Things are getting a little tight in San Francisco.  Livejournal Inc., previously owned by Six Apart, before that owned by Brad Fitzpatrick, now in possession of Russian company SUP, has been gearing up some major changes for the site.  Last week, keen-eyed observers found out that Basic accounts (the no-frills unpaid accounts with no ads) were about to become artifacts.  Users with accounts prior to March 13th could keep or scale back down to Basic, but all new accounts created after that time default to Plus, with an option on Paid.  (Plus accounts are still free, but ads run in the margins much like competitor sites MySpace and Facebook.  Paid accounts are exactly what you think they are.)  With no official notification to current users that this was going to be the case, Livejournal users once again applied excrement to fan and hit "High."

Then came this past weekend.  Again, sharp-eyed users noticed a problem.  This time, certain words were no longer showing up in the site's "Most Popular Interests" list.  Among the missing interests: "depression," "bisexuality," "faeries," and "fanfiction."  The interests in question appear to have been blocked after 2/28/08, according to one user's cache of the data.

Firefox News contacted SUP's corporate office and were told by a spokesperson: "Regarding the possible censorship of certain lists, this appears to be a technical issue.  LJ is trying to fix this at the moment."  As of this writing (and checked as of earlier today) those interests have been restored to the list.  No reason was given from SUP as to the nature of the technical problem, leading some to speculate that an ad-monitoring program may have been the culprit; no use putting ads on that page if the program grabs the wrong keywords, after all.

However, despite the fix, users are displeased.  Livejournal users are an eccentric, cantankerous lot, not quite as mainstream as MySpace or Facebook users (though of course, many of us have accounts there as well).  Many Livejournal users were lured onto the site by friends who told us: "It's free.  You don't even need to have ads on your page," and we liked the place so much we stayed and paid for more.  (I have had a Permanent account since 2005.)  The viral nature of LJ means it's not the Web 2.0 goldmine that competing sites might be, but it also means LJ has a unique character.  It's an ongoing conversation rather than an ad-laden destination, and the users who have been here a while like it that way.

During previous debacles (Nipplegate, Strikethrough, etc.) users have shown their displeasure in visible fashions.  Nipplegate (aka LJ suddenly decided breastfeeding icons were obscene) prompted users to delete their journals for a day.  Strikethrough saw an exodus of users to other journaling sites.  This time, the planned protest is a content outage.  On March 21st, for twenty-four hours (midnight to midnight GMT), many LJ users are going to simply not post, not comment, and not access the site.  Since the previous protests appeared to have little effect on LJ's policies (other than to convince Six Apart to sell the whole thing off and get rid of the troublemakers from within and without) this will likely be symbolic at best.  Nevertheless, we wish the protesters the best of luck.

The purchase of Livejournal by a Russian-owned company raised questions at the time of SUP's commitment to LJ's long-standing relationship with its user community, for good and ill.  The recent decision to drop the ad-free Basic account is "a business decision. It is, emphatically."  It may however be a poor business decision, one made in the hopes of making a fast buck off the content provided by the users without understanding the background of those users' relationship with the site.  The removal, for whatever reason, of possibly controversial interests gives users good reason to worry that we are not wanted on a site we helped make so popular.  The restoration of those interests, allowing us our thoughts on yaoi once more, does not immediately restore our faith in the company, especially with the clandestine removal of the primary way in which most of us first came to the site (and then brought our friends).

In short, Livejournal users no longer feel like customers, but product, and that's bad business all around.