LiveJournal volunteering

I'm always hesitant to write about this anywhere, because I have a tendancy to be a drama queen, and discussing my time in LiveJournal support only makes that behavior more apparent than ever. I often get asked why I don't volunteer on LiveJournal anymore, and I don't typically have a very good answer, because any I give will be seen as drama-mongering. So, if I write it down, I figure no one will likely read this, so I can just have it to link to.

I started volunteering for LiveJournal.com a long time ago. I quit a couple times over various things - I was a typical teenager, I'd get upset at the drop of a hat and overreact. Note that this behavior hasn't entirely changed, despite the years since when I started. So, I'm a drama queen. Blah blah blah. Nothing new there.

Around the time that I started my job at wedu, I had "interim" privs in a couple categories: Basically, I could see all aspects of the requests, but I couldn't send anything that the users could see. I also worked in a relatively high trust position, on the LiveJournal Abuse Team, which deals with people who break the terms of service. Some political issues arose regarding the privacy of information shared on IRC in the #lj_abuse IRC channel, however, which led to a turn of events. Basically, at one point we had discussed how we all disliked another volunteer in #lj_abuse. I repeated that this discussion had occured in another (invite only) channel on the network. Some people got pissy, and all of a sudden, there was a total shitstorm. To this day, I really have no idea why it happened, but I know that there were a lot of accusations being thrown around.

A short list of things I was accused of: Hacking into another user's account, hacking into administrators accounts to obtain information, sharing confidential information regarding the process LiveJournal uses to prosecute Abuse cases, Sharing my account so that other people could see things that they shouldn't be able to. Note that all of these allegations were only shared with me long after this incident: to my face, I was told one thing, and one thing only: "Due to the fact that the only reason you want to continue supporting the site is to gain more privileges than you could otherwise, all privileges are being revoked."

Now, I'm a reasonably intelligent guy. The ability to do something like I was accused of would not be out of my technical expertise: especially since one of the people in question, who accused me of breaking into her account, regularly shared her password with other users. No proof was ever brought against me: in fact, during the entire incident, none of this was even mentioned to me. This pattern has continued with other incidents of the same type, stretching both before and after my time doing support. I realize now that these kind of things do happen, so you just kind of have to grin and bear it if you wish to continue to support the site.

That, for the most part, explains why I don't volunteer to support LiveJournal anymore from the helping users standpoint. I was also active in the development community, despite the serious roadblocks to making headway in that arena. For a period of time, I continued to watch the development process, and discuss where I felt my interests lie: on the differences between XML and HTML generation, things like that. After a discussion in comments with an employee of the site, he basically explained to me that everything I said was just trying to start a fight. Rather discouraging to be told by someone who you hope to make any useful headway with. After that comment to me in public, I was later informed that he posted a non-public entry to his journal.

"crschmidt, your time is done. Go soft into that gentle night."

Along with the rest of the entry, it was quite clear that my presence in the development community only caused him, and others commenting on the entry, to be more frustrated than anything else. To this day, the idea of developing on LiveJournal is tempting, but unfortunately, I really feel that any effort i put into it will be wasted. There are a number of people who I was close to when I worked on the site who still do not know why I suddenly left: they thought it was my own volition. (This appearence has been made falsely in other similar cases as well, although in this case, I just dissapeared.) I am still contacted regularly regarding debugging or support questions. Despite all this, I do not expect that I will ever be able to again look at the volunteer aspects of LiveJournal without getting a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. It's unfortunate, because I really love the site. It's a shame it has to have such a political air about it, because I miss the things that I had when I wasn't involved in the politics.

This entry is largely rambling, and may inaccurately reflect some aspects of the situation. Quotes are really paraphrases to the best of my ability mirroring the intent of the quoted material.