All right, all right. I can’t keep ignoring the questions anymore. People are outraged: why does Navalny have six thousand friends when everyone else is limited to two thousand?!
Teacher’s pet! Enjoying special privileges! Pulling strings! Sponsored by SUP (the company that ran LiveJournal in Russia)! Well, what can I say—it’s all true. By now everyone already knows about the idiotic bot attacks on my LiveJournal. We’re fighting them in various ways, but obviously the most effective and radical one is to turn on the “comments from friends only” option. The problem is that on LiveJournal you can only have 2,000 friends, while I have far more commenters than that. intervoice cleverly put together a “whitelist” of commenters—that is, not people who write “Navalny, you’re great,” but people who are actually human, in the sense of not being robots. There are about 13,000 of them. I officially asked SUP to create an option for me so that, if I chose, only a specific number of users selected by me could comment on my posts. It’s their job to protect users from attacks, so my request was perfectly justified. At first SUP refused, then spent two weeks looking into the technical feasibility, then agreed and expanded the friend limit specifically for me. So that’s how I became cool and exclusive. Why can’t they do this for everyone? This exclusivity creates a lot of technical problems, especially when it comes to displaying the friends feed. As you can see, even I’ve only managed to get the number of friends up to 6,000, and beyond that it’s progressing at a snail’s pace. Some users, for reasons that are still unclear, simply can’t be added. In a sense, my LiveJournal is currently being used to test whether this option can be enabled for everyone. Since I get a lot of traffic and a lot of comments, it’s more convenient to test it on me. That’s the simple explanation. ~~And if someone tells you that Obama ordered Medvedev, Medvedev ordered Usmanov, and Usmanov ordered SUP, and that this whole thing was invented to boost my popularity—that’s not true. Don’t believe it. Ha-ha, who would believe such nonsense? It’s definitely not so. Honestly, who even comes up with this stuff? There is no conspiracy. ~~~~Click this link, stare at the screen, and repeat: THERE IS NO CONSPIRACY.~~ Also, while I’m at it, I apologize to everyone for yesterday’s LiveJournal “outage.” It really was because I was being DDoSed. Every post touching on the theme “United Russia is the party of crooks and thieves” (there were two yesterday: 1, 2)) triggers new bot and DDoS attacks. Update: for those who still didn’t get it, let me be clearer—if you have ever commented on my posts, sooner or later I’ll add you as a friend, and you’ll be able to comment again.