8August
It's about here that we completely give up on Six Apart, and it's not for retaining Abraham Hassan, a man whose complete lack-of-professionalism (if not propensity to utter libel) was clear to us many months ago. Mr. Hassan is not the only Six Apart employee to badmouth their customers in public - Loïc Lemeur, the company's European figleaf, calls customers an asshole, and there's the infamous moment when SA's office pin-up Mena Trott added an adjective, and called a customer a fecking asshole.
Liz Marcs is able to generalise from these outbursts, and explains the root of the problem, the company's customer service is worse than atrocious. It's not that the company has closed the accounts of contributors who (in Six Apart's sole view) may have acted in an illegal manner. It's not that the company sings free speech while basing itself in a severely repressed territory. It's not that the company supports charities that were set up by its funders - an offence for which lesser lights have been suspended from Parliament. It's not even that the company has revised its policies, hasn't told its customers what those revisions are even after specific questions, and acted in an inconsistent manner.
To paraphrase Ms Marcs's argument, the problem is that the senior management are acting like drama queens with entitlement hang-ups. Miss Trott, Mr. Berkowitz, M. Lemeur, Mr. Hassan and their cronies appear to be forgetting where the power lies. The company's customers make them, and the company's customers can break them. At the rate things are going, Six Apart's customers will break them. The half-million Russian customers have been sold off to gangsters in their neighbourhood for pennies in the pound, and now many of the hyperactive Fans Of Anything are looking around for the door marked ExIT.
Not that they'd be the first - Pyrop has some pretty charts showing the decline of Livejournal since 2005. See also posts here passim.
We also learn that Bradley Fitzpatrick is to leave Six Apart, apparently to join G****e. That's a remarkable achievement, leaving one bunch of money-mad shysters whose plans for taking over the world are being thwarted by their own near-comical incompetence, only to join another bunch of money-mad shysters whose plans for taking over the world are being thwarted by (er) something that the world has yet to realise. Good luck to him; he'll need it; St. Francisville gossip site Valleywag has a lot of negative commentary, and very little praise - comments from people who aren't Six Apart employees or obvious shills have been almost exclusively negative.
Though his farewell note was short to the point of perfunctoriness, the breaking point appears to have been Six Apart's recent move into censorship. Mark Kraft, one of the early employees who is now the Tony Benn of the resistance, says Mr. Fitzpatrick is a sell-out.
In the case of The People Versus Six Apart, the power lies with the customer. Not the management. As a demonstration, we're working on bringing our old Livejournal content to a subsidiary of this site. We'll keep you posted.
