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

[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.