hello from the other side! (dreamwidth, that is)
Hey! I'm trying out crossposting from Dreamwidth. Augh, learning curve! So yes, anyway, I'm one of the 9000+ people who created new DW accounts on Wednesday. I haven't worked out yet how I'll use the two journals--for right now I don't plan to disappear from LJ, but depending on what they do about the Facebook/Twitter thing I might have to change where people can leave comments. Another thing to think about while I'm on vacation!
So, first thing: I don't know who among my friends over here has a DW account. I'd love to add you to my circle if you have one! Either comment or just add me to yours so I can find you?
It probably goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: I would never cross-post a comment on any LJ post, public or private, to any other location. I don't believe any of my friends would do that either. I feel like although we know each other to different degrees, we're all pretty much on the same page as far as maturity and common sense.
The real concerns I have are about a couple of other aspects of this thing:
First, if you're a writer and you want to share your work, those posts generally need to be public. I'm happy having my stories accessible to the LJ community and to anyone else who happens to discover and enjoy it. But all it takes is one well-meaning but naive person to crosspost a comment on a story to Facebook to open the door to all manner of trolling--from people's conservative relatives getting up in arms about what they're reading to dogpiles of Facebook bullies trolling just because they can.
In the past, there was at least the obstacle of needing to register on LJ to keep random trolls from posting comments. But as of a few days ago, that barrier is gone for all 50 million+ Facebook users. They're now "registered users" and don't have to even know what LJ is to come in and comment. If you have any concerns about that at all, the alternatives seem to be to allow no commenting, or "friends only" commenting, or get the hell off LJ entirely. I hate all of these options, so I'm hoping that LJ will change the policy and allow us to ban crossposting on an entry, period.
My fic isn't particularly controversial (at least I don't think it is), but many people write about subjects that are sensitive and do it here because they know that the LJ TOS as well as the culture of LJ users makes it a safer space to do that. Crossposting potentially exposes those writers to a bunch of people who otherwise would never know they exist, and gives any random FB user a direct link to the controversial story and automatic posting rights. The potential for that to lead to abuse and harassment is very, very concerning to me.
Facebook itself has proven over and over that they can't be trusted with anyone's information. They're explicitly anti-privacy, and their TOS and privacy rules are constantly changing as they come up with new ways to mine and sell every piece of data that people allow to be put there.
The fact that there are maybe 2 people on Facebook who could post a link to my LJ that would be seen by others I know in RL is immaterial--the real issue is, Facebook is a massive data-mining operation disguised as a social network. Whatever the current terms are of the LJ/Facebook integration, Facebook has demonstrated that they will change the terms in their own favor at any time. Given the way this was rolled out, LJ's owners are looking extremely naive with respect to privacy issues, and how sensitive people are to Facebook's reputation for dishonest privacy policies.
My concern isn't just with the implications of the current arrangement, but with what it will become in the future. Facebook's entire reason for existence is to collect every data point it can about you and sell it. That's what it was invented to do. To get that done, they need to break through whatever barriers you think you've put up around your private things. The fact that this was rolled out with no information available about how this affects the TOS and privacy policies of LJ says to me that it was done thoughtlessly--we don't actually know if this deal has given Facebook access to our private LJ registration data, or the history of pages we've visited, or any other mineable information about our LJ use. The fact that something so basic to our privacy is unknown is really troubling and says a lot about how poorly-conceived this is.
Anyway! This is a useful event for me because it inspired me to take action on a couple of things I'd been meaning to do:
(1) delete my Facebook profile, which I've struggled to keep private to the point where it's useless, yet keeps showing up randomly when I try to do unrelated things, like use Yelp. Why does Yelp want to attach itself to my Facebook? So Facebook can gather data about what I'm searching for on Yelp and sell it to service providers to start spamming me! That's the evil genius of Jeff Zuckerberg at work.
(2) learn to use DW and start collecting a circle over here.
(3) create an account at An Archive of Our Own for my fic.
Of course this burst of activity coincides with me being about to leave on vacation, so we'll see how far I get. Still, progress?
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there.
So, first thing: I don't know who among my friends over here has a DW account. I'd love to add you to my circle if you have one! Either comment or just add me to yours so I can find you?
It probably goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: I would never cross-post a comment on any LJ post, public or private, to any other location. I don't believe any of my friends would do that either. I feel like although we know each other to different degrees, we're all pretty much on the same page as far as maturity and common sense.
The real concerns I have are about a couple of other aspects of this thing:
First, if you're a writer and you want to share your work, those posts generally need to be public. I'm happy having my stories accessible to the LJ community and to anyone else who happens to discover and enjoy it. But all it takes is one well-meaning but naive person to crosspost a comment on a story to Facebook to open the door to all manner of trolling--from people's conservative relatives getting up in arms about what they're reading to dogpiles of Facebook bullies trolling just because they can.
In the past, there was at least the obstacle of needing to register on LJ to keep random trolls from posting comments. But as of a few days ago, that barrier is gone for all 50 million+ Facebook users. They're now "registered users" and don't have to even know what LJ is to come in and comment. If you have any concerns about that at all, the alternatives seem to be to allow no commenting, or "friends only" commenting, or get the hell off LJ entirely. I hate all of these options, so I'm hoping that LJ will change the policy and allow us to ban crossposting on an entry, period.
My fic isn't particularly controversial (at least I don't think it is), but many people write about subjects that are sensitive and do it here because they know that the LJ TOS as well as the culture of LJ users makes it a safer space to do that. Crossposting potentially exposes those writers to a bunch of people who otherwise would never know they exist, and gives any random FB user a direct link to the controversial story and automatic posting rights. The potential for that to lead to abuse and harassment is very, very concerning to me.
Facebook itself has proven over and over that they can't be trusted with anyone's information. They're explicitly anti-privacy, and their TOS and privacy rules are constantly changing as they come up with new ways to mine and sell every piece of data that people allow to be put there.
The fact that there are maybe 2 people on Facebook who could post a link to my LJ that would be seen by others I know in RL is immaterial--the real issue is, Facebook is a massive data-mining operation disguised as a social network. Whatever the current terms are of the LJ/Facebook integration, Facebook has demonstrated that they will change the terms in their own favor at any time. Given the way this was rolled out, LJ's owners are looking extremely naive with respect to privacy issues, and how sensitive people are to Facebook's reputation for dishonest privacy policies.
My concern isn't just with the implications of the current arrangement, but with what it will become in the future. Facebook's entire reason for existence is to collect every data point it can about you and sell it. That's what it was invented to do. To get that done, they need to break through whatever barriers you think you've put up around your private things. The fact that this was rolled out with no information available about how this affects the TOS and privacy policies of LJ says to me that it was done thoughtlessly--we don't actually know if this deal has given Facebook access to our private LJ registration data, or the history of pages we've visited, or any other mineable information about our LJ use. The fact that something so basic to our privacy is unknown is really troubling and says a lot about how poorly-conceived this is.
Anyway! This is a useful event for me because it inspired me to take action on a couple of things I'd been meaning to do:
(1) delete my Facebook profile, which I've struggled to keep private to the point where it's useless, yet keeps showing up randomly when I try to do unrelated things, like use Yelp. Why does Yelp want to attach itself to my Facebook? So Facebook can gather data about what I'm searching for on Yelp and sell it to service providers to start spamming me! That's the evil genius of Jeff Zuckerberg at work.
(2) learn to use DW and start collecting a circle over here.
(3) create an account at An Archive of Our Own for my fic.
Of course this burst of activity coincides with me being about to leave on vacation, so we'll see how far I get. Still, progress?
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there.