SUP, a Russian company, buys Livejournal

[solarbird]

SUP, a Russian company owned by a former Yeltsin crony, has bought Livejournal. No, really. No, REALLY. ETA: NO. REALLY. THIS REALLY HAPPENED. THIS IS NOT IRONY OR PARODY. Here're a selected bunch of initial reactions pulled mostly out of the English-language announcement post on news:



Some English-language Russian argument over the possible badness of this here, particularly "I am a Russian user, luckily residing in the US. I have over a thousand friends, most of them in Russia. There is a sheer panic in the Russian LiveJournal community. People are contemplating mass exodus. This used to be one of the last free speech platforms for the Russians. Now the halcyon days are definitely over." (I don't know about the entire userbase, but his friendslist is certainly worried, and several are setting up accounts on places like GreatestJournal.)

The first person here is all Yay! Russia! and the respondent is, "Yeah, but for my two cents, Putin still sucks."

More Russian expatriate reaction in English here.

ladylightning asks about new Russian 'hate speech' laws are going to find their way down the chain.

as_p laughs (Xexe) and says in English DON'T PANIC, most of the rest of the Russian is a joke about a "big red button" that I don't understand.

georgedollie reports that a lot of Russian users were fleeing once SUP started managing LJ in Russia a year or so ago. A respondand links to here, here, and the Washington Post. Keep in mind that in Russia, Livejournal is not a second-tier player; that line about "blogosphere" in Russian being a shortened form of the Russian version of the word "Livejournal;" the Russian governmental oligarchy has a clear interest in taking control over the Russian internet opinion space. So.

dkmnow has a lot of links about SUP and the like here.

turkeyphant points to a critical Wired article about SUP. That's here. There are responses from one Russian LJ user in this chain.

marta is going around telling everyone again that "LiveJournal, Inc. is an American company based in California and is subject to California and US law. The servers will stay in San Francisco and the privacy policies won't change."

8irt provides convenient transliterations for LOL, OMG, and other important net words.

A couple of Russian-language speakers are going on here about this, and are kind of amused at all the kerfluffle to some degree but oxyd does note that the political community НБП was suspended shortly before the election. My checking shows that an NBP community (same thing, in Roman) has been deleted and purged, but the community ru_nbp still exists, and is specifically political - lots of discussion of election monitoring and charges of fraud. (I think it's a different community but I don't know.) Apparently there have been various efforts to throw off community moderators and such. And reportedly a lot of people have been (are?) leaving now that SUP owns Livejournal, Inc. outright.

So. Yeah. I recommend LJ Archive as a backup utility, it's easy and fast. Even if you don't do anything, or have to do anything, it's nice to have.

ETA: The Russian LJ News press release on sup_ru is pretty similar, tho' there, you have people tying the timing of unveiling of the "flag" button with the elections instead of, um, I lose track of what.

ETA3: penguin_yuh tells me that he doesn't see why everybody is running around spazzing and says that everything will be fine.

Comments

[wytwolf.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the LJ Archive link. Been meaning to find something like that for awhile, and it was fast and easy. :)

[blues-kun.livejournal.com]

lol wut

[alexshubert.livejournal.com]

You are right. Here, in Russia, we all drinking vodka all over 24 hours.
We hate europe, cos it is sooo clean, innocent, virgin. The bears is walking by our streets. What did I forget? Oh, yes! Right now we are building tenthousand millions of nuclear missiles, preparing to kill everybody in the livejournal, becouse we cant see them so honest, clever, kind. You know, we gonna kill you all just to have you hamburger and collections of postmarks. Also here, in Russia, are builded about 902492592532522352525252353 of Gulag camps: one camp for each europen man. Only one dream we are thinking about is russia Imperia and World war and Pony and Stalin and chocolate with peanuts. Well, sometimes we are thinking about Angelina Jolly too, but, nevermind, thinks about WoW is on the first place.

I hope, you are scared enough and will give me all your cookies!

ONOES

[solarbird]

я достаточно беспокоиться об имперских США. я нет времени беспокоиться об имперской россии.

кроме того, mmmmm имбиря меда лепешки -_^

Re: ONOES

[alexshubert.livejournal.com]

Let's try to make it correct
Я достаточно беспоился об имперских амбициях США, и у меня нет времени беспокоиться о таких же амбициях России.

также

[solarbird]

я понимаю русский язык достаточно заметить, когда язык перевода двигателей перерыва. это очень мало знаний. *^_^*;;

Re: также

[feoshat.livejournal.com]

i think it'll be better for u to write on english O_O

Re: также

[solarbird]

Probably! But let me have my fun. ^_^

Re: также

[alexshubert.livejournal.com]

+1

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[alexshubert.livejournal.com]

You posted sensless set of words. If that was ironia, then you missed your target.
So, how about all you cookies and bonbons?

Re: также

[solarbird]

Foo, I thought it was more understandable. But I only had high school Russian so I guess it's not too surprising. (My Japanese is much better than my Russian. ^_^ )

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[alexshubert.livejournal.com]

Wish I know Japanese at least as your knowledge of Russian.

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[solarbird]

I have had more success studying Japanese than any other language. I get better grades, and I go to Japan and I can talk to people and translate sometimes for tourists. It's fun. ^_^

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[solarbird]

"Also, mmmmmmm, cookies." Which is kind of an English idiom, for "Also, I like cookies." (The only kind of Russian cookies I actually know are ginger honey cookies.) ^_^ Since you also speak English I thought maybe it would go across just kind of dumped into Russian but I guess not so much.

Re: также

[alexshubert.livejournal.com]

Well, let's count it as a try. But, you know, you Russian need some improvement :)
Anyway, if you think, that russian guys are happy about that sell, you are wrong.
BTW, I have a very slow connection here. Where r u from?

Re: также

[solarbird]

My Russian needs LOTS AND LOTS OF improvement. I really like languages but I'm not very good at most of them.

I don't know where I was born but I'm kind of from Deerfield, Massachusetts. But I've lived in or near Seattle, Washington more than anywhere else by far.

Re: также

[alexshubert.livejournal.com]

USA then? =)
Moscow, Russia here.
You know, taking back to our main theme: most russian guys really disturbed about this buy, cos of censure of our posts.

How do you know Japanese then ?

Re: также

[solarbird]

USA, Cascadia (climate and social region, one flag, another flag), Washington (state government, flag, big), county of King (flag), city of Seattle (flag). Or actually in my case right now city of Kenmore (flag), right next to Seattle. Oh, and neighbourhood of Uplake. (No flag. Hm. Maybe I should make one, that'd be funny. ^_^ We have a lot of flags, don't we?) So that's about all the way down since I don't want to post my street address. ^_^

You know, taking back to our main theme: most russian guys really disturbed about this buy, cos of censure of our posts.
That's what I was wondering about more than anything else. It seemed very likely that you would have some things to worry about there. But some people are telling me that the worry is kind of overblown. Hopefully they are right, but I don't tend to think so.

How do you know Japanese then?
I don't know. For some reason Japanese is much easier for me to learn than other languages. Possibly it's because the vocabulary is small - it's a very small language, and the biggest problem I have is learning new vocabulary.

I also tried to study Latin in high school. That was ... not successful. ^_^

Languages are really interesting, though. I particularly like grammar systems. If I could I would learn all of them. ^_^

Re: также

[leggedxl.livejournal.com]

:)
That's was funny.

[as-p.livejournal.com]

Just kidding ;)
red button ~= delete button ;)

[solarbird]

oh! hi! i did not expect people to follow me here. ^_^

hee, now it makes sense. thanks! ^_^

[ellerisse.livejournal.com]

Antennapedia's journal migration tool (http://antennapedia.livejournal.com/266462.html) (which also works nicely as an archiver) also works well - I use Mac, and ljArchive seems to be aimed at Windows so I didn't dabble in it.

[firni.livejournal.com]

Translation for Russian comments in last link plz thx

[solarbird]

I basically already summarised, but he posted that it was interesting to see people posting from all over the place and I think joked about wangst an on international level. I replied saying that I studied Russian in high school and that Russia's not the problem, we just don't know about SUP. Then he replied saying not to worry and stuff as above, and asked where I was studying Russian, and I told him, and added that I study Japanese now and live here. And then I asked him if he speaks Japanese. (That's the part that's in Japanese.)

Below that sish is laughing at the flamage (this is interesting: lit. "light napalm") and the person below her... er... um... ha! Yahoo chat board people know the idiom. And now so do I. Muah. Basically, "Skype smooches to everybody!"

[firni.livejournal.com]

For that, I reward you with Hamster 3.0.

http://www.hamstertracker.com/

[feoshat.livejournal.com]

>reports that a lot of Russian users were fleeing once SUP started managing LJ in Russia a year or so ago.
it was basically those users who hate russian opposition. and sum antisemits) rly there were no any facts when users were suspended after sum "wrong" posts

curently i am not russian, but i'm under cyrillic sector of LJ and i don't felt any changes when SUP starts to rule on our territory ;) SUP at first is only a commercial company, they doesn't have any interests in political sphere.

[solarbird]

Yeah, it's just that we got told all those same things ("this'll be great! we can do so much more stuff now! LiveJournal will get much more resources and focus!") when Six Apart bought LiveJournal and then almost everything they did in the English sector was stupid. So now everyone is nervous and worried about more stupidity, or worse.

[wrog]

ok, so what is the deal with Russians and anti-semitism, anyway? Is there some part of their history where they were Ruled By Jews that I never learned about? Or is it something in the water?

(...yes, I know, this shit is all over Europe, but it always seems like it's extra-special bad in the former USSR and eastern Europe...?)

[solarbird]

hrrrrrr... Okay, let's oversimplify, 'cause space and time.

Okay. So. Take the whole pre-October Revolution pogrom thing as read. Anti-semitism was very strong in western Europe too, but not as strong in action (with one particular real serious exception, I'm getting to that), mostly I think because western Europe had ... a less brutal history in a lot of ways than the Russians, in large part because they were never subject to the Mongol rule. (Mongol rule over conquered territories was particularly harsh; when the Russ finally kicked them out, they took over the existing governmental structures and traditions, so things stayed harsh.)

Jews, being a nationality but without territory, were particularly subject to abuse, and the harshness of the pogroms in the east reflected the general harshness of government in the east. (One could also extrapolate about harder conditions - routine famines until the introduction of things like the potato, etc., but then I have to talk about medieval weather patterns and hail and and and nobody cares. Take that as read.)

Stalin was no exception to this, and he used them as targets and/or scapegoats routinely, despite formal Marxist anti-racist rhetoric. Then, after World War II, in the west (and particularly in West Germany), you had a real and deep examination of anti-Semitism. Germany had been considered rather a western country by the west (even if it didn't particularly think so, seeing itself as "central" and separate, and Nazism was in part an attempt to refute the idea that Germany was a "Western" country - but that's yet another topic), so you had a real sorting out of a lot of that history.

In the east, unfortunately, you had a political directorate to blame the past evils of societies in general on capitalism, as per Marxist doctrine. It was almost reflexive. And Jews, of course, didn't have the whole usury thing in their religion, so had the reputation they had (in both east and west) as money-changers and lenders and all that, which brought resentment, and which carried extra capitalist baggage.

So you combine an extra level of resentment (because of the perception of being counter-revolutionary by nature) with a complete failure to actually analyse the underlying social forces that engender anti-semitism, and you get both a situation of societies failing to improve above the past in this regard and a conflict of "Marxist societies will not be racist" against "capitalist counter-revolutionary assholes." And even if the causes are now irrelevant (capitalism is good again in Russia -- sorta) the effects persist.

(Sorry for yet another edit, I wrote this really badly.)

[motherofpearl51.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads-up on lj Archive. I have archived my journal. So pissed. I guess I shouldn't have bought a lifetime membership. Doh!