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| | Xanga's TOSThere is a growing group of members who appear to want to "clean-up" xanga sites and make members conform to the Terms of Service they agreed to when they signed up for membership. I would like to offer a few thoughts in this regard.
It would be a relatively easy thing to automate a scan of every Blog posted to black out offensive language. Pictures are a little more difficult, but it can be done. It gets much more difficult to block more literate but offensive content. The problem is that automation cannot make all the judgment decisions that a human being can make, and certain inequities would exist. Where does literature end and pornography begin? We would have to be willing to accept that some things that should be censored would not be, and some things that should not be censored would be. Are we willing to do that?
An even bigger issue with automation is the question of how much bandwidth the process would require. Given the number of Blogs being posted every minute of every hour of every day, a real-time scan prior to posting would result in a delay between clicking the "submit" button and actually seeing your post online. That delay could be significant, because the automation would not just be looking at your post or mine. It would have to look at hundreds of posts at any given moment of the day. How much of a delay would be acceptable to the community? A few minutes? An hour? A day? This needs to be investigated before xanga can make an automation decision.
Because of the delay introduced by the automation, there would also have to be a mechanism put in place to eliminate the inevitable duplicate posts by people who would think that the submit "didn't take" the first time they clicked "submit."
Alternatively, instead of real-time scanning of posts and edits to posts, the post could be allowed immediately as is currently done, and the automation could look instead at what has already been posted. This would eliminate the bandwidth concerns for the membership if not for the technical staff. The Process would have to be a cyclical one to catch offensives introduced after the initial scan of an entry. The scan would start with the first post, scan it, and then move to the 2nd post and then the 3rd post and so on until all posts had been processed. It would then start scanning each post that had been added or updated since the initial scan and repeat the process forever.
At this point, we have only addressed elimination of the vulgar, the obscene, and the pornographic. We have not yet addressed all the things that might be considered unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortuous, defamatory, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable.
Let’s face it: to get rid of all the things that violate the TOS, a Blog Patrol of some kind would be necessary, whether we like it or not. Given the number of pages that are posted, a fulltime patrol would be needed, and even that could not keep up with the ever growing numbers of posts. Since xanga doesn't have the staff resources to do it, we would have to do it ourselves (not likely) by taking the time, however inconvenient, to report violators, and xanga would have to investigate each reported violation on a case by case basis before taking any action against individual members.
Having said all that, let us not forget that a service like xanga doesn't just happen for free. There are all kinds of expenses associated with running an operation like this. Xanga isn't running on somebody's desktop PC you know. Hundreds of servers (perhaps more than a thousand) are required along with large numbers of storage devices and backup up equipment, all of which has to be paid for, along with internal networks, electricity, water, and maybe natural gas. There is also the cost of rental space to house all the necessary equipment, payroll for the staff, and the cost of connecting to the world wide infrastructure itself, etc. etc. etc. It's a more expensive operation than some of us may realize.
The point is that as long as most users opt for the free service, xanga will have to depend on advertising revenue to support the service. That means that they don't want to lose too may users as a result of cleaning the place up. If advertising is eliminated, we will all be required to pay for the service, and many users would be lost to our community because of an inability to pay the fee. Many more I think than we can know at this point. And after that, still more will be lost in the clean up that would follow. Would there be enough of us left to make the operation profitable, or at least a break even operation?
And after we put ourselves through all of this, what will prevent those users who are given the "royal order of the boot" from signing up again under a different user id, and again and again after each subsequent boot? And who gets to decide what is offensive and what is not? Should we make an exception for one member who uses the “S” word occasionally but not for the other member who uses the “F” word?
My friends, we may not like it, but abuse is here to stay unless all of us are willing to pay a very – Very – high premium for the service, shutting out those who can not afford the fee, and content ourselves with being a member of a very small community, assuming the owner/operators would allow it. It is, afterall, a business, and business must make a profit for its owners.
It doesn't sound like much clean-up will take place does it! I don't mean to sound overly pessimistic, but those are the unvarnished facts.
In the end, the best form of clean-up turns out to be avoidance of those sites that offend us. We don’t have to go visit there. How do we do that? By exercising self-control. Oh we may stumble upon a bad site once in a while, but we can immediately leave it and never return.
For those who can't even tolerate that stumbling onto such a site once in a while, you can form Blog-Rings consisting of members whose postings are Protected from view and available only to other members of the Ring. Membership would, of course, be by approval only based on the applicant's site content and contingent upon the member sites remaining in good standing.
This, in effect, would amount to the formation of a private blogging facility within the greater system as a whole. As long as you stayed within that ring, you would never encounter an offensive site. Also, the vast majority of xanga members would never have an opportunity to see your site.
Is that the kind of service you want?
| | | Posted 3/11/2006 10:35 AM - 2 comments
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