God damnit. I just read something on stinky's LJ that has left me pretty annoyed.

The bubble in social networking has burst, decisively. LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based arm of Sup, a Russian Internet startup, has cut 12 of 28 U.S. employees — and offered them no severance, we're told.

The quirky site, part blog and part social network, is best known for its users' weird obsessions — like the troublesome clique of Harry Potter erotica writers, whose outré tastes ran afoul of LiveJournal's efforts to comply with U.S. child-pornography laws. (Oddly, the site also gained a following in Russia, which led to its acquisition by Sup.) All that adds up to an environment even more distasteful to advertisers than the typical social site.

The company's product managers and engineers were laid off, leaving only a handful of finance and operations workers — which speaks to a website to be left on life support. Matt Berardo, a Yahoo executive hired on last summer, has also left.

You can find the rest of the article here but the major takehome points are all above. I think it's pretty clear that LJ's survival is iffy at best. I would say that it's almost certain that there will be no more improvements and the very best we can hope for is that it'll just die a slow stagnant death. At worst, someone will pull the plug within a year or so.

What a fucking pain in the ass. I wasn't all that certain that buying a permanent account on this site was a great idea to begin with and now it seems absolutely certain that I made a shitty decision. It seems that I won't even have had time to recoup my investment and I feel sorry for those poor schlubs who just bought perm accounts a month ago. They certainly got hosed.

Stinky's take on this info is that she's planning to jump ship before the whole thing capsizes anyway. I'm frankly not sure what to do. I'm not sure it's even worth blogging on if I had to start over at some new site. Hell, it's not like I have many people who read this crap as it is. Forced to start anew and I might as well make blog entries by talking to myself in the closet. Feh.

It's sad really. I always felt this site had gone to the rejects, swarming with emo teens, furries, and harry potter slash freaks but I never thought it'd actually get the plug pulled. I might actually miss it when it's all gone. We should probably all follow stinky's example and make some backup plans. LJ's going down the toilet.

There's been a lot of focus lately on female bloggers and whether or not they receive more threats of violence than male counterparts. The Washington Post had a story about a recent study that claimed that women received "25 times as many sexually explicit and malicious messages as males". Predictably, the response to this has broken down pretty closely along gender lines with women lighting bras on fire in sympathy and men telling them to grow a pair.

I spent some time thinking about it, wondering if women do receive more negative responses and in my experience, I don't think it's panned out in general. I've been on some pretty rough and tumble internet sites where you wouldn't believe some of the vitriolic exchanges and there dosen't seem to be tilt toward women when it comes to negatively. If anything, the more brutal and bloody exchanges are often between men. I do have little doubt that women almost certainly receive more sexually explicit attacks, at least from men, than men do from other men. For one, it's always an easy target for a salvo. What you find is that your goal in these 'net flame wars is to try to draw blood and you reach for whatever weapons you have at hand based on the info you have at hand. This leads, almost certainly, to people who are open about their race receiving more racist comments, people who are open about their religion receiving more bigoted anti-religious comments, fat people receiving more fatty fatty fat fat comments, etc. In order to draw blood, it has to relevant to the target.

I'm not exactly sure how this all plays out with more extreme death threats and the like. As I was reading Slate's commentary on the issue, I thought to myself that maybe my view was too skewed since for all the years I had been online and often tossing around verbal moltov's, I had never received one. It took me a few minutes to realize I was wrong. I think I've actually had at least half a dozen people I can specifically recall threaten me and probably dozens more besides. The difference is, I simply dismissed it out of hand and it barely even registered. It seems ridiculous to actually spend time worrying about what some anonymous nutjob says online. Besides, if you buy a gun, if and when they show up you can just shoot them in the face.

On a sidenote, if there were one blogger that I could hit in the face with a brick in a sock, it would be abyss2hope. It would just be out of general principle I think. She claims to be female, so maybe there's something to this after all.