EVAR!!! has just been released?

And why a mundane in his fifties just should not even try to defend said actions against fangirls who not only have infinite free time, but can even find out your home phone number, even if it's not listed?

And then there's why getting the whole thing written up for F_W (more than once) is Not A Good Thing...

My biggest beef was the total lack of any sort of social training. A degree in Management may make a person well qualified to run a company, but not to disperse an angry mob with lit torches and pitchforks. The person who is the spokesperson needs to have some serious background in sociology and crowd management. And the folk behind said person need to not let themselves become the puppets of microscopically small splinter extremist religious wackos. Yes, there was a problem, but kneejerk reactions won't solve anything, they just muddy the waters.

To do that sort of ugly job, it would have been better to properly learn social engineering, and then used that. That always works so much better than brute force, and with fewer casualties among the bystanders. Or among one's own ranks.

OK. So. Any major thing AT ALL is to be undertaken NOT ON A FRIDAY, and oh fucking NOT right during time when whole bunches of people are on vacation.

barakb25 is approximately the lead standard that LJ management should avoid emulating. Period.

The only way I can contemplate that time period without feeling gut-punched is to remember that it's all over now. Or, rather, I still feel gut-punched, and I just don't wind up crying. And I was only on the sidelines.

Negative changes shouldn't be released right at the start of a weekend, in general. More time for immediate damage control is key.

And announce your changes BEFORE you make them. No matter how wonderful you think they are, if there's a flaw you want it found before you're committed. Trust me.

Management versus userbase is never a good conflict. Ever.

If the Abuse Prevention Team says something is a profoundly bad idea, bring stuff to a screeching halt right then and there.

If on the other hand there's someone in management who you're trying to get rid of, shove them out and have them make news-posts on unpopular topics, without backup, with comments turned on. They'll be considering quitting by page 3, and will have handed in their resignation by page 10.

Yep. Dot on. And he did. He simply couldn't stand the heat.

I don't necessarily think it was a conscious decision, though.

And it will do hell for PR.

Not by him, he was too stupid when it came to people to figure it out. Not by fandom, they were simply too enraged, and when the target presented itself, they landed on it hard. It was a complete clusterfuck, a bad alignment of the stars that showed some folk simply could not be relied on to make good business decisions.

A degree in management can mean nothing more than the ability to maneuver oneself into a class team with a couple of hard-working classmates and avoid doing any work at all. I've worked with a couple such. There's a difference--and I don't think 6A ever understood this -- between a community and a commodity.

btw, if anyone's not looking close at spyware -- did you know 6A is still loading cookies through LJ?

Ask in Support if you're concerned about that one; I know that at this time, 6A engineers are still helping maintain some LJ stuff, even if 6A management isn't playing with LJ. I'm not sure who-all is responsible for the ads at this point in time, since I'm strictly volunteer and don't even wind up doing much support in ad-related areas.

Hm. I just checked my current cookies, and the one that appears to be from 6apart is...the cookie for Friendster. Intriguing.

I do know that 6A still handles LJ's advertising, but I'm not sure if those cookies are related.

That would make sense. Possibly I'm not seeing those cookies because I'm a permanent member? And have certain things blocked using NoScript in Firefox?

Probably? Also, logged-out pages show ads, so if you're never logged out, you won't get cookies set either AFAIK.

Various places give actual courses in Public Relations. Take one. Take several! Mostly take your users seriously. It's amazing what trouble you can avoid simply by taking the time to treat the people you deal with as... you know... people.

Ya think?

Mostly what we want to do is to be able to continue to post in peace. However, we're hyper-aware that decisions from the management can have a direct effect upon whether or not we can post in peace, so we tend to micro-manage our managers a bit, to make sure that anything bad we can see coming down the pipeline gets stopped before it blows up. (This causes its own set of problems.)

LJ started out as Brad. Then Brad made it open-source, so any and every random dev who happened to be using it could chime in, identify a problem, make a case for the problem being fixed, and submit a patch.

That open-source mentality has been preserved and communicated to the wider vocal portion of the userbase. Unfortunately, not all of them have the technical know-how to submit a patch, but are quite free with the identification of problems and the case for the problem being fixed. There's some general outlining of how the problem should be fixed, but there's a reason that the "plans for implementation" field got taken off the suggestions form: when all the "plans for implementation" tended to be "I dunno, that's for the developers to work out."

Most userbase cat-macroing could probably be responded to with "And what are your plans for fixing it?" alternated with "And what *about* it sucks?" until the responses either become coherent or circular.

It may be beneficial to distinguish between "LJ time" as experienced by users and "LJ time" as in "LJ-soon".

Oh yes.

Someone who uses LJ heavily is probably going to subconsciously think of the timeframe that they would use if they put up a post and got the reaction that some of the cracktastically drama-filled news-posts have gotten. How long does it take to write up an addendum to the post to address the top complaint about it? Often, not more than fifteen minutes or an hour or so. How long does it take to put up a second post with more information and a more well-thought-out position? No more than 24 hours, often, no more than 8-10.

8-10 hours from first serious complaint is a long timeframe, in which one can be assumed to be incommunicado due to a) work, or b) sleep. 16-20 hours is a timeframe that gives ample room for both. 24 hours, and you're back to the original time of complaint, and well past the original time of posting, and you've had time to wake up, go to work, get home from work, have a sandwich, check your email, see the explosion, and realize that you had better do something about it.

Given that LJ *is* work for LJ staff, LJ's timeframe gets shortened, because there's no excuse about being at work and getting fired for looking at such stuff at work. Also, since volunteers are active around the clock, and assorted of LJ's staff work idiosyncratic shifts, the timeframe is not necessarily going to be expected to adhere to a California business clock. If it's noon California time the day after a major incident, the userbase is expecting at least a "please stand by while we pull our pants back up" post.

Response to a technical emergency is expected to be even faster. If the site is down for five minutes, someone will notice. If the site is down for ten, people will want to know why. If the site is down for half an hour, emergency backup journals will be activated.

Hee hee, emergency backup journals.

This is a good discussion about timeframes. One thing though, is that while some of LJ's staff may work idiosyncratic shifts, I'm not sure that the management (the people who would be writing followup posts) are the same people who have unorthodox hours. I could be wrong on this because IANALJS and all, but I still think a California business clock is most applicable for a timeframe for expecting posts. A thing that users in general don't seem to get is that while yes, it would be good to address concerns right away, sometimes it takes lots of meetings to figure out what face to put on things, and that can take time.

On a different note, there's also the "LJ-soon" of feature implementation (which I'm sure you're familiar with from the

suggestions end of things), and although it's not necessarily pertinent to the "how to handle a dramabomb" post, it's still definitely important to lay out, because when

news says that a feature is going to be implemented "in the future", it would be so nice to have people understand that this may be the rather distant future.

Oh, I'm sure that LJ managers do work orthodox hours. It's just that public perception is of LJ as a 24-hour type operation. But that's a good thing to hack out.

Public perception is that when it's a feature that the userbase wants, it'll be implemented sometime from years to never, but when it's a new and sparkliesparklie feature that the MySpace demographic abuses, it's RIGHT THERE ZOMG, no matter how much time and forethought was actually put into its implementation. They'll have been looking at it from the back end, so they'll have a real sense of its scale, but from the user perspective, it just happens, poof.

Not sure if there's a cure for that one, but one of them might be Comments From

marta in

news giving the actual development time, now that it's out and can be talked about.

Granted, there is shit that will get priority and shit that will not, but there's a huge perception that sparkly happens overnight and practical does not.

I suppose I have one. Beginning this past January, I started simulcasting my account to another, for a long list of reasons (http://vakkotaur.livejournal.com/427791.html). Even though the "backup" has problems, it has a couple big advantages: while it has fewer features than LJ, it also has fewer misfeatures (snap, anyone?) and the lines of communication are more open or at least seem so. If the whole site is down, there is still a Twitter account to say what's going on (about the only good use I've seen for Twitter so far). As the site owner says, a bit bewildered by all the positive comments he gets even when thing hit the fan, "Good customer service is just honesty."

And I quite agree about the timing issue. I know that people work on normal work schedules, but I am still reminded of how the X.25 mail protocol was derisively described as being "Same-day service in a microsecond world." Ouch.

You may want to add something about not learning selectively from others' mistakes. Ie, restricting it to "how can we do a better snow job than they did" is missing the point entirely. (You may be able to borrow stuff from http://pauamma.livejournal.com/83097.html. If so, feel free.)

Yeah. And sugar-coating bad news is probably not very good either. Some "And this may suck" is the sort of blunt honesty that we got to expect from Brad. Granted, we do not miss Brad's occasional blunt asshole moments.

rahaeli least of all, I think.

Oo. Good letter. Very good points, especially about the LJ advisory board.

Thank you.

People making business decisions about LJ should regularly and continually use LJ at least one hour a week, every week. It doesn't have to cover all of the use cases for LJ that there are out there, oh no, because there are probably literally a billion, but in just poking around LJ, even if it is the same thing day in and day out, you will gradually become more attuned to the subtle hum of the userbase as we go about our business.

If you're on LJ already for more than just business reasons, you know what I'm talking about. If you're not, go add a comic feed or two, go check out a community that caters to your interests, go read a few journal entries that are heavily linked, help contribute to dragging down the cluster upon which

ohnotheydidnt resides (and then get out while you still have your sanity if you don't like celebrity gossip). Find a journal at random. Find someone whose writing you absolutely love. Find someone whose journal is *not* full of quizzes. Find someone whose style makes your eyes bleed. Find someone whose style you want to steal. Find someone whose content appalls you (for its content, rather than its presentation). Interest-surf. Play profile-surfing where you start out from a random journal and see if you can get back to places you recognize by only clicking on links to the profiles of other users. (Using one of the default communities is cheating.) Cruise by

the_lj_herald. Find a cat macro you like in

news comments. Cruise through http://www.livejournal.com/support/help.bml (yes, read the docs at some point). Poke around in the journals you find in http://www.livejournal.com/support/highscores.bml, because these are the people who help explain how the site works. Management is keeping the lights on by keeping the power turned on. Engineering is making sure that the lightbulbs that burn out get replaced. Development is putting in new fixtures where needed, replacing those clamped-on construction lamps, and trying to make it so people can't burn their fingers as much, or accidentally take out a lamp with a beachball. Support makes sure that everyone knows where the lightswitch is, and how to find a flashlight and keep out of the glass if something goes wrong. And then sometimes your users are going to just sit there in the dark...

You can easily kill ten to fifteen minutes a day just poking around on LJ. That experience will do you good when you actually go to make decisions about it -- you'll have at least a little bit of a feeling for the people who choose to be on LJ over any other platform, and you'll run into some of the same daily annoyances. Some of the best improvements to LJ come from some developers stubbing their toes on that one thing that has always driven them crazy, and finally getting mad enough to write a patch to fix it.

If you're going to resent the userbase or any part of the userbase, don't do it in public, and don't address that part of the userbase. Don't blow off steam under your own name; don't blow off steam under a sockpuppet in public. You may not get caught, but if you do, the consequences can be really ugly and have long-lasting consequences for LJ.

People are still mad at LJ, deeply and personally, for the actions of people who have since not let the door hit them on the ass on their way out, over a year ago. Some people have forgotten, some people have let it slide, some people are still cautious and alert and watching, and some people are still so hurt and angry that they're still lashing out over it. For you sports enthusiasts, imagine if your favorite team made it to the absolute final game of whatever major tournament, and then some absolutely blind game official made some absolutely cracked-out bad call, so bad you think they were smoking mummified squirrels in the locker room before the game. As a direct result of this, your favorite team has lost the game, and the tournament. It's a year later. Maybe it doesn't haunt you every day. But when you see that god-damned official, have you forgotten what they did there?

The high-traffic parts of LJ are a small city. You will be crossing and recrossing paths with some of the most vocal, so first (and second, and third) impressions do count.

Use your journal in addition to hanging out on LJ. Pick a userpic. Have fun and show some of your safe-for-work but not entirely professionally related userpics. People relate better when they know, for example, that someone avidly watches Stargate in addition to wearing great big stompy boots, or someone is a member of the ACLU in addition to whacking code, or likes bunnies in addition to loving servers maybe a little too much.

Post title to be, most likely, "Turn off the radio; turn off the lights."

"There will always be wank" might be good to state flat out. It's practically one of the guiding principles of the site. ("You're better off minimizing your involvement" as a corollary, maybe.)

Friended you, mostly bc of this post (thru metafandom), since it's interesting and intelligent. I'm sure I've seen you around before, don't know where, but apparently no negative associations ; )

LW. :D

Right! And perhaps the Bujold mailing list, though I haven't hung out there in at least a couple of years, and I used a different handle then anyway.

Several years, ditto. Joanie Laurel/Azz-the-Younger

Well, nice to see you again! : )

... Really, when it comes down to it, LJ users want to know that we're being managed not by a bunch of suits who are going to take away our playground and make things Not Fun Anymore, but by people who are LJ users themselves, dig what we're doing here, and will do their best to keep beer bottles out of the sand and unbroken, beer in the cooler where it belongs, and are not averse to kicking back, enjoying a Cold One, and watching the kids run around and scream and throw sand at each other and play.

That's all.

We want to be for the users, by the users, and we also want those in charge to have competent business and technical sense. We're used to the competent technical sense, and we're not used to dealing with someone who does cold hard financial calculating without telling us why they're doing things that are Not Fun.

While it's interesting and exciting for an LJ user vs. LJ Management dustup to make the industry papers, it's not fun for the users either.

the people who are enjoying it are either people who in general thrive in the middle of conflict situations (battle leaders) or those who like to foster conflict. However, there's such a long history of miscommunication and bad drama that it's not *as* hard as making peace in the Middle East, but anyone walking in had better be prepared that things are going to be really interesting in all directions. However, not all the goals are fundamentally incompatible, and almost everyone who's staying want LJ up and the lights on.

(there are those who'd rather see it razed, and since they're passionate, they'll still be found somewhere abouts.)

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LJ meta, planned

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Emergency backup journals

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