blamebrampton | LJ changes bring LJ musings ...

For my part, I'm not too perturbed about the Facebook and Twitter things, since a couple of my posts went a little viral over the last two years and exactly nothing bad happened as a result. But then, I live in the happy place of having no kids, working as a creative where everyone already thinks I am a little mad, not writing actual porn, and not being able to remember when my last flocked post was, because this is not the place where I post personal stuff.

So I won't be making a list of grumbles about what I'll do if ... because it doesn't really affect me.

But I still think LJ has made a major miscalculation. They've taken a step in the Google/Facebook direction, where the underlying sentiment is that if you want something to be private, it shouldn't be on the internet. I believe that LJ is misreading itself here. For every person who uses their LJ to communicate publicly, there is at least one who uses it to communicate privately. So while the first type of user is like me, where stories, ideas, rants and sometimes just rubbish form the content of posts, the second type of user is someone who is hoping to speak to a small group of people. They may be people that he or she knows and who are far away or busy, so LJ provides a useful forum, or perhaps they are looking for new people who can talk to them and make them feel less alone, which is something that each and every one of us has done at some point in our lives and not everyone has the luxury of a large family or peer group to find those people in.

So for those private people, what LJ has done here is said that your desires are less important than the desires of those who comment on your posts. Now there is a case to be made that comments made on an LJ belong to the commenter and not the poster (indeed, it's the reason I did not import comments to Dreamwidth when I copied much of my LJ over), but picking them up and taking them outside is like you making a phonecall in the middle of a private conversation we're having at my house, so that suddenly the conversation is you, me, and the West Dapto Basketball Team, which is not what I was expecting when I invited you round for a private chat about whether or not your herbal deodorant was working.

And again, when I say that, it's a joke, but for people who are dealing with serious issues, it's not.

For some people I know of on LJ, there are very serious issues indeed. I know of people who have had fandom issues cause them grief in everything from their marriages to working with children. The solution to that in the past has been to make their LJs wholly private, but this new setting removes that certainty of privacy from their hands to the hands of anyone they allow to comment on their posts, because any comment can include a quote, and now go immediately outside the flock.

It is true that in the past people could copy and paste from behind flock anyway, but it was not as easy, and not as certain to have come from the original poster.

So now we have a system where people are reliant on others not to be twats. Which I must say is often a safe thing to rely on, the vast majority of people being actually quite decent*. But in battles of child custody, or in serious investigations into the backgrounds of those wanting to work in many agencies, the rules are not the same.

Now it may be that I have the wrong end of the stick and that somewhere in the chaos that is LJ settings is a box marked: Hide me from Facebook and Twitter, for I care not for them! But I canna find it if it's there.

I do believe that it is something LJ will fix, because they seem to not be complete bastards (unlike Facebook), but I also believe it is something they should have not broken in the first place, and which a small amount of thought would have kept whole.

* In three years on LJ I seem to have attracted about three people who seem to hate me, which at one a year is not actually bad. It appears to bring them great joy. Bless!