Let’s start with the tough question. A lot people are saying that your sale of Livejournal is a final admission that SixApart simply couldn’t manage the site properly. What do you say to that?

Oh, I completely agree. When we bought Livejournal we had a lot of great plans for the site, and we’ve pretty much failed to deliver on any of them.

Really? It’s not often we hear this kind of candor from a CEO. What happened?

I think we failed to grasp the complex, social aspects of the site.

Oh, who am I kidding? There are currently about one and a half million “active” users of Livejournal. Ninety-nine percent of them really don’t care what’s going on so long as the site stays up most of the time. Which it did, we're pretty proud of that.

The remaining one percent care. I mean they really care, even when they have only the slightest clue what they're caring about. And because Livejournal is supposedly a community site, every one of them feels that they hold some kind of magical part-ownership. Now one percent doesn’t sound like a big deal, but you try getting anything done while fifteen thousand people shout at you all at once.

It can’t have been that bad….

Don’t get me started. You know that embarrassing friend you have, the one who whenever anything happens they find some way to interpret it as a personal slight, as if the universe woke up this morning and thought “How am I going to completely screw Sharon over today?”

That’s Livejournal.

But…

Seriously. 98% of them were freeloaders who never gave us a cent. Every time we tried to get some kind of money back from our investment they were up in arms about how we were the worst kind of money-grabbing capitalist scum, defecating all over the supposed legacy of the Brad in Shining Armour. The other two percent, whenever we did anything that might benefit the free accounts, would scream even louder that they were sick of subsidising the freeloaders!

There was a lot of talk that SixApart was always more interested in its own social blogging platform, Vox, than Livejournal.

Guilty as charged. Do you blame us? Vox is just more fun. We can move stuff around, add features to it without running into a whining wall of stop energy. We can experiment! When we announce something new, people are actually excited about it. Can you believe that?

You must admit, though, you made some pretty big PR mistakes. The breast-feeding thing, for one, could have been handled much better

Oh Jesus. I thought that was a joke at first. I mean, they call themselves “lactivists” for fuck’s sake. Lactivists! How comfortable, complacent and privileged does your life have to be before the only thing you can think of to protest about is some guy looking at you weird when you get your tits out on a bus?

The whole lot of them go from site to site, posting pictures and waiting for some well-meaning prude to complain so they can unleash the hounds of hell. And they don’t even realise that the only reason they get any attention is because norks sell newspapers, and it gives some editor an excuse to put a big honking boob somewhere other than page three.

No, the only thing I regret about that mess was that we didn’t go with my first suggestion…

…your first suggestion?

Yeah. It was perfect. The next software update for Livejournal had a “bug” that would randomly crosspost items between the breast-feeding and child-free communities. It would have been marvellous. Unfortunately, we calculated that the total gravitational suck of all that concentrated self-righteousness might just cause the planet to collapse into a black hole.

Joking aside…

I was joking?

…joking aside, censorship on the Internet is an important issue.

Yes it is. And the best way to waste any goodwill your side of the argument may have is to spend a month turning your website black to protest against the unfair treatment of underage-sex fan-fiction. Don’t start with that Pastor Martin Niemöller “first they came for the lolita-fetishists” crap. You’ve got to choose your battles, and boy was that not the one to stick your neck out on.

I guess that'll teach the free speech folks...

What do you mean?

You don’t think it’s a coincidence we sold Livejournal to the Russians, do you? The same country that just put Kasparov in jail for daring to suggest the election might have been rigged? Read the press-release. Livejournal is the blogosphere in Russia, and now every bit of data, every single private post is stuck halfway between Putin and the Russian Mob.

Any final comments?

Я люблю сыр.

(Disclaimer: the author is in no way associated with Livejournal or SixApart. I don't even know anyone who works there in more than an "I might have met them on IRC once or twice" way.)