I just joined fandom_counts

[mamadeb]

And even while I was doing it, I was thinking how useless it could be.

Why? Because the vast majority of LJ users are still high school and college students using LJ as a social interaction network - same as fandom, but in much, much greater numbers. If we disappeared, LJ would notice. For a day or so. Because maybe the site would run a tad faster with all the communities gone. Maybe. But, see, I could be wrong, so I joined it.

Okay, I'm doing the math here. 13 million livejournals. I could be wrong, but a *generous* estimate for the fen here - 10K. That's 0.8% - and even if as much as half the ljs are actually not active or just puppets or comms (and LJ just did a purge, so who knows?) - that's 1.6% of the total.

We'll basically be showing LJ that we are essentially meaningless. Go US!

And I'm not convinced that putting notices in your userinfo will stop them from suspending your lj - assuming they even read the userinfo beyond the interests.

Question - have any survivors of child sexual abuse communities been deleted? I've heard rumors, but none of the posts that list suspended communities mention those. Because if they haven't, then it's not just interests, or maybe it's a combination of interests.

And, yeah, I did clean up my interests a little bit - I got rid of "slash", "yaoi" and "pretty boys." I also added "freedom of speech." And I archived my fiction journal.

Comments

[cyprinella]

I've run across one person clearly stating that they were an abuse survivor and their journal was deleted: http://cordelia-v.livejournal.com/188534.html?thread=2901622#t2901622 Other than that, there doesn't seem to be any substaniated examples of survivor comms yet. At least not linked through f_w although there could be something I can't read in the comments since the servers are so robust over there right now.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Nod. I saw her. This actually leads me to wonder if it *is* combinations of interests that does the trick - fannish plus triggers. Or fiction plus triggers, or *something*.

Otherwise, I'm completely at a loss.

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

It's nothing to do with fandom. The journals which have been deleted were selected by an outside group of fanatics based on interest searches. They did not complain about every journal that had incest, lolita, rape or paedophilia as a keyword, but combinations of the above interests plus general weirdness did seem to attract them. Among the deleted are at least one survivor, multiple RPG characters and a Spanish-language community for discussing the book, "Lolita". Most of the best collections of links are in innocence_jihad or liz_marcs.

They don't seem to be interested in plain old gay porn.

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

To the best of my knowledge slash and yaoi are not problematic--just anythign relating to rape or underaged sex. Wincest and Petrellicest seem to not bother the unwashed hordes, but incest does.

Putting a disclaimer in your journal profile WILL NOT prevent deletion or enable you to get a deleted account back. One of the deleted RPG character journals I lost had a MASSIVE disclaimer which I put there because creepy people were finding the journal and trying to friend it. In other words, I took steps to prevent the use of the interest search as a mechanims for creeps to find each other--I disclaimered the heck out of that journal. The other journal had less of a strong disclaimer because creepy people hadn't been trying to friend it, but it did have one. The disclaimers matter not a whit to LJ Abuse. Nor did my promise to remove all suspicious interests if they just let me have the journals back. They said that would make them liable if I did commit a crime (even though they knew I wouldn't, or at least said so.)

[prezzey.livejournal.com]

FYI, it's now over 12,000.

I think a sizable portion of LJ is fandom, especially the most active journals, but we'll see I guess. Of course there are huge heaps of inactive journals...

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

No. It's not.

A lot of people have more than one fannish journals, just as I do, and they're being encouraged to have those puppet journals also join fandom_counts, rendering it statistically meaningless.

[prezzey.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I follow. The point is the number of journals, not the number of users, isn't it? 13 million is also a figure for journals, there is no way of knowing how many users LJ has.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

I'll accept that.

I'll even postulate that a sizable percentage of those 13M journals are not being used.

But aren't we also telling LJ that we're tiny?

[prezzey.livejournal.com]

That depends on how large this thing eventually grows. Now it's over 13000. We'll see!

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Yeah. We will see.

[hannahsarah.livejournal.com]

They deleted >lj-user broi< and that makes me really sad. She was one of the best HP/slashfic writers ever. Her journal hasn't been active for a while, but I was keeping it as an archive so I could go back and re-read once and a while.

She is also a school teacher, so I suppose the combination of interests was what got LJ's attention.

Crappy. :-(

[amireal.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I mean, I agreed too (about the numbers) and then i went to their stats page.

It's more like 5 million USERS and of that a tiny percentage has updated in the last 30 days. Of that, an even SMALLER percentage are actually paid.

The comm is at nearly 30,000 and growing. I think it's a larger swath than people think.