Interoperability vs. Preservation of Site Culture

[charmian]

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 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.

Comments

[damned_colonial]

I have to say that my comment on dw_suggestions is very much meant to be "here's how I feel about it" and not "here's how everyone should feel about it". Lots of people disagree with me, and that's fine. I can certainly see the arguments for expanding beyond the LJ-ish niche.

My problem is, I have a lot of issues with segregating work stuff from play stuff. I have been very active on the Internet for 15+ years under my real name, and am also a somewhat public figure in my work under that same name. Facebook is the site of a lot of tension for me around that.

thorfinn is my friend on DW, on Facebook, and in RL. We met on the Internet 15+ years ago, in fact, and lived and worked together at various times. I know him and trust him, but I also know that we have a lot of mutual Facebook "friends" who I'm not entirely comfortable with on a personal level. *Speaking for myself*, the idea of those people following thorfinn's links back from Facebook to his DW and then, potentially, to my DW, makes me twitch.

Currently, I keep a lot of what I post public, but I've been locking down an increasing amount of it because I have a huge amount of anxiety about people reading and commenting on my stuff who don't get it, don't know where I'm coming from, don't understand my context, or whatever. (And by "anxiety" I mean literal, disabling anxiety. Yes, I have issues. Yes, I am getting help for them.) This anxiety gets triggered most often when the streams get crossed between my professional and personal lives, especially since, in the last year, I've had a number of abusive/harrassing incidents from people who know me in a professional or para-professional context (eg. from the online tech community).

At present, the way I use DW balances my desire to publish with my need to protect my mental health. An influx of people from Facebook, many of whom I know in (para-)professional contexts, who don't know my personal context here, would quite likely tip that balance for me, and make me change the way I use my DW -- lead me to lock down my journal more strictly, change my identity, or stop journalling. (That's not a threat to flounce, it's just a list of possible options that I might consider.) I'm not sure that a Facebook crossposting option would necessarily lead to that (in fact it probably wouldn't), but it is something I fear, and that fear is real, and affects how I use this site.

So yeah, that's where I'm coming from.

ETA: I should also probably note that it's Facebook in particular that I'm most twitchy about, because of the way Facebook has a TOS-requirement for 1:1 mapping between identity and accounts, in a way that doesn't let people effectively segregate the personal/professional/whatever parts of their lives. I'm more comfortable with the idea of crossposting to Tumblr, Wordpress, and other platforms that don't have that kind of identity setup, and where people more often have a blog-like-thing that is focused on a particular interest or subject. In fact I would love to see more crossposting options for those platforms! So, I'm not sure whether that makes me kind of inconsistent or not. And I'm not queen of the universe anyway, so it's not up to me. What will happen will happen, and I will adjust as necessary.

[charmian]

I guess the thing with dw_suggestions is that regardless of whether I am speaking for myself or not, whenever I post there it comes down to essentially advocating that something should or shouldn't become policy for the entire site; in other words, I'm saying that everyone else should be allowed to/disallowed from doing something, regardless of whether I'm telling them how to feel about it, which is why people might have expressed more irritation than was needed.

I am sorry to hear about your problems and hope that you can somehow resolve the split between your private and public blogging. I really don't want to be presumptuous about the difficult situation you face, so please tell me if I am out of line; however, isn't that really a problem about what happens when people who segregate their personal/professional lives have social media links to people who don't? I mean, if Thorfinn had a WP blog that imported into FB, and he frequently referenced your DW journal, and had it prominently linked in the sidebar, wouldn't the same problem potentially occur?

[damned_colonial]

isn't that really a problem about what happens when people who segregate their personal/professional lives have social media links to people who don't?

Yup, I think you're onto something there.

I'm in a weird position, in a way, because I do a soft segregation: my real-world identity is not secret (it's in my DW profile), but I downplay it to some degree, mostly post about different things here, and try to discourage people from the professional side from coming over here unless they really *do* want to interact with me on a personal level. Conversely, when people from DW come over to the professional side of my life (as happens occasionally), I give them my work email address and try and do most of the professional interaction there. This mostly works OK for me because the people I know on DW are, in general, very familiar with navigating pseudonymity online, and are good at respecting boundaries around that.

At present I have a slow trickle of (para-)professional people who I get to know personally and connect with on DW, and a slow trickle of DW people with whom I've wound up doing professional stuff. It's currently happening at a rate I can handle, but I fear a destabilisation of that balance.

[thorfinn]

*nod* The soft-segregation is pretty common to people around our age on the net, I think. I can understand the crossover issues, I just happen to fortunately be in a position to not have to particularly care about privacy that much.

That said, I have just gone through and locked everything on DW and LJ that might not be best to have splashed across the front page news.

[charmian]

I see this as a problem, but IMHO, it's not one that should be solved by limiting interoperability on DW, especially since the desired effect (limit FB users from coming to DW) is not actually something which I think DW should be discouraging? The problem about social links between people who try to segregate their RL and pseudononymous identities, and those who do not is one which pretty much is at the center of social media.

If DW were for example to get a lot more popular (say Thorfinn suddenly convinced people to join it), even without this feature being implemented, the same problems could potentially occur, also. So I guess what this situation is, is that to some the obscurity and 'walled garden-ness' of DW is a feature, and to others, it's a bug.

[damned_colonial]

I don't want DW to be a walled garden, but I would personally prefer that the other platforms we reach out to be ones that have a closer match to DW culture (and no I don't mean fannish culture -- I mean the sorts of things espoused in the site policies, diversity statement, etc.)

Examples of social media platforms I think match better than Facebook include Flickr, Tumblr, and Ravelry, just to name a few.

[charmian]

See, I just don't think that other platforms are monolithic, and I don't see why Tumblr, which has a lot of people using their real names, especially since there are so many people using it for professional reasons, and otherwise blogging under their RL identities, would be so much better to integrate with than FB?

[niqaeli]

I'm frankly confused by this because, honestly... I'm confused by the insistence that there is ever a single site culture. Inasmuch as there can be said to be one, it'd be the development culture. All the social networks you've mentioned for good or ill, I am fairly sure have far more complex userbases than can be boiled down into any single 'site culture'.

And I find myself baffled by the implication that Dreamwidth currently only has a single site culture, to be honest. Again, there's the dev/support culture -- and there's certainly some very strong fannish components but even those fannish components do not actually function as a single culture in my experience.

I think a lot comes down to both a different view of the site as it is and different desires for how it should funciton. I'd like to be able to use an interface that doesn't make my skin crawl to interact with other networks that, well, their interface does. There's some I'm not prepared to interact with at all, but others are not so far gone that I care to write off the audience and social circles that are available on them. Being able to carry out that interaction via my Dreamwidth is far and away my long-term dream for the site and service and has been from the start.

[charmian]

The point about a variety of cultures and norms on a single site is another really good point.

[damned_colonial]

I think there are kind of two layers to online community culture: 1) what's baked into the platform, and 2) how people use it.

Wrt DW's fundamental culture as a platform, I look at things like website copy, policies, and UI. The DW homepage tells me that the site supports and encourages creativity, for example. The policy docs around DMCA takedown notices reassure me that DW supports freedom of expression to the greatest extent they are able under law. The business model is based on subscriptions, not advertising, which means I needn't fear advertiser pressure to remove certain kinds of content, or that my content will be used to advertise things I disagree with. DW's signup process lets me create multiple accounts without asking for my legal name or making me specify a binary gender, and what little it does ask me (for legal or site operation reasons), it allows me to keep private. The posting interface offers readily-available controls for managing the privacy of my posts and how I want to handle comments. It also offers me a large text area to write in whenever I make a post or comment, along with a rich text editor (for those who want it), suggesting via the UI affordances that long-form posts and comments are welcome and expected.

All these things exist across the DW platform, regardless of what people are using DW for, or where they come from, or what social circles they move in once they get here. And yes, I think those choices at the platform level have a *strong* effect on the site's overall culture. People or groups can certainly buck it, but the platform does set expectations for how the site will commonly be used.

[niqaeli]

That would be, I suspect, the heart of my irritation -- it's not the fears expressed which I can sympathise with. But in the context of dw_suggestions, it becomes a matter of site policy for myself as well. So there, it isn't talking about how you yourself feel about whatever feature, but talking about what you believe site policy should be and how other people should be able to experience the site as well.

I was honestly startled to realise I had such a severe reaction to the whole notion. And if you reframe it out of being an issue of site policy and acknowledge it only as a social dynamics issue that crops up when those who blog under their meatspace name have social media links to those who blog pseudonymously, with serious implications for those blogging pseudonymously, the irritation pretty much melts away.

I guess basically I don't think the site policy should attempt to enforce social norms above and beyond eliminating/preventing genuine harassment. It strikes me as -- a bad way of going about it, all around.

[charmian]

Exactly, whether one is telling people how they should feel or not, one is telling people what they should be able to do. Certainly people may have strong opinions about how they should feel about something, but often their opinions about what they should be allowed to do are even stronger.

Yeah, I agree it is a problem, but I'm not sure if that problem is one that is DW's responsibility to deal with, and I don't think the solution is to limit interoperability, now that I've thought about it before.