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.

The quirky site, part blog and part social network, is best known for its users' weird obsessions — like the troublesome clique of Harry Potter erotica writers, whose outré tastes ran afoul of LiveJournal's efforts to comply with U.S. child-pornography laws. (Oddly, the site also gained a following in Russia, which led to its acquisition by Sup.) All that adds up to an environment even more distasteful to advertisers than the typical social site.

The company's product managers and engineers were laid off, leaving only a handful of finance and operations workers — which speaks to a website to be left on life support. Matt Berardo, a Yahoo executive hired on last summer, has also left.

The company's Moscow-based management has told employees it blames the "global economic downturn" — the kind of pat excuse every boss is giving for layoffs, even when mismanagement or a bad business plan is really to blame. The brutal, abrupt cuts suggest something different: That Sup founder Andrew Paulson (above), who paid an estimated $30 million for LiveJournal a little over a year ago, has realized his expensive mistake in buying at the top of the bubble. Someone familiar with the company tells us Paulson lost the CEO job last summer to Annelies van den Belt, a former News Corp. executive, and was given the meaningless title of chairman; he's essentially out of the company now.

Executives at Six Apart, the blog-software company which sold LiveJournal to Sup, are happily counting the money in its bank. And they should consider themselves lucky that Vox, the LiveJournal knockoff it started, hasn't been more popular. At this point, having a larger social network in the portfolio would be a drag on the company's value.

LiveJournal, founded by engineer Brad Fitzpatrick in 1999, predated most blogging services and social networks, and anticipated many of their features. (Some of Fitzpatrick's software is vital to the operation of Facebook and other large sites today.) But Fitzpatrick never figured out how to turn it into a business. Instead, he sold it to Six Apart, which didn't have much more luck.

The weakest in the herd are always the first to fall. Facebook and MySpace, so far, have resisted layoffs. A host of also-ran social networks — Hi5, MyYearbook, and other obscurities — could be next. It's only a matter of time before investors reach the same apparent conclusion as Paulson: that there's a lot of fuss in running a social network, but not that much money.

The play on "whassup" seems almost too obvious to mention — but keeping users ultracurrent on their friends' doing is very much the intention. SUP will let sites like FriendFeed pick up news quicker, avoiding the risk that you might be even 30 minutes out of date on swift-moving trends like which avatar style people are using on Twitter. Faster! Faster! Faster!

Six Apart, the previous owner of LiveJournal before selling it to Russian Internet startup Sup, looks wiser by the day for abdicating the company's iron-fisted rule over what sounds to a non-LiveJournal user like the democratic turmoil in some post-Soviet Central Asian country. Except with more homoerotic Harry Potter fan fiction.

Founder Brad Fitzpatrick, who returned to the advisory board in December after leaving the company in the wake of another user-generated fracas last year, has to be regretting the decision. Not to leave the company, that is, but to agree to rejoin it on the advisory board, which was recently proved toothless by a ham-handed change to LiveJournal's account types. (Users, unbelievably, complained about the elimination of an option for completely advertising-free, unpaid accounts; only in the bizarro financial world of LiveJournal users does this option make economic sense.)

While the affair amounts to bad publicity for LiveJournal — even the developer who wrote the poll code managing the election has called into question voting practices — it's got to be great for pageviews.

Which makes us wonder: Why just let one LiveJournal user onto the advisory board? Sup execs should just turn the asylum over to the inmates, sign an ad-network contract, and step away. Far, far away. Moscow has never been so conveniently distant.

Shellen's going back to his first plan: Running a startup incubator called The Secret Agency. His model: Blogger founder Evan Williams's Obvious, which recently spun off Twitter as its own company.

Anker, LiveJournal founder Fitzpatrick, Sup CEO Andrew Paulson and some of his Russian engineers, a passel of Six Aparters, and one slightly bewildered goat held a bash at 111 Minna to celebrate the split. Also there: Fitzpatrick's omnipresent ex, Pownce engineer Leah Culver. Culver was in good spirits, though, despite the rumor Fitzpatrick's seeing someone in Russia. She too has a new beau, Justin.tv's Kyle Vogt. We're just waiting for the inevitable Leahcast.

Culver wasn't the only camera-friendly type there. Natali Del Conte, CNET's newly hired TV personality, stole the spotlight with a sparkling appearance just as I was leaving 111 Minna.

One explanation is simply Fitzpatrick's fickle nature: In his brief career at Six Apart, he vacillated between wanting to retain control of LiveJournal and disclaim responsibility for it — typical if less than noble behavior for a founder after a sale.

There's another reason for Fitzpatrick's new interest that also has to do with his fleeting passions. Before he even knew of Sup's interest in LiveJournal, Fitzpatrick had booked a ticket to fly to Moscow this month. Who travels to Moscow in December? Why, a young man who quickly found a Russian girlfriend to replace Leah Culver, that's who. Now, presented with an advisory gig that gets him tax-deductible booty calls, it's no wonder Fitzpatrick signed right up. (Photoillustration by valiskeogh from Brad's Life)

LiveJournal's boisterous users taxed Six Apart's already stretched management. Fan-fiction writers, whose output was often not for the squeamish, made the site a home. So-called "griefers," apparently dissatisfied with a tightening of site policies, published executives' Social Security numbers. Founder Brad Fitzpatrick noisily quit the company to join Google. Users mocked an ill-conceived advertising campaign by sending then-CEO Barak Berkowitz 527 virtual "gifts" of Diet Pepsi Max icons, defacing his profile.

Berkowitz stepped down in September, replaced by Chris Alden, an executive who ran the company's money- and sense-making business, the paid blogging products TypePad and Movable Type. With the sale of LiveJournal, Alden's reign looks likely to be far less entertaining than Berkowitz's. That's a good thing for Six Apart, if not for gossips.

As for LiveJournal, Sup has made grand promises about respecting the community and appointing an editorial advisory board. Sup already operates the Russian-language version of the site, and is run by Andrew Paulson, an American entrepreneur. But let's be real: This is a company operating in Vladimir Putin's Russia, where the media increasingly is falling under state control, either explicitly or tacitly. One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to find this prospect discomfiting.

Whatever happens to LiveJournal and its users won't be Six Apart's problem. Ben and Mena Trott, Six Apart's founders, are far too polite to say this about their LiveJournal adventure. But they should: "Goodbye, and good riddance."