The latest fuss comes after LiveJournal, bought in late 2007 by Sup, a Russian Internet company, laid off much of its U.S. staff, but took days to post a denial-laden explanation of the move on the site, which sparked 2,742 comments in reply.

Who has time to read 2,742 comments, let alone take them seriously? LiveJournal management had it coming, by not promptly acknowledging the layoffs. But the spew is all too typical of indulgent sites which allow users an open forum to whinge. A potential advertiser looking at the behavior of the LiveJournal users who comment on the site's news-posting forum would surely run in horror.

It's just the latest fracas between LiveJournal management and its fractious users. When engineer Brad Fitzpatrick owned the site, paid subscribers rudely accused him of spending the money on "hookers and blow." After blog-software maker Six Apart bought the company in 2005, protests surrounded the introduction of advertising, the removal of pictures depicting breastfeeding, and the banning of accounts involved in child pornography. (Fanatical Harry Potter erotica writers, never the most mentally stable lot, insisted that graphic depictions of a teenage Potter getting it on with Severus Snape did not violate community mores.) And under Sup's ownership, users protested the removal of an advertising-free account.

Underlying all these protests: The notion that users deserved a free lunch — total liberty to do whatever they wanted on someone else's servers and someone else's dime. That their self-expression provided some unspecified, unproven business benefit to LiveJournal, and therefore the site was theirs to run, not the company's.

Of course, the protests never amounted to anything. LiveJournal's fortunes waxed and waned as the vast majority of users, uninterested in the fringe's obsessions, at first gravitated to the site, then moved on to others. The relentness weirdness that infects the site, rather than the protests, seems to be driving away users. The site's U.S. traffic has dropped 25 percent since August, a shift that has had nothing to do with the timing of the protests.

And there's the lesson of LiveJournal: One can crush an online community by cracking down, as Friendster did by deleting parodists' fake profiles. But one can also destroy it by coddling self-indulgent freaks. In Russia, where LiveJournal is a mainstream blogging site and the country's largest social network, Sup doesn't seem to have these problems. Having laid off a dozen U.S. staffers, it would probably be just as happy to lose the site's troublesome American users. Sup executive Anton Nosik put it best to a Russian newspaper earlier this year:

In a situation where people are trying to scare and blackmail us, threatening to destroy our business, there are business reasons for not rewarding such behaviour. This is not just human psychology, which retaliates more the more it is pressed. Problem is that there's never been a successful company whose success was based on bowing to collective resistant forces. No decision — no matter how correct — should be based on pressure.

Nosik, unlike the namby-pamby free-speech believers who used to own LiveJournal, has it right. So Harry Potter porn writers want to boycott LiveJournal? He should only be so lucky.

I don't have a preteen child, but instead, a husband who views "Harry Potter" with much the same excitement. So, last Saturday, I checked Amazon.com's site for the tracking information. Delivered, UPS claimed, to the front door. Curious, since I was sitting about 20 feet from my front door. I called UPS's automated information line and discovered it had been delivered to my former work address. So downtown I went, and by luck, a former colleague was at the office to let me in. No "Harry Potter" to be found, even though a UPS deliveryman had called on the building that morning. I called Amazon.com, which was good enough to refund my money and send a new copy, which wouldn't arrive until Wednesday.

The book did show up eventually — but by U.S. Postal Service on Monday, not by UPS. How a book can simultaneously be delivered to an office's front door and entrusted to the USPS for delivery is a feat of magic beyond my understanding.

Amazon.com, of course, did the right thing in issuing a refund. Occasionally, the company fulfills Jeff Bezos's tired promise of being "customer-centric" — in this case, recognizing that the book didn't have much value to me delivered late. (I had to rush over to a physical bookstore and — oh, the indignity! — purchase the book by handing it over the counter to a human being to have it rung up.) It will incur some expense, but leave the incident with its reputation intact.

But UPS? UPS is just screwed. Its vaunted electronic-tracking system has been revealed as full of lies. The data, after all, is only as good as the people who enter it. Kottke speculates that his deliveryman entered in false information to avoid trouble from supervisors who wanted delivery to go off without a hitch. And, perhaps, to avoid having to make Amazon good on the cost of its refunds.

Instead, though, it's been caught out. And now, I'm not inclined to trust anything UPS tells me about any delivery. How do I know that its personnel aren't fudging the data to make their jobs easier, or save their bosses a buck? If we can't trust UPS with the simple delivery of a book that's precious to kids — and more than a few adults — why would we ever put our businesses in its hands?

Here's what I think happened. I think UPS's network was overwhelmed by Amazon's Potter-volume in some parts of the country and they had no way to deliver all those packages. (The forums for the book at Amazon and Google Blog Search are full of similar complaints from others...warning, spoilers! UPS even offloaded some of the volume to the USPS for "last-mile" delivery.) So, UPS just marked all of those packages they had no intention of delivering as "oops, we missed you, you must have been out".

Let's go back to Amazon's guarantee, which states that the refund "does not apply if delivery is attempted, but no one is available to accept the package". Amazon would be pretty angry with UPS if they cost them a bunch of money due to refunds and, more importantly, the loss of a bunch of customer goodwill...maybe Amazon would switch a larger portion of their formidable package output to another carrier, for instance. So UPS intentionally misclassifying those deliveries covers their ass with Amazon and covers Amazon's ass with regard to the refund.

Harry Potter and the Phantom Delivery [Kottke.org]
(AP Photo/Tina Fineberg)