Musings on the "Friends" feature
Mar. 6th, 2004 02:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
triskellianI've been intermittently following the debate about the LJ "friends" feature that's developed since invitation codes were done away with, and LJ became a free-for-all. Lots of people seem to have got upset that LJ is no longer exclusive, and 'just anyone' can now get an account, but The Management have said over and over that the original intention of the site was not to be exclusive, and that invitation codes were always meant as a temporary solution to some technical problems to do with the size of the supportable user-base, so IMO, that's a non-issue.
The reason this has developed into an argument about the "friends" feature is that many of the people who are now able to freely create accounts are "serial adders" - people who just wander around LJ, randomly "friending" people in large numbers. Some of the people thus "friended" take great offence at this, and demand to be defriended (I've got bored of putting quotation marks around the word. Just imagine them there for the rest of this post, OK?), to the great entertainment of the adders. The adders don't seem to be actually reading the journals of the people they've friended, and, judging by some of the outraged comments I've read, they're also adding friends-only journals which they couldn't read if they wanted to.
The anti-serial-adders people want control over what shows up on their own userinfo page, perhaps because they've been added by someone with an offensive username, and they don't want to just hide their Friends Of list; they don't want people to think they're somehow associated with the unwanted adders, and, in lots of cases, they want some extra level of control over who reads their journal. The last bit is the one that surprises me. They don't want to make their whole journal friends-only, but they do want to stop John Q Ljuser from reading their journal via his own friends page. Huh? They know that he can still go to their actual journal page, or use an RSS thingie to make something that looks just like an LJ friends page, they just don't want him having them on his friends page.
Inevitably, the whole things gets mixed up with the ongoing problem of the nomenclature, and the baggage that the word "friends" carries around with it. Then there's the dual function of friends - they're the people who show up on your friendspage for easy reading (this person is entertaining, I'd like to easily see what they write), and they're the people you trust with your friends-locked posts (this person is trustworthy, I don't mind them reading my personal stuff), and although for many people these two groups will be quite similar, for many others, they're not at all.
I don't think I'm hung up on the use of the word "friends". I think I'm pretty much aware that it means something different from when I use it in the real world to refer to the people I like hanging out with. It being something different doesn't mean it doesn't have its own set of stuff to get hung up on, though. There's always a little bit of disappointment if I add someone new, and they don't add me back, always a little feeling of joy when someone new adds me, and changing the name isn't going to remove those things. For the most part, I add people back when they add me, just because, actually, it makes little difference to whether or not I read their journal. I read, with varying frequency, lots of journals that aren't on my own friendslist, and I don't always read everything that does appear on my friends page. I read friendsfriends. I read other people's friends pages. There are people whose journals I read often and enjoy who I haven't added, and I fairly frequently post in the journals of people I haven't friended and who haven't friended me. Usually, I preface these comments with something like "I'm just wandering by on friendsfriends, and I wanted to say...", and I almost always get a friendly and welcoming response.
With the trusted part of the friends feature, I do two things. I use a bog-standard friendslock on anything work-related. I don't much care who reads those posts, as long as I can be reasonably sure none of my colleagues are. For actually personal stuff, or stuff I'm self-conscious about, I have an assortment of filters of various groups of people, most of whom are actual friends in the RL sense of the word (and I try to make a point of listing the people in the filter when I use it). And I have a bunch of single-person filters, but that's getting away from journalling, and towards IM- or email-type functions, so it's not really relevant.
It's looking as if the friends feature will be split into those two areas, with names like "trusted" and "read", and I'm wondering if I'll change how I use it when the names are changed. All the people on my current list are likely to stay on both, because if I don't trust person A with a specific piece of information, I make a filter so they don't see it. But I'm thinking about going off and adding all those exciting and interesting people I see on other people's friends lists to my "reading" list, to save me the dreadful hard work of the extra click or two it takes to get to them now, and then wondering why I don't just add them now, since the way I use locks and filters means nothing particularly sensitive is ever going to end up accidentally revealed because I didn't think of the consequences of friending someone.
ETA: (I remembered I was going to say this just as I'd turned my computer off) this rambling comes partly from a conversation with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
secretrebel, killalla, metame, ao_lai, cin1607and thebratqueen, the last of whom is one of those people who I've been reading even though she hasn't been on my friendslist ;-)
And on that note, I'm going to have to finish, with all sorts of thoughts left unwritten, because I have to go pack up my Regency kit and head into London for a dance :-)
The reason this has developed into an argument about the "friends" feature is that many of the people who are now able to freely create accounts are "serial adders" - people who just wander around LJ, randomly "friending" people in large numbers. Some of the people thus "friended" take great offence at this, and demand to be defriended (I've got bored of putting quotation marks around the word. Just imagine them there for the rest of this post, OK?), to the great entertainment of the adders. The adders don't seem to be actually reading the journals of the people they've friended, and, judging by some of the outraged comments I've read, they're also adding friends-only journals which they couldn't read if they wanted to.
The anti-serial-adders people want control over what shows up on their own userinfo page, perhaps because they've been added by someone with an offensive username, and they don't want to just hide their Friends Of list; they don't want people to think they're somehow associated with the unwanted adders, and, in lots of cases, they want some extra level of control over who reads their journal. The last bit is the one that surprises me. They don't want to make their whole journal friends-only, but they do want to stop John Q Ljuser from reading their journal via his own friends page. Huh? They know that he can still go to their actual journal page, or use an RSS thingie to make something that looks just like an LJ friends page, they just don't want him having them on his friends page.
Inevitably, the whole things gets mixed up with the ongoing problem of the nomenclature, and the baggage that the word "friends" carries around with it. Then there's the dual function of friends - they're the people who show up on your friendspage for easy reading (this person is entertaining, I'd like to easily see what they write), and they're the people you trust with your friends-locked posts (this person is trustworthy, I don't mind them reading my personal stuff), and although for many people these two groups will be quite similar, for many others, they're not at all.
I don't think I'm hung up on the use of the word "friends". I think I'm pretty much aware that it means something different from when I use it in the real world to refer to the people I like hanging out with. It being something different doesn't mean it doesn't have its own set of stuff to get hung up on, though. There's always a little bit of disappointment if I add someone new, and they don't add me back, always a little feeling of joy when someone new adds me, and changing the name isn't going to remove those things. For the most part, I add people back when they add me, just because, actually, it makes little difference to whether or not I read their journal. I read, with varying frequency, lots of journals that aren't on my own friendslist, and I don't always read everything that does appear on my friends page. I read friendsfriends. I read other people's friends pages. There are people whose journals I read often and enjoy who I haven't added, and I fairly frequently post in the journals of people I haven't friended and who haven't friended me. Usually, I preface these comments with something like "I'm just wandering by on friendsfriends, and I wanted to say...", and I almost always get a friendly and welcoming response.
With the trusted part of the friends feature, I do two things. I use a bog-standard friendslock on anything work-related. I don't much care who reads those posts, as long as I can be reasonably sure none of my colleagues are. For actually personal stuff, or stuff I'm self-conscious about, I have an assortment of filters of various groups of people, most of whom are actual friends in the RL sense of the word (and I try to make a point of listing the people in the filter when I use it). And I have a bunch of single-person filters, but that's getting away from journalling, and towards IM- or email-type functions, so it's not really relevant.
It's looking as if the friends feature will be split into those two areas, with names like "trusted" and "read", and I'm wondering if I'll change how I use it when the names are changed. All the people on my current list are likely to stay on both, because if I don't trust person A with a specific piece of information, I make a filter so they don't see it. But I'm thinking about going off and adding all those exciting and interesting people I see on other people's friends lists to my "reading" list, to save me the dreadful hard work of the extra click or two it takes to get to them now, and then wondering why I don't just add them now, since the way I use locks and filters means nothing particularly sensitive is ever going to end up accidentally revealed because I didn't think of the consequences of friending someone.
ETA: (I remembered I was going to say this just as I'd turned my computer off) this rambling comes partly from a conversation with
secretrebel, killalla, metame, ao_lai, cin1607and thebratqueen, the last of whom is one of those people who I've been reading even though she hasn't been on my friendslist ;-) And on that note, I'm going to have to finish, with all sorts of thoughts left unwritten, because I have to go pack up my Regency kit and head into London for a dance :-)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Serial Adders
Date: 2004-03-06 03:19 pm (UTC)The thing that confuses me about this is that all his posts are "friends only", which does raise the question of why he has 602 of them...
Re: Serial Adders
Date: 2004-03-08 09:10 am (UTC)