Almost two years ago I posted my controversial opinion that blogging services suck, citing an incident where LiveJournal killed a vibrant vintage erotica resource and concluding:
Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.
I still feel this way. Latest evidence, from LiveJournal again: apparently they are threatening to suspend users who dare to display the dreaded nipple, even when it belongs to the Virgin Mary and is being suckled by none less holy than the Blessed Baby Jesus:
Picking to the bottom of a huge flapdoodle with many nuances, the bottom line is that LiveJournal recently changed a FAQ explaining its TOS; the TOS prohibits “inappropriate” imagery, and the FAQ change nerfed a “graphically sexual” interpretation of “inappropriate”, replacing it with a “nudity” interpretation. In short, the prudishness got kicked up several notches. Obviously, folks object to the idea that all nudity is inappropriate by definition, because it’s such a fundamentally silly and stupid idea.
LiveJournal owner Six Apart has issued the classic corporate non-apology, stating in effect (I’m paraphrasing, and not with sympathy) “We’re sorry our new no-nipple policy makes us look stupid and bad, but we’re really not stupid and bad, so we’re not sorry for doing stupid bad stuff to our users, and we’re gonna keep doing it, neener neener, thank you for your support.”
In the Making Light post cited above, a commenter offers up a potential explanation of the corporate business pressures that might be responsible for all this anti-nipple stupidity. He then concludes with a version of my point from two years ago:
But the one thing this whole debacle proves is, you should never trust a public corporation to hold your blog or social network, because they will always try to place the interests of their shareholders ahead of the desires of their customers.
Exactly. Get your own domain, and get it hosted by somebody smart who knows he’s selling bandwidth, and that you’re the customer. And if you want to show some nipple, make sure your host has customers who sell real pornography on their sites. I promise, a web host with customers selling Street Blowjobs or Cum Fiesta is just going to laugh like hell at anyone who emails to complain about your nipples, whether or not there’s a baby attached.
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