Interoperability vs. Preservation of Site Culture
Friday, July 2nd, 2010 08:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charmianRecently, 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 bydamned_colonial:
In response, there was an interesting comment left bymatgb, who said:
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: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.
For example, this comment by
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
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:
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.
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Date: 2010-07-03 07:18 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2010-07-03 07:25 am (UTC)Tumblr is pretty much not very difficult, and since you can't see the non-public part already, you had might as well just pull in the RSS feeds you like.
AFAIK, though, wasn't that the plan, for DW to be niche? I'm also not sure that the possibility of Site Culture Lock-in is something that will be greatly affected by the ability to push or login using FB or Twitter; I wonder whether it will have more to do with purely social dynamics on the site itself.
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Date: 2010-07-03 07:34 am (UTC)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.)
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Date: 2010-07-03 07:45 am (UTC)There seems to be a lot of talk in the development community about the shortcomings of openID. However, I actually think that FB and Twitter have done a fairly good job of this... although in FB's case perhaps not for the best reasons. Twitter's APIs allow me to read locked Twitter posts through other websites, for example. FB's APIs allow you to view locked content via sites like Brizzly. I've heard people praising FB for its interoperability APIs as well. I have also read some things about FB making itself more accessible as part of a plan, which is supposedly why they hired David Recordon. Google, also, is also interested in interoperability.
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Date: 2010-07-03 07:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-03 07:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-04 11:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-05 12:08 am (UTC)http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_snags_open_web_community_leader_recordon.php
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Date: 2010-07-05 10:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-05 10:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-05 01:05 pm (UTC)DW could possibly even leave the choice of specific services for the login splash to the journaller or comm maintainer; I'd want the LJ, Twitter, Blogger, FB and WP logos displaying prominently, but others might want journalfen or IJ or similar. As long as the OpenID logo is there as well, we're good.
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Date: 2010-07-05 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-05 01:01 pm (UTC)Depends. If Dave does what he seems to be implying, and build the next version of OpenID to essentially be a mix of Oauth and FB Connect, and FB adopts it as a standard, then there's a strong business reason for soft use of it.
Discus is already using FB Connect, Oauth and OpenID protocols, and a lot of blogs and news sites are using their implementation now.
Facebook represents a massive proportion of active web users, many of whom are logged in constantly. I regularly go to blogs and see a comment box that's already populated with my FB details, even if I've never been there before.
Ergo, there's a reason for sites to use whatever OpenID becomes, it makes use of their site more likely for lower end users. Especially if it's the same protocol for Twitter, there're a lot of sites doing stuff for there already.
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Date: 2010-07-05 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-03 08:01 am (UTC)