Blogging Services Still Haven’t Stopped Sucking
I’ve been saying for years that blogging services suck. I said it in 2004 when LiveJournal destroyed a vintage erotica journal that I liked. I said it again in 2006, when, you guessed it, LiveJournal started threatening to suspend users for posting pictures of nipples.
Well, I’m saying it again.
Of course it will come as no surprise that I’m saying it — again — because our old friend LiveJournal (that outfit makes a wonderful bad example!) deleted a bunch of journals for posting dirty stories that management didn’t like.
“Our decision here was … based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what’s not. We have an awful broad range of discussions and topics and other things going on in LiveJournal, and we encourage other broad-ranging conversations on all sorts of topics. This was a specific case where we felt there was not a reason (for these journals to stay online).”
This is not a censorship issue (it’s their sandbox and their rules). This is not a rights issue. This is a no-brainer “poor stupid fuckers spent years of their lives writing their shit on a blog service that could, and did, turn them off and delete all their posts” issue.
“We felt there was not a reason for these journals to stay online.”
Why in the name of Odin’s enormous penis would you put your creative efforts at the mercy of someone who had the power to say that, and make it stick?
Dude, don’t do that. It hurts.
And it hurts to watch.
I’m telling you for the third time:
Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.
Aw, hell, I’m going to say it again for the kids on the short bus:
Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.
And this is for my slowest reader, the guy who is sounding out the words with his finger touching the computer screen, which he can’t see very well because of all the pizza sauce and popcorn butter that gets on there when he does that:
Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.
Are we clear?
Also, let me be clear: Livejournal is just the bad example here, not an especially bad service. All blogging services have the power to screw you over. The potential screwage is inherent in the nature of what they do.
Use your own domain. (Your registrar won’t care what you write.) Buy your own hosting. (Your host won’t care unless you post something that’s actually illegal.) Own your own shit. Don’t put yourself in the position to be messed with by somebody who can say “we felt there was not a reason” for your blog to be online.
There are other good reasons to own your own shit. We live in the era of the global microbrand. If you do anything creative, your brand identity is tied to your domain, the place where you publish all your creative stuff.
What? You don’t have a domain? You’re still putting all your shit up on a domain somebody else owns? You’re using your stuff to help them build their brand? WTF, HAVE YOU NOT BEEN LISTENING TO ME?
OK, I’m done ranting for comic effect. But I’m not kidding about this stuff. Blogging services still suck. Get your own domain. Control your own shit. Build your own brand, for you. And own it. For you.
You’ll thank me later.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=1952
What if, like me, you have a high traffic blog, known at a particular (free blog site, like Blogger) address for over three years? What if all your hundreds of linkers blogroll you at the address you’ve had for over three years? What if some annoying domain-sitters bought up the most common domains of your ‘brand’ for them to sell advertising off, leaving you unable to host your ‘brand’ elsewhere? What do you do? Seriously, what?
I feel like I’m stuck where I am and I do of course worry about Blogger going under/deleting content. I’ve saved my 450+ blog posts offline, links and all, but it would cause me a lot of grief were I to lose my blog as it stands. It’s not perfect, not hosting my own blog, but given my circumstances, I feel I have little choice but to stick with Blogger…
Well, first I hope you won’t mind my pointing out that the time to have avoided this predicament was before you got to be a high traffic blog with a brand worth domain-squatting. Pity you didn’t see my advice back in 2004. The time to avoid this sort of expensive mistake is when you’re still small and it’s still cheap and easy to fix. Which is why I’m ranting so loudly on the subject, and thank you for reinforcing my point.
Now, what are your options? You’re doing the right thing by keeping good backups offline; that’s a good start that minimizes your losses if-and-when Blogger goes crazy and screws you over.
Once you’ve got a brand built on somebody else’s server, it’s obviously going to hurt to make a mid-course correction. You *could* get the best available domain, forward the traffic from Blogger, re-install all your archives in a nice WordPress setup, and forge boldly forward, but you’d lose a big chunk of your installed base of links and traffic, no avoiding it. That’s not very palatable.
To improve the domain part of the equation, you could get a domain monitoring service and start monitoring the squatted domains you could live with using. Your hope would be that the squatters find them insufficiently profitable and let one or more of the domains lapse, whereupon you could snatch them up. And then it’s time for your big transition.
The transition, however, is still going to suck.
That said, I think in your position I’d still bite the bullet and make the jump. Why? Because I take a very long view. You’re going to have to do it someday. Unless you think the blogger service in its current form is going to outlast your desire to maintain your blog? It’s a free service provided by a company in a dynamic and unstable industry, I see that as a shaky bet.
So, which do you choose? A painful and difficult and imperfect — but planned — migration at a time of your choosing? Or a transition that’s every bit as difficult, or worse, at an inconvenient time when you had other things going on in your life and no opportunity to warn all your link partners and readers? In other words, do it now or do it when Blogger coughs up a lung unexpectedly?
No good options once you get strongly committed to a brand you built on somebody else’s server. But at least you could stop building their brand for them and get a start (three years too late, and at the price of a lot of your hard work) at building your brand for you.
Hope this doesn’t sound flip or unsympathetic, because nothing could be further from the truth. You’re in a tough spot and there’s no way out that isn’t going to hurt. Because blogging services suck.
You know, I had to seriously question what to put down as my website. I used to put down my LJ without question. Now I’m not so sure.
I have an MT blog (ironic) but I use LJ. The easy community setting, with friends list and simple navigation to find other people with similar interests, made it just simpler to use LJ than the extra work needed to do my own blog. Besides, it’s easier to get readers on LJ, everyone does it the same way. I don’t read blogs on their own, I read them through the syndicated feed on LJ. That’s how I read this blog, even. If it wasn’t for that, I probably wouldn’t bother. I don’t have time to look at a dozen different sites to read different blogs to see if they have new posts.
Yes, I’m lazy.
None of my fiction will go up on LJ again, though, I’ll use my MT blog for that. People can read it or not, screw it.
This whole incident is making me rethink how I go about blogging online, though, and maybe I’ll be using my MT blog just a little bit more now.
I have to agree with Eros. I moved from Blogger to TypePad, then from TypePad to my own domain. Sure, there are some cool community features and widgets that I lost, but the level of control I have over my work and the way my site looks is priceless.
If you have devoted readership, all you need to do is to put a link from your old site to your new domain and they will follow.
I still get traffic from my old pages–not huge amounts, but enough to tell me that the method is working.
This particular incident is a case of a stupid mistake that was handled very badly and thus got out of control. It would probably never have made front page news if it hadn’t involved pornish_pixies. LJ has restored the journals involved.
Your basic point still stands, of course. I keep my blog on my own domain. But this wasn’t a case of LJ going after porn, it was them trying (really, REALLY clumsily and ineffectively) to get rid of blogs that actively encouraged child molestation. They certainly weren’t targetting porn – among the other mistakenly suspended accounts were assault survivors’ support groups, discussion of Nabokov’s Lolita, and a fashion community. They were false positives because they listed things like ‘lolita’ and ‘rape’ in their ‘interests’. By the looks of it LJ didn’t even go to check them themselves and hadn’t a clue what was actually in the journals/communities.
So yes, things like this are a very good reason to not trust anyone else with your blog. But no, they’re not going after the porn… and I’ll be *very* surprised if they ever do. It would certainly signal the destruction of LJ as we know it.
Also, plenty of people have very low traffic blogs that are only intended for people they know (whether irl or only online). For those people, LJ or a similar service makes by far the most sense. They have surprisingly good (if not flawless) control over who can see which posts, many people will already have accounts, the friends page is wonderful and there’s a whole host of other features that you just don’t get elsewhere.
For a blog that has a ‘brand’, makes money, has high traffic etc LJ is an utterly crap option, for reasons I could write a number of pages on. But it’s a question of the right tool for the job rather than that such services are never a good idea.
S, the reason I didn’t say much about *what* LiveJournal was going after this time is that it doesn’t matter. In going after it, they were remarkably honest that they were simply getting rid of stuff they didn’t think should be online (for whatever reason; the reason doesn’t matter).
And that’s the problem with blogging services. They get to decide what should be on their sites, and that makes them a bad deal for their customers (at any price, including free).
As always, I have a PayPal button available for anyone who’d like to enable me to finance my own domain…so far, I’ve raised a grand total of no dollars or cents, so I remain upon the Blogspot teat.
*eep*
I’m really glad I switched to my own domain this past weekend so that Bacchus’ spanking didn’t apply to me.
Thought it could be fun to be spanked by Bacchus.
Girl, I feel your pain. Someone else has “my” proper site and is sitting on it. My links have gone to shit. Oh well. They’ll come back, maybe.
:)
Brutha, you are so incredibly right. That’s why I run my own domain, and why I’ve helped friends get off blog services and onto thier own domains. The list of things wrong with LJ, and the moronic ‘why’ is not the point (interesting,but not the point). The point is, you’re at the mercy of a commercial service that can and will decide what you can and can’t say.
Master of Your Own Domain, as the saying goes.
So, what you’re trying to say is: if I’m doing something on the Internet, and it’s worth doing (IMHO), I should do it on my own domain that I control . . . right?
OBIntelligent Comment: longtime LJ user, likewise annoyed at their periodic eruptions of idiocy and paranoia, but usually just as I’m getting on my high horse I’m struck by a thought: Their service; their equipment; their rules.
BTW, do you know a good way to get pizza sauce and popcorn butter off a monitor?
LJ have started restoring some of the LJs but, yeah, the damage to their rep has pretty much already been done.
I’m on LJ, & watched the whole thing unfold… it sucked hard, & the censorship pissed a lot of people off, but LJ is doing the right thing now, sorta. They’re un-suspending journals all over the place.
Meanwhile… vintage_sex is back, I think.
Their service; their equipment; their rules.
Yup. No argument.
That’s why they suck.
Stephanie, nope, I just went and looked. Vintage_sex is still gone from the open internet, judging by this at the bottom of the page: “Now that vintage_sex is a moderated community, you MUST be a member to view entries.”
If a thing can’t be linked to for the enjoyment of the broader internet community, it’s not really on the internet, however useful it may be to members of the local clique.
Yep Bacchus I was nitpicking a couple of your sentences, not disagreeing with your main point :)
I agree with everything you said
I registered my domains shortly after I set up my Blogspot account.
Who knew the blog would take off the way it has?
I’m moving to the new domain in the next 2 months and the traffic will be forwarded from Blogger.
I know I should have done it earlier but life trumps blogging.
Please help! ;)
I am entirely in agreement with you here on this and have considered buying a domain name, but then how do you get the pages themselves set up? I’m not very technically oriented.
I looked at squarespace yesterday, because it seemed like they had a really good solution, but they don’t allow sexual content on the sites they host and for me that’s really the whole point of why I’m moving.
If I’m putting erotica out there, and I sometimes do – I don’t want anyone else deciding if it’s obscene or not.
So I do do ABSOLUTELY want to move because I believe ENTIRELY in free speech without censorship, but I don’t know how.
Advice? Pretty please? *bats eyelashes*
Gira