LiveJournal, it's a nice place really. It's almost the exact opposite of Everything2. It focuses on what we would call "GTKY". There is no editing staff. You can restrict who sees what you write, and you can even stop feedback.

The LiveJournal friends list is a bit like an RSS aggregator. You can pick and choose among all the white pride lolita fashionistas, the glitterwhore gothpixies, the professional fetish models, and the regular people with regular weblogs. The ones you like go into the bucket and you can view a special page with everyone's updates chronologically sorted. This shouldn't be anything special.

However, on LiveJournal, anything and everything can be turned into a shitstorm.

When you add a journal to your friends list, the owner of that journal is now available to view your "friends-only" entries. Sophisticated users can set up different groups of friends so that only a subset of the user's friends can see particular entries. Expert trolls can use this to their advantage.

This security setup can easily cause hurt feelings. When you subscribe to a new journal, your more private entries are open to what may be a complete stranger. When you remove someone from your friends list, and that person finds out, he or she is often hurt at the loss of access. In essence, removal from a friends list can be a slap in the face. "I don't trust you," is basically what it says.