Moving over

[helen_keeble]

Due to recent LJ shenanigans*, I'm considering moving my blogging over to here. Quite a few of the people I follow on LJ seem to be jumping ship, and I want to be able to keep reading them. I'll be trying to work out how to set up cross-posting and suchlike, so I can hopefully still maintain the old platform as well (not sure if this is possible without paid accounts... will see).

If I know you on LJ but haven't friended you here, please let me know - especially if you're using a different username!


* silently monetizing outgoing links in people's journals... deeply morally dubious. And also plain stupid, given how many geeks there are on LJ who are capable of reading JavaScript and finding out exactly what's going on, and raising bloody hell about it

Comments

[wheatflower]

For the benefit of us old ladies who don't follow tech stuff, what does it mean to monetize a link?


Good grief, Firefox's spell check recognizes 'monetize'. I'm not sure how I feel about this....

[helen_keeble]

A lot of commercial websites such as Amazon and eBay have "affiliate links" - these give a kickback to the referrer if someone clicks on the link and subsequently buys something. So if Fred links to a book on Amazon, and I click his link and end up buying the book, Amazon pays Fred a (very very) small amount of money (generally in the form of a gift certificate). This works because Fred's link contains his affiliate id embedded within the URL.

What LJ was doing was running a bit of JavaScript code on every page that stripped out the affiliate ids and replaced them with LJ's own id. So now if I clicked on Fred's link, LJ steps in and ends up getting the money instead.

The truly nasty thing here was that you couldn't tell this was happening from hovering over the link and looking at the URL - the script is activated by the click. It was only noticed by an eagle-eyed LJ user who realised that links were starting to pop up in separate windows instead of the same window/tab (a side effect of the script), and who went digging to find out why.

(I imagine more people might have noticed in a month or so, as they all suddenly wondered why they weren't getting any kickbacks from Amazon etc. anymore...)

So that's how LJ was making money from people's links... directly taking the money away from the people who _should_ have been getting the money, and pocketing it themselves instead. And hence the sudden mass migration of pissed-off geeks away from LJ...

[daidoji_gisei]

OK, I'm moved! I'm ok with LJ being run by venal people, but venal and stupid is a really infelicitous combination.:-(

It's really kind of guilt-inducing, having two free accounts here on DW. They need to get the credit card processor soon, so I can pay for one.

[yhlee]

Eee, it's a Helen!