Some links

[charmian]

1. An interview with Matt Haughey, the creator of Metafilter, which, though it started out as a hobby, has enabled him to quit his day job and pay three employees.

The site's revenue model is not based off of membership fees (although now you do have to pay $5 to become a member, but that's more to control membership size), but off of advertisements, mostly in the AskMefi section. Members don't see ads, but people who stumble in via search engine or external links do.

2. In Praise of Online Obscurity

On how socializing doesn't scale.

"Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote....At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting."

Comments

[elena]

(although now you do have to pay $5 to become a member, but that's more to control membership size)

And avoid trolling. IIRC, that's why they do the same at the Something Awful forums.

[charmian]

Oh yeah, and spammers too. I think it does keep up the quality of the audience to put up that sort of hurdle.

[princessofgeeks]

omg thanks for the Wired post. So true.

[charmian]

Yeah, I think a lot of people have trouble making that transition. If you start off with a broadcast model, it's not so bad, but then someone isn't entirely in charge of determining how many people read them, unless they start to lock their twitter/blogs/etc., so if people start out with the social model, they can find themselves blindsided.

[princessofgeeks]

Did you see this essay last year on privacy or levels of assumed privacy? From the Flow blog?

http://flowtv.org/?p=3913

all the various assumptions of who's reading are so fascinating....

[charmian]

Oh yeah, I've definitely seen this issue discussed on LJ a lot. Frankly, as much as people wish to assume privacy, I think the system is breaking down.

For example, there's a group known as Linkspam which is dedicated to gathering links about social issues, and unlike Metafandom, it's their stated policy that they don't need permission to link. The more such groups there are, the more aware people become that they may face publicity when posting in public.

[princessofgeeks]

I just thought that flow post was a good way of putting into words something i'd sensed, which is that although we've had the tools to lock down our stuff forever, that people didn't because they counted on being a tiny dot in a giant sea of information.

people's assumptions about who they're talking to do, i think, go beyond the locked/unlocked binary.

i hate to lock posts, because i WANT people to be able to find my fanfiction and join the conversation, and so forth, but there are definitely other issues involved. and yes, perhaps the culture of the LJ and DW part of fandom is changing, dunno. To more F locked, and not just out of pure "I only want to talk to my friends".

Yeah, linkspam won't let you opt out without private-locking, while metafandom will. I thought that was an interesting evolution; not sure how I feel about it yet.

[charmian]

Maybe instead of 'privacy' I should say 'obscurity.' Assuming obscurity is taking a gamble,etc. Security by obscurity, in other words.

It could be that the culture is changing... I'm not really sure though, as I've sort of dropped out of the fandom side of things. I think that there's always been that tension there on LJ, and recently it's been swinging more to the 'public is public' side of things.

[princessofgeeks]

yes, obscurity -- that's it exactly.

[charmian]

The security of obscurity thing sort of reminds me of how some people post pictures of themselves publicly to social networks etc. of themselves committing some crime or doing something against the rules, and the police or employers come upon them by doing searches.

After some publicization of that kind of thing, I suspect more people started to lock down their stuff.

(Maybe the obscurity culture on LJ is partially driven by how previously there was no search, and now there is search, but it's really rather useless. Or in general, obscurity on the web is in general decreasing because RSS and search and such are improving? Security by obscurity is a better "bet" when search engines are weak (and the next step is social search, which is even more efficient))

However, things such as external search engines, or delicous.com or newsletters, in the case of fandoms, increase the strength of search and thus mean that if you want to be truly 'obscure,' you've really got to actively hide.

[holyschist]

I think* linkspam has the "won't delete links on request" policy specifically because of the amount of backpedaling and ass-covering done by people with real-world cred (in SFF circles) during Racefail(s). And in that case, I'm really glad they did it, because having an archive that didn't link to anything said by Teresa Nielsen-Hayden or Elizabeth Bear or Lois McMaster Bujold, or any of the "names" would have been useless for following what was going on.

It feels different when it's relative nobodies on the internet, but I'm not sure where a bright line would be drawn if the policy were changed to apply only to "famous" people.

*I am speculating here. I watch linkspam, but I don't know why their policies are as they are.

[princessofgeeks]

I read their policy and asked them about it, and I see why. it's just interesting to see how different it "feels" than the metafandom policty.

and it is true that anything posted publicly is fair game. i have no quarrel with that at all. once you post something unlocked, you lose control over it. full stop.

[morineko]

I'm basing this on the experience of the blogger, rather than the experience of the followers.

In my experience (the sports blogosphere, for the most part) Twitter is not the same at all as LJ/DW/Facebook sort of social network; it's usually used as the quick, more social adjunct to existing non-intimate blogging. Twitter, for sports people, has always been largely a broadcast model. Also, after 3000 followers (and not every follower will even try to @ you, especially if they're following for content and not interaction) I'd imagine that it gets to be just too much work catching up with the @replies.

In previous experience with LJ the monkeysphere definitely kicks in at about 100 followers. How many people with that many followers at LJ/DW have granular access lists? I'd imagine almost all of them. For me, anything with an audience of more than 10 is already broadcasting.

As for "revealing"--back in the stone age of online journaling, there weren't comments. unless the journaller tacked on a forum or guestbook, everything was email. There was no social community and people probably could reveal a lot more than they could today; obscurity because the WWW wasn't as popular as it is now, combined with inconvenient technology.

[charmian]

Interesting points on Twitter. I don't have anywhere near that # of followers, but yeah, for a lot of famous/well-known people that I do follow, they do appear to work on a broadcast model.

I did on LJ, but I didn't use them much. On the other hand, I'd say a lot of the time I was working out of a broadcast model anyway.

Hmm, so since feedback was harder and lurkers had a harder time speaking, the illusion of obscurity could be much better maintained. Yeah, with the internet having grown exponentially over the past ten years, it would in fact be odd if social norms/mores had not changed.