in my grand tradition of coming late to parties

Actually, I've been at this party just about the whole time. The internets went splodey while I was at the optician's on Tuesday evening, but I've been watching the issue (and even discussing it, in some places) since then. I've just not been hollering.

I don't think history is ready to judge yet whether I've been right to remain calm or whether I'll ultimately wish I'd got more charged up about it. I continue to believe that the following things are true:

1. the Terms of Service are (probably by design) vague enough that in a disagreement about whether something should or shouldn't be removed, odds are decent the Provider will win (I don't mean book discussion groups, incidentally, although I bet I could in this instance; language like "or anything else that is offensive" is, you know, like not at all objective)
   
2. there is a difference between deletion and suspension, actually a two-pronged difference, and it's very important:
   • one prong has to do with the degree to which LJ/6A could cover its own legal ass if they could be shown to have manipulated users' genuinely actionable content, making themselves a co-publisher
     
   • the other prong has to do with the recoverability of users' content (offensive or otherwise), which is a major difference between this and what has happened to disappearing fanstuff in the past
3. it was incredibly stupid for the CEO of SixApart to use (or condone) the word "deleted" in the cNET interview when what he meant was "suspended"
   
4. that was not remotely the only incredibly stupid thing he and his staff did
   • for another example, see frankly the rest of his quotes in the cNET interview, which seem to lead to the conclusion that the TOS is worth approximately the paper it's written on
5. the apology in news is sincere in the following emotions (in ascending order of intensity):
   • regret
     
   • embarrassment
     
   • stark fear
6. the "too little, too late" charge doesn't really stick; the Little may turn out to be true, but the Late is really, I mean, from suspension to the news post was one business day. Even granting that (one hopes) people weren't keeping normal business hours out there during this fracas, we're talking about less than 48 hours. When you've already fucked up large, the first thing to do before you say anything is work out what in god's name you're going to say, so that you don't inadvertently make it worse.

   DONNA: I screwed up.
   JOSH: You THINK?!
   DONNA: What should I do?
   JOSH: Do nothing. Do absolutely nothing.

7. Brad may not have made this exact mistake, had he been here this week, but it is silly to suggest that he has never made nor would ever make mistakes similar in scope and reaction
   
8. there is a non-zero number of people who believe that fandom_counts' membership figure is The Reason for 6A's ultimate (see above) action. This despite the fact that rounding its current (as of 10:06a EDT) membership of 25,395 up to 25,500, and rounding LJ's total journals down to 13,000,000, the membership of fandom_counts comes to (rounding up again) .2% of the total membership of LJ.
   
9. the "freedom of speech"-in-the-interests movement has its heart in the right place, but misses the point rather. I know that you all know that, and did it as a way of making a Broader Point, because you are all reasonable adults and grasp the difference between LJ/6A and Congress (even "Congress" broadly construed to include state and local governments as well). But I also know that I'm maybe as little as one degree of separation from people who genuinely believe that the ACLU would be at all interested in hearing about this and defending those who have been Unjustly Silenced, etc. etc. Which leads me to a whole other series of thoughts about what people are learning in civics and history classes, but that's another subject for another day. I did, however, amend my interests, which had previously been blank, to include "farcical aquatic ceremonies" and "the violence inherent in the system".
   • I've also, separately, been reflecting lately that it's about time the Eddie Izzard quotes retired from my headers and whatnot, and this episode has made a Python-quote theme likely to be their successor.
10. it continues to be a mistake to ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently explained by stupidity; see #3, #4

I do, at this point, think we'll be fine. I've thought so all along, with degrees of confidence generally hovering around what I'd call 65%. I do have a GreatestJournal -- I'm darthfox over there too -- and I'll accept a JournalFen code if anyone's offering, but I don't have any real plans to decamp. (Also, I've got a permanent account and I don't buy vgifts, so I really have no economic cards to play against LJ/6A here.)

faith in logic: intact.

See?

there's one thing i still don't understand. (cue CLUE: "One thing?")

People have been talking about CEO Man's assertion w/r/t interests, and how it doesn't match up with reality.  He says:

Both in the instructions for profiles and in other places on the site we make it clear that interests listed should be evaluated within the context of “I like x”, “I’m in favor of x” or “I support x”.

In fact, as many, many (many) people have pointed out, the "other places" are unclear, and in the "instructions" for profiles the guidelines -- what I'd have been more likely to call "advice" -- the words "support" and "in favor of" do not appear.  The text is as follows:

Short single-word phrases are best.

Rule of thumb:  You should be able to put the interest in the sentence "I like _____".

When referring to nouns, use the plural form for consistency, e.g.: "I like DVDs" instead of "I like DVD".

GOOD Example:  biking, snow skiing, computers, dvds, mp3s, cheese

BAD Example:  I like lots of bands and watching movies and talking to friends and going to clubs.  That sort of stuff goes in your bio below.

Okay, this? to me? is advice -- instruction, even -- about style.  Short single-word phrases* are best, so don't give us complete sentences.  In fact, your interests want to be just the predicates of simple declarative sentences.  If you like DVDs, don't tell us "I like DVDs"; tell us "DVDs".

I cannot be the only person to whom it never even occurred to look at any of this as advice about content.  (In fact I know I'm not, because ellen_fremedon and I talked about it as we were leaving work today.)  It seems that BB/6A/LJ had in mind that the "instruction" "You should be able to put the interest in the sentence 'I like _____'." meant "Don't tell us about things you're interested in if you don't like or understand them, such as diabetes or wormhole physics."  Which makes that the one bit of content-related advice in a whole stack of style-related advice, so the fact that NOBODY ON THE INTERNETS made that assumption shouldn't have been all that surprising.  There has got to be someone in that office who writes better than BB does, who could have pointed out to him that One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other.  Unless it never occurred to any of them, either, because WHY ON EARTH would you restrict interests to only things a person liked -- which is where everyone else's argument comes in.

The fact that this is how both ellen_fremedon and I found ourselves objecting to that snippet of CEO Man's reasoning may, I suppose, be a professional hazard.

In other news, the glasses that I was ordering at the time all this went splodey? are now ready for me to pick up, apparently.  I like that.  Sort of a full-circle thing.  :-)  (And, hey, they said it would be about a week and it was two days, so total bonus.)

*whatever that means, to a layperson; I know what a single-word phrase is, but I also know that to most non-linguists a "phrase" is more or less defined as "a collection of words", so "single-word phrase" must sound a little oxymoronic -- and anyway, how long can a single-word phrase be, really?, so was there a need to specify "short"?  ... welcome to my mind.