more locking? let's delete positive comments!

[charmian]

1) Is it just me, or does it seem like everyone these days on LJ is friends-locking their journal? Not that I'm not the same (the new journal is going to be most impersonal and topical, thus unlocked. However, I locked the more personal journal.)

Although it does make it harder to figure out whether an unknown person is worth friending or not, in some ways you could say it's a positive sign, that people are finally figuring out that if they don't want The World to go seeing their journal, for whatever reason, the very sensible, normal thing to do is to make it friends-locked. Posting for The World is a different mentality from posting for The Friendslist, and it's good to see that people are possibly increasingly realizing this, thus leading to some containment of drama.

2) http://blackbeardblog.tumblr.com/post/205141856/five-reasons-you-should-delete-positive-comments

Provocative post on why bloggers should delete positive comments (that do not contribute to discussion or do not add relevant content). Hmm... I'd say that deleting is likely to offend the commenters, and make them mad for no good reason. Also, having comments, even of the contentless kind, is often used by a metric for readers to determine whether a post is worth reading or not. What is needed, then, in my opinion, is either a comment sorting system, so that the cream rises to the top (comments are either ratable, or comments that are responded to rise up), or for alternate feedback mechanisms to be promoted. Sharing is one, and another a ratings/like system.

Tumblr and Posterous get the liking mechanism down right, IMHO. A small, but conspicuous place where you can register your approval of a post. They also use it as a bookmarking system, but that works less well because there is a lack of hierarchy (in other words, you can't tag your bookmarks).

Comments

[cleverthylacine]

That's not really practical, because if you grant access to people you don't know, you don't know them well enough to trust them yet.

One of the main reasons I'm on DW is that I used to friend anyone on LJ whom I found interesting, and a lot of these were fandom people. After I'd been in a few fandom kerfuffles, not always by choice, I discovered that there were a lot of people passing around my locked journal entries for giggles, and I couldn't even figure out who they were. This is why I think a mixture of public and private entries is a good idea, so that "subscribe" rather than "grant access" isn't a useless feature.

But "subscribe" not being useless kind of depends on people understanding that not every person who has a journal considers themselves a blogger. I am very much not a blogger (I actively dislike the internet "it's okay to link to small journals if they aren't nailed shut and it's okay to be as much of an asshole as you want and invite the mob to follow you in it if there's a serious issue at stake" attitude and this is no secret) and when I do make a public post I make it no secret that metafandom and FW are not particularly welcome and that if there is any nastiness of any kind, even if the commenter thinks it's an important issue, I will shut the entire discussion down. A lot of people think this is awful of me, I know, but it's the only self defence in a world where there are too many people who think having an occasional open house mixer/socialising party means it's okay to come in with your muddy boots on and start yelling at the host or the guests as if they were news commenters.

[torachan]

But if your (general you) journal is 100% locked, then even if you subscribe without granting access, you still cannot expect anyone to friend you back, because you have no content they can see. Therefore DW has no advantage to LJ in that regard. It does if you are using friending/subscribing simply as a reading list, but you were talking about "how to make friends", which I took to mean actual friends, or at least acquaintances, not just friend in the reading list sense.

If you want to make friends and you have a locked journal, you have to take the first step and friend people first. It's not unfair. It's common sense. No one should be expected to automatically know you're a great wonderful super interesting person if all your content is behind closed doors. That's ridiculous.

[cleverthylacine]

I agree with you. It is ridiculous to expect people to randomly friend you. I only friend people nowadays if I've interacted with them on communities long enough to trust them, or if I know them. And I make few public posts.

Because if making any public posts at all is treated by the internet as a whole as the equivalent of leaving your doors unlocked and open in a large city, and therefore it's your fault if 3000 people show up, drink all your beer and steal your stereo...do you see where this is going?

Social media != broadcast media, which is why I personally wish people who think of themselves as BLOGGERS would either go to sites designed for that or stop pressuring others on journal sites to think of themselves as bloggers and accept blog behaviour.

[morineko]

The funny thing about that is that blogs, back in the day, didn't have comments. LJ was one of the first systems to have integrated comments.

And there are blog systems like tumblr that are indeed like the old blogs; you have to use comment plugins.

The doors at my other blogs are unlocked, but as 99.5% of the discussions I've had on blogs have been informative and without dogpiles, I don't really feel like I need to lock down. The LJ/DW/clone culture, because it IS social media, is more conducive to rounding up packs of friends to go and pile on another journal. It wasn't just for srs bzns issues, either (yet another reason I want 0 to do with LJ/DW "fandom".)

[morineko]

That was one of the things that always bothered me about LJ culture. I hated "friending" people from memes or communities because I liked their posts there and then, after being friended, finding out that their journals were not what I was interested in.

I think a lot of people who were using LJ to talk to a circle of friends have moved to Facebook, anyway.