assorted cheap shots at lj
January 9, 2009
Filed under dot com, free beer fundamentalists, global tags, kicking baby squirrels
You want to provide asylum for lj-ers? That’s beautiful, but be prepared for:
- complaints that they only get two icons
- outrage at the censoring of
pornartistic work with adult content from global tags - I have to PAY to have more than 35 people on my flist???!!!!1111!!!
- why does my picture of a nipple get rated X on Gravatar?
I think the corporate culture at wordpress.com is probably an even worse fit for your average LJ-er than Six Apart’s was; arbitrary suspensions are an everyday occurence, not a cause for scandal, and there’s more pressure to keep things PG purely because there are so many kids. I’ve had a couple of people on my flist attempt the switch to wordpress.com already, but they find there’s no community here and get tempted back to livejournal. I don’t know why there’s no sense of community here, since most of the architecture is in place. It’s an organic thing. It either happens or it doesn’t. And of course there’s always been this underlying sense that wordpress.com is a stepping stone to when you get your own real wordpress blog, and it’s hard to make people passionate about a site that they’re just passing through on their way to somewhere better.
I don’t write anything like as much about wordpress as I used to because I don’t care about it anymore. I don’t care about the new interface that will be gone the way of all the others come 3.0. I don’t care what struggling little minnows Automattic swallow on their way up, or what empty promises they made to tempt investors. I see the same old wars being fought over the GPL and I might still find them interesting if they were still about freedom and authority, but they’re not. They’re about money.
jumping the snark
August 22, 2008 
I imagine Six Apart draw considerable comfort from the fact that the Matt/Lloyd tag team still considers them enough of a threat to attack them at every opportunity. Far worse to be Blogger, and too crap to be scary.
But then, Blogger’s not in direct competition. Blogger’s already been bought.
I imagine I am not the only person drawing amusement from the spectacle of Automattic and Six Apart scrapping it out to be perceived as the the most valuable acquisition. I know I shouldn’t laugh. Recessions are not funny. I suppose I’m laughing at the pretence that it’s about who makes the better software. That ceased to be the point a long time ago. And when it was the point, there was a lot less bitterness and fear floating round.
Goddamn credit crunch. You make the snark so much more serious.
the mother of invention
July 28, 2008
Filed under dot com, free beer fundamentalists, kicking baby squirrels, pointy-headed fanatics, wank
Lloyd is sad, because the cool kids at Six Apart and OpenID are having some sort of open-source standards-inventing party and Automattic weren’t invited.
Well, maybe they remembered Matt’s reluctance to support Atom 1.0? Or took note of his failure to provide any specs for the WXR export format and assumed he wouldn’t be interested in their venture? Just a thought.
I kind of love how the fanboys in that thread protest that it doesn’t need a spec because it was only ever intended to be used for ferrying content between WP installations anyway. (Who would ever deviate from the One True Path and switch to another application?) It reminds me a lot of how Matt refused for years to include any export features at all, because he thought it was the sole responsibility of whichever tool you were adopting to get your data out of his software and into theirs. Database dumps were considered a perfectly adequate form of export until wordpress.com arrived; if this place had never been invented, WXR would not exist. It’s not a standard. It’s a makeshift solution to the problem of shifting data from .com blogs to .org installs, and nobody at Automattic believes in it enough, or cares enough about data portability, to bother polishing or promoting it.
I have little doubt that the MT export format is technically inferior to WXR (I wouldn’t know, my head’s not that pointy yet), but it became a de facto standard because they documented it and encouraged people to use it. Back in the day, someone wrote a nifty little program to export Diaryland entries in MT format, and I used it to import a year’s worth of posts into WordPress. That didn’t benefit Six Apart directly, but it certainly benefited me. I think that’s probably what they mean by openness.
bitchery in slugs
June 17, 2008
Filed under Akismet, bubble, dot com, free beer fundamentalists, kicking baby squirrels, speculation, wank
Isn’t it strange how when you write an article slagging off TypePad and praising WordPress you are inevitably ‘honest’ and ‘insightful’, ‘interesting’ and ‘eloquent’, and when somebody from Six Apart tries to make a counterargument they are ‘venomous’ and guilty of ‘falsehoods and misdirection’?
Sadly, my comment on Lloyd’s post is still languishing in moderation. I’m sure this is merely an oversight, since nobody would tell their readers ‘Please challenge me on my views!’ if they were going to censor dissenting comments. I’ll reproduce it here for now, and link to it when it’s published:
I don’t see that Anil’s any more abrasive in his defence than Matt is when people come out attacking WordPress. (That is, possibly a little too forthright, but hey, fanboys are annoying.)
For someone with ‘extensive experience of both platforms’, Michael seemed strangely confused about the distinction between wordpress.com and .org and TypePad and MT, attempting to draw direct comparisons between Automattic’s non-hosted software and Six Apart’s hosted service when it suited him, and switching back to comparing TypePad with wordpress.com when that fitted his argument better.
For example: he thinks TypePad makes it too difficult for people to add third-party widgets, conveniently forgetting that wordpress.com doesn’t let you add any third-party flash or javascript widgets at all. But he thinks it’s cool that wordpress.com won’t let you use Adsense, conveniently forgetting that wordpress.org has dozens of plugins which make it easy.
I’m afraid that by the point where he claimed the separation of WordPress and WordPress MU was ‘a different developmental strategy’ rather than a historical accident I’d lost all patience. WordPress MU isn’t a fork of WordPress; it’s a fellow fork of b2 that got swallowed up by its sibling. Incorporating multiblogs into core would have broken backward compatibility so much it was no longer an option. And it’s not for people who need to run a handful of blogs off a single installation, it’s a specialist tool for site admins who need a blogfarm. It would make more sense to assess it alongside the Livejournal open source code than to pit it against Movable Type. http://mu.wordpress.org makes this perfectly clear, but proselytising fanboys trying to push it as ‘the upgrade to the upgrade’ don’t do anyone any favours.
I left out how he’s praising the 2.5 interface when Matt has already pretty much acknowledged it was a failure. Or how he thinks monthly security upgrades are cool because they’re a ‘a testament to a vibrant developer community’, which comment alone constitutes the loopiest piece of fanboying since ‘the blogging market is c.l.o.s.e.d.’
But no. Mocking the fanboy is a cheap distraction. My point is how nasty things are getting now the market is contracting. I’m not talking about the consumer market so much; people are still starting new blogs, though in the current economic climate they’re going to be less willing to spend money on them and that’s not good for either company. I’m talking about getting more funding, or going public, or finding a parent company willing to take you under its wing and shield you from the hard times ahead. These things are not going to be as easy as they were a couple of years ago. You are competing for increasingly scarce resources. It’s easy to be nice to each other when things are going well, but these days it’s survival of the fittest, and the way these spats are conducted both sides seem about equally worried.
Which would be odd, if Six Apart really were the underdog; but they’ve stolen a march on Automattic by making their anti-spam service free to everyone. Short-term this shouldn’t make too much difference as most paid-up subscribers won’t be interested in switching till they’ve got their money’s worth, but long-term it threatens one of Automattic’s major revenue streams. That’s the real reason the gloves are off again.
And the accusations of being splog-ridden have evidently hit home because they’re, um, true. How could they not be? Akismet can’t hope to catch them all at sign-up and you’re relying wholly on volunteers to report the ones they happen to see. Plus, all reports have to be dealt with individually by support staff, who are generally sort of busy with support. At least they’ve blocked drmike’s wordpress.com account now so they won’t be getting any more of those pesky spam reports from him. That should help with the workload even if it doesn’t help with the splog situation.
mentioned in dispatches
priorities
April 7, 2008
Filed under bubble, design, dot com, forums, global tags, kicking baby squirrels, monkeys saying BOO!, wank
In the course of breaking everything else, they accidentally fixed global tags again. Obviously Matt fixed it as soon as he found out, gaming Google being so much more important than letting people upload images or check their spelling.
I think they will lose a few people over this dashboard thing. 150-post threads where staff do not bother responding are never good. You’d think they’d have put someone on firefighting duty, publically addressing people’s concerns and giving some vague impression that they listen to their users, even if that isn’t actually true. Clearly we are going with the SUP school of community management (’so what if a vocal minority of customers hate us? they can go cause trouble on someone else’s service’) rather than Six Apart’s (‘we’re so sorry we upset you! we love you! we’re listening! right up to the point we sell you out!’)
Fair enough. I mean, we all know they’re not going to listen to their users, so it would be disingenuous to pretend.
paradoxes are fun
March 13, 2008
Filed under Akismet, bananas, bubble, dot com, free beer fundamentalists, kicking baby squirrels, megalomania, wank
[This was going to be a comment on my last post, but it was getting so unwieldy I thought I'd promote it]
Well, Matt seems to have these brainstorms every so often. It tends to coincide with the party season. Or, apparently, major conferences. Hard to see what Toni and the Happiness Engineers (hey! they sound like a Fifties girl group!) could do about that, other than fit Matt’s laptop with some form of alarm that starts wailing and locks down the keyboard when he mentions validation, grammar, or his own general fantasticness for giving ‘his’ software away.
Also, not all the code on wordpress.com is GPL. Nor is all the code in Akismet. Six Apart understand better than anyone else that Automattic are a business, and that letting people have wp.com out of the box or disclosing Akismet’s inner workings to spammers would make no sense whatsoever. But it looks like you’re trying to hide the fact when you refuse to concede the truth of it. Owning up to closing some of your source for sound reasons is a lot more open and honest than encouraging the fanboys to believe that everything you do is 100% open when it’s not.
Paradoxes are fun. Embrace them.
The most interesting thing about this whole brouhaha is Matt’s overreaction. He clearly feels far more threatened by Six Apart than anyone would have suspected based on, well, the facts and figures; not to mention the psychological advantage of his current success being largely due to their earlier failure. They must be really happy. It would be very easy for them to spin this as Automattic falling apart in the face of a renewed challenge from an older company that has already made its mistakes and learned from them. Or as Matt being not quite ready for the cut and thrust of big business. I think drmike is probably right in saying that it’s Toni’s job to mentor Matt through this period and stop him getting wound up by the competition, but I’m not sure he actually has the authority to tell Matt not to do anything, CEO or no CEO.
In a year or two, people may look back on this spat, coinciding as it does with the delayed release of 2.5 and the brokenness of .com, and say it was the point that WordPress jumped the shark. Certainly I’d never seen so many discontented people on the .com forums before this week. No wonder Matt is freaking out.
glass house
Baby squirrel lulz. To be honest, I still found MT slow last time I tested it, and I think the lack of one-click installs is really hurting them, and as a livejournaller I’m still sort of bitter about the gulag thing, but I do think Anil’s snark is of a whole different class to Matt’s lame cracks about validation errors.
If Matt cares so much about XHTML then maybe wordpress.com could quit stripping the slashes from the <br /> tags in my widgets (no, I don’t like sprinkling linebreaks everywhere either, but I kind of want the spacing on my sidebar not to be screwed up). Validation, like punctuation, is always a glass house in which it is inadvisable to cast the first stone.
baby squirrels flee scary fangirls
Having plundered everything they could from its code and staff, Six Apart have offloaded the troublesome Livejournal onto some Russians. (The latest incident? Outrage over user flagging of mature content. You know, like wordpress.com has had for, like, ever.)
Let that be a warning to you, kiddies: whine too much and you’ll be sent to the gulag.
Yes, I can totally see why Six Apart felt the community was more trouble than it was worth, and it’s not like they were particularly commited to the site in the first place (I remember having to nag to get userpics accounted for in the Style Contest, which was really for MT/Typepad with LJ tagged on as an afterthought). But as an LJ user? Wow, I feel so unwanted. And, it goes without saying, I don’t trust SUP. I see even more ads and even less privacy in my LJ future.
Oh well, at least the guy who runs Insanejournal is happy. Every cloud…
you don’t know you’re born: a baby squirrels special
These days, I find 07refugees over at insanejournal a quicker way of keeping up with livejournal wank than wading through infinite cat macros at news, but this doesn’t stop me occasionally wishing to give the contributors a smack upside the head.
Oh noes! livejournal has sneakily turned on autopay so they can steal your moneys! OK, I want you to imagine this scenario: livejournal says they’re having a sale on paid accounts so they cost $10. When you get to the checkout they have this shady ‘credits’ system that lets you purchase $15 units only. So you buy the credits and — get this — they tell you they’re not giving you the extra $5 back because they ‘don’t do refunds’. That’s what stealing your money looks like. LJ know perfectly well they couldn’t get away with that kind of manoeuvre. Unfortunately, wordpress.com can.
(If I had a personal blog here, I’d have left there and then. As it is, the wank from that incident is worth $5. Also, of course, I’m never buying anything from them again, so ultimately they lost more than they gained.)
Oh noes! livejournal is screening comments on news! You think that’s censorship? Please. I can’t remember the last time I got a comment past the Great Firewall of Matt on our news blog.
Oh noes! livejournal is tracking visitors to your journal! Yeah, except livejournal is only tracking 5% of journals and has given you the option to opt out. Wanna see my footer?
I don’t seem to recall anyone telling me about that, let alone letting me turn it off. Not to mention the Google Analytics shit in the header.
_uacct = "UA-52447-2";_udn = "wordpress.com";
urchinTracker();
Oh noes! livejournal is inflicting snap previews on every link in your journal! Honey, wordpress.com was doing that months ago. And they didn’t even have the grace to make it an opt-in feature for existing users. We had to seek out the option to turn it off ourselves.
Oh noes! our ToS is vague and keeps changing and we don’t know what will get us deleted! and we is being censored from posting porns! Try not having a terms of service sometime. Then maybe try being hidden from all public listings if your content isn’t PG-13. Try blogging on a host where they can delete you without notice for having a link they don’t like the look of. Or a host where they rewrite the FAQ to allow them to requisition your username at any time without your permission. How do you like them apples?
Back on lj… Oh noes! livejournal won’t let me hide its stupid ugly navbar for evermore and never have to look at it again! At least they let you hide the navbar on your own journal. And if you can’t deal with their tasteful, grey, customisable creation then how would you like something fat and blue and Bloggery instead? (I take that back. Blogger also give you a choice of colours, and their blue is less visually offensive.) If I want to take the navbar off my blog that’s a) going to cost me money, because they charge you here to edit your CSS, and b) get my blog deleted.
And oh noes! livejournal reneged on their promise to never ever put ads on the site! Well, at least they told you the policy was changing. And, again, they gave you the option to opt out. We had ads implemented by stealth and they only owned up when a bunch of people informed them that the lack of ads was their favourite feature. Even now, the existence of ads is hidden away in the FAQ and right at the bottom of the ‘features’ page (and we had to lobby quite hard to get that much). Many people remain unaware of them, because Automattic are smart enough to show them only to non-logged-in users. As for opting out, you’d have to give them money. Yes, even if you’re already paying for other upgrades. And that’s an unofficial workaround which I can’t promise wouldn’t get your blog deleted. The official no-ads upgrade is vaporware.
Yes, livejournal gets a lot of stuff wrong, but guess which site I’m willing to trust with my personal blog? (Here’s a clue: the idea of random angst juxtaposed with compulsory ads and ugly navbars is of extremely limited appeal to me.)
