charmian: a snowy owl (Default)
charmian ([personal profile] charmian) wrote2010-07-02 08:00 pm

Interoperability vs. Preservation of Site Culture

Recently, there was a suggestion about crossposting to Facebook Notes. In general, public opinion was against the suggestion, and in the comments, there was some discussion about whether this option might create problems for DW site culture or not.

For example, this comment by [personal profile] damned_colonial:


2) I dislike Facebook culture and the style of interaction that happens there. I fear that making it easy to crosspost to Facebook would result in lots of people coming here from Facebook and bringing Facebook social norms, which are at odds with the social norms I enjoy here on DW. (For instance, things I enjoy on DW include: lengthy, thoughtful posts and comments, a respect for pseudonymity, and the ability to segregate one's journalling from one's "real life").


In response, there was an interesting comment left by [personal profile] matgb, who said:

More of my readers come to read my stuff from Twitter and Facebook than do from LJ or DW. Even more come from a UK politics aggregator (or at least did when I was posting regularly). I'd like them to be able to comment effectively. I'd also like to 'push' to those sites I make use of to aggregate my stuff.

Essentially, who are you (or anyone else) to determine what sort of culture I want in my personal journal, and why should a whole site be tarnished because some people don't like the bits they've seen?

[......]

I didn't sign up for a fandom blogging platform, I signed up for an LJ fork that would take the good idea and make it genuinely interoperable. Refusing to deal with other sites because there are "normal" people there and they have a "culture I don't want to see here" is, well, annoying.




I don't think that an influx of FB users is likely destroy the culture of pseudonomity at DW. (Especially since a lot of people on DW already are FB users) The culture of real name usage at FB is something which exists mainly because it is the policy of the site, and enforced by FB itself. It's explicitly against the rules at FB not to use it under your real name. In contrast, there are no such rules at DW prohibiting people from using pseuds or from having multiple accounts or personae. The culture at FB is something that is developed by both the technology and the ToS, and at DW, both are different and don't reinforce those aspects of the FB culture.

In general, also, I am sympathetic to Matgb's desire to use DW in a highly interoperable way. IMHO, one of the reasons behind LJ's decline is that in an age where interoperability is becoming more and more important, it's still lagging behind. Tumblr, Posterous, WP.com, all of these allow you to easily push your updates to other platforms. I think it is highly desirable that DW also become an open platform in this way; however, if outside readers/commenters are considered a negative force, then this openness will be decreased.

Or is the site culture of DW really is that fragile? May be better for DW to differentiate itself from other blogging platforms by avoiding interoperability with anything but LJ, by making interoperability only possible by the technically inclined who are able to mess with APIs etc in order to crosspost? What do you all think?

UPDATE: [personal profile] foxfirefey has alerted me to the fact that an earlier suggestion about crossposting to FB was already accepted into the bug database. So the point itself may actually be moot.
niqaeli: cat with arizona flag in the background (Default)

[personal profile] niqaeli 2010-07-03 06:36 am (UTC)(link)
I prize interoperability from an ethical standpoint and I -- am sort of surprised to find how vehement my reaction to the notion that DW site culture will be damaged by making it possible for people to use the site to their best interests. But, wow, I am at some seriously irritated how about no.

Frankly, I'd always seen Dreamwidth as moving towards being a sort of dashboard site -- a convenient, usable space to gather all the content you want to interact with on the internet to. That's what I want it to become for me, anyway. And increased interoperability is obviously necessary for that. I mean, I'd be really happy if I could do everything with facebook that I want to do via Dreamwidth. The interface here is so much more usable for me.

I feel like... ugh. I love Dreamwidth culture. And I'm kind of annoyed to be told that my participation in it should be in some way contingent on not bringing 'the wrong sort' onto the site. The site culture's not that fragile (and, honestly, for the long-term health of the service? I'm pretty sure it needs to be more complex than a single culture). And, frankly, it's my space. If you don't care for the space I create, awesome. The unsubscribe button's right there.
Edited 2010-07-03 06:38 (UTC)
foxfirefey: Fox stealing an egg. (mischief)

[personal profile] foxfirefey 2010-07-03 06:39 am (UTC)(link)
And I'm kind of annoyed to be told that my participation in it should be in some way contingent on not bringing 'the wrong sort' onto the site. The site culture's not that fragile (and, honestly, for the long-term health of the service? I'm pretty sure it needs to be more complex than a single culture).

Hear, hear. DW culture could use a good influx and shake up.
niqaeli: cat with arizona flag in the background (*stalkpounce*)

[personal profile] niqaeli 2010-07-03 06:51 am (UTC)(link)
I don't think that any service should try to hold my information hostage -- I've chosen them to host it at this time, nothing more. So, forme interoperability's an ethical issue when it comes to OSPs: it's about treating their customers respectfully and acknowledging that they don't have the right to keep your information pent up on their servers and impossible to retrieve or to push to other OSPs.

And, yeah. I know people who use LJ to blog professionally. One of my favourite blogs, actually, is [livejournal.com profile] la_bricoleuse. It's a professional costumer's professional blog and it's great. I read it here via RSS feed, because hey: the beauty of RSS means I don't have to read the content where it was originally posted. (Which is good because I Really Don't Like LiveJournal, personally.)
niqaeli: cat with arizona flag in the background (Default)

[personal profile] niqaeli 2010-07-03 07:03 am (UTC)(link)
Data portability's higher ranked, but interoperability ties into it for me. They're not quite the same, but they're definitely linked up.

Interoperability is something I desperately want more of, ethical opinion aside, because I really kind of hate having three social media networks to deal with, all with very different interfaces. And that's really not very many at all to be managing, given all the choices out there. RSS definitely helps, some, but not fully.

I'll be very curious to see how many people bail on LJ when CARL goes live here. I can't begin to guess, to be honest, but I think whatever the result is it'll tell us something about the value of interoperability to Dreamwidth. Maybe not everything, because LJ is one pretty smallish fish in the sea for the English-speaking blogosphere, but I do think it'll tell us something.
morineko: Hikaru Amano from Nadesico (Default)

[personal profile] morineko 2010-07-03 07:10 am (UTC)(link)
I think it's too late; I'm actually surprised that users like [personal profile] matgb and [personal profile] thorfinn are still around, but apparently other things are trumping their lack of involvement in media fandom.

(If [personal profile] charmian and another friend didn't blog here, I'd be gone.)
foxfirefey: Fox stealing an egg. (mischief)

[personal profile] foxfirefey 2010-07-03 07:16 am (UTC)(link)
It gives me half a mind to just go and implement Facebook connecty stuff myself, except I know I'm kind of a ditz with no stamina, so I'm not sure I'd have enough follow through.
niqaeli: cat with arizona flag in the background (Default)

[personal profile] niqaeli 2010-07-03 07:18 am (UTC)(link)
Probably true -- and I'd be really happy to see WP or Tumblr cross-posting implemented from either direction. Not particularly useful to me, personally, the cross-posting in and of itself anyway. But I know there's a lot of stuff on Tumblr that interests me but I just haven't felt like fighting with Yet Another Interface (TM) to actually follow. So any kind of interop there would be interesting to me personally.

And I really do think it'd be better for Dreamwidth as a service. It's a great product, but it's awfully niche. Niche can work and be profitable, I just really don't want to see the site fail in the long-run because it got locked into a Certain Site Culture and was unwelcoming to the greater internets.
foxfirefey: A fox colored like flame over an ornately framed globe (Default)

[personal profile] foxfirefey 2010-07-03 07:22 am (UTC)(link)
Dunno! Probably not too ridiculously hard.

And yeah, that suggestion's technically already in the bug database.
foxfirefey: A fox colored like flame over an ornately framed globe (Default)

[personal profile] foxfirefey 2010-07-03 07:31 am (UTC)(link)
Oh sorry! I meant to link to Bug 2375.
niqaeli: cat with arizona flag in the background (Default)

[personal profile] niqaeli 2010-07-03 07:34 am (UTC)(link)
I always thought the intention was to be, yes, niche but -- I had honestly gotten the impression it *was* intended to become a dashboard in the long run, for a particular niche market. I haven't been following dev culture as closely as I was back in closed beta and early open beta, so it's possible that's changed. And, of course, it's also just as possible I was wrong to have gotten that impression in the first place.

I honestly wish there were better authentication protocols so that accessing and interacting with locked content cross-service weren't so ugly and difficult. But I'm not sure if that's ever going to happen, anyway. OpenID is not exactly a resounding success story, honestly -- and I don't know that anybody's going to be interested in making content on their servers super-accessible from anywhere else, from a business perspective. Even if it could be proven logically and all, with numbers/data/studies, to be better for business it still won't be an intuitive concept and that probably matters more than the hard numbers would. (And I'm not sure how easy it'd be to gather hard numbers and thus prove.)
foxfirefey: Fox stealing an egg. (mischief)

[personal profile] foxfirefey 2010-07-03 07:41 am (UTC)(link)
For one of two reasons, I imagine:

* It was discussing the technicalities of implementation in a way that hadn't been mentioned before.
* The backlog for the community gets really annoying to deal with and sometimes dupes get through.

But yes, the naysayers are a little moot on this one.
foxfirefey: A close up of my eye, upside down. (eye)

[personal profile] foxfirefey 2010-07-03 07:51 am (UTC)(link)
You're right. I bet on a dupe. Or maybe even testing to see what people'd be saying now six months later?
foxfirefey: Look at this wee octopus! LOOK AT IT! (squee)

[personal profile] foxfirefey 2010-07-03 07:52 am (UTC)(link)
David Recordon is hearts. I really like him.

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