Why I'm Switching to Dreamwidth, OR The tree that broke the already-overburdened camel's back
I've been thinking about the whole Facebook integration thing, and it continues to trouble me.
I've been poking around Dreamwidth more, and think I'll be moving to that as my primary journal site over the next few months, possibly continuing to repost here withocomments disabled. I've had an account over there for a year (silversliver.dreamwidth.org), since the last time lj did something egregious. I just haven't used it much.
Dreamwidth reminds me of the lj I got to know and love nearly 10 years ago. I would probably not sign up with Livejournal if I were starting a new journal today. What has kept me here for the last ... 5 years? as LJ has transitioned from a community-oriented small operation to a major commercial venture has been my history here. Making entries for momentous parts of my life for 5 years was a pretty big anchor; the magnitude of poor business decisions and shift away from a community orientation were still minor to me, and there was a distinct lack of fully-featured alternatives.
Over the last few years, though, LJ's missteps with the original core user-base have been increasingly severe: Ads were introduced for non-paid accounts. There were questions of intellectual property: who owns the content users produce and post on LJ? They suspended and deleted accounts en masse without investigation when an unrelated religious group reported a problem. They deleted content which was legal but in potentially questionable taste and banned the posting users while a) claiming it was illegal, and b) not addressing reported users writing non-fiction accounts of similar activities. There have been privacy breaches. And now a permanent privacy breach has been implemented: Facebook integrations that do not permit the original poster to relay "Hey, please don't be a dick and put this on Facebook" except by explicit request. For FB-integrated users, the button is always there on your content, locked or not, and if their comment is cross-posted FB can pick up and repost parts of unlocked entries. Word on the comment threads is the code for adding a FB "Like" button is already in place but hasn't gone live. That shit is insult to injury.
The permanence and persistence of this social media culture, and the movement from anonymized persistent handles to Real Names, is part of why I admire 4chan and probably the key to its persistence: its complete and utter commitment to anonymity. Personally, I like handles. There is a sense of permanence to it and we're not necessarily going to *poof* out of existence, but there is also an anonymity to it and a freedom that doesn't happen when I believe I may run into my boss at any moment.
So then came along Dreamwidth. Open beta started about a year and a half ago. I made an account after whatever fiasco happened last August, but ignored it mostly. Now, I've been spending a little more time there and it's... nice. Like Canada-nice. The owners and many staff came from LJ, signed to the promise of dw as LJ started to implode, and care about it being completely user-supported community. Their diversity statement is awesome. The free service loads quickly, even in the last few days as the userbase is exploding with people fleeing LJ. Paid service is slightly more expensive than LJ, but I think it will be worth it.
Long story short, I see myself making the switch, letting my paid LJ time lapse. After I lose the benefits of paid status, I doubt I'll be logging in to LJ much if at all. That happens near Christmas, but I'd rather take the switch in pieces so I can do a little at a time, lazily and be finished for the holidays. I have a few invite codes if anyone wants to see what the fuss is about. If you're already there, look me up under the same name.
The commentary below is reposted from A particularly erudite Newspost Comment under blanket permission. Feel free to re-repost with or without attribution to the OP. Don't credit me 'cuz it's not my words. It clearly outlines my problems with the current FB integration model and the direction of LJ's management as a commercial for-profit company.
The key issues
1. Anyone who wants to can now crosspost their entries and their comments on YOUR entries, even friends-locked entries, even if you have comments screened, to Facebook and Twitter. It doesn't even have to be malicious; an accidental or careless click is all it takes.
You cannot stop them from doing this, and you WILL NOT EVEN KNOW they are doing it.
2. This also means that if you comment on a journal or community, that journal's owner OR any other community member could reply to you, post that reply to Twitbook, and reveal the comm's existence and your username to Facetwits everywhere. And again, you won't know and won't be able to prevent this.
3. Anyone with a FaceTwit account, regardless of whether they have an LJ account or not, can follow said links and, if the post is public, drop into the conversation. You can't prevent them barging into the conversation except by f-locking your posts; disabling anon comments won't work.
4. If you do choose to enable this connect feature, your REAL NAME from Facebook will automatically appear in your LJ profile. There is NO way to change this except to turn the feature off.
***
But if you don't link YOUR journal to Twitter or Facebook, no problem, right?
Wrong. Anyone who has them linked can out your presence on LJ on purpose or on accident. Whether YOU have YOUR account linked makes no difference.
Won't it be fine if LJ just takes away the option to repost comments on locked entries?
I don't think they will do that, but even if they did, NO. Not for those of us who don't want Facebook to know we have a journal at all. Just what we need -- our business contacts, bosses, casual acquaintances, stalker exes, whoever, all finding our journals where we write things they were never intended to see, in a journal we never told them about because we had good reason not to. "Oh, look, Mare has a profile. What's this hw_reqs thing? *clicks* HOLY CRAP! What kind of pervert reads this?!!" You know -- not to mention that lots of us are members of abuse-survivor comms or other VERY personal groups.
Yeah. Just what we want.
Well, why not just take anyone you can't trust off your friends list? Problem solved!
1. I post art and I write fic. I don't want to f-lock everything. 2. I don't want to have to ditch my communities for fear that someone will crosspost their replies to me. 3. Do you know how Facebook works? Facebook sends bots into its users' personal email accounts, gets all the addresses it can find, matches them up and alerts people to each other's presence -- all without their knowledge or consent. I am convinced it's merely a matter of time before they do the same with Livejournal accounts, and literally send invitations to people on Facebook to "Come check out Livejournal! Your friend LJuser Fullname is already there as incognito_user12!"
In short, Facebook and LJ, not my friends, are the problem.
Well, why not stay until they address the issues instead of just leaving?
Even if they do mitigate some of the damage (and I don't think they will), that's like avoiding getting hit by the 5:10 train and therefore figuring it's okay to lie down and sleep on the tracks. LJ has a record of doing stupid things to its users and then alerting us after the fact. When the next train comes through, I'll be over there where it's safer.
Oh, and there's also the fact that, as this UK news video explains, SUP is turning LJ into a giant advertising platform.
This is only going to keep getting worse.
Editing to add: feel free to copy-paste this anywhere on LJ with or without attribution. Elsewhere on the web, post all you like, but please don't credit me. :-)
I've been poking around Dreamwidth more, and think I'll be moving to that as my primary journal site over the next few months, possibly continuing to repost here withocomments disabled. I've had an account over there for a year (silversliver.dreamwidth.org), since the last time lj did something egregious. I just haven't used it much.
Dreamwidth reminds me of the lj I got to know and love nearly 10 years ago. I would probably not sign up with Livejournal if I were starting a new journal today. What has kept me here for the last ... 5 years? as LJ has transitioned from a community-oriented small operation to a major commercial venture has been my history here. Making entries for momentous parts of my life for 5 years was a pretty big anchor; the magnitude of poor business decisions and shift away from a community orientation were still minor to me, and there was a distinct lack of fully-featured alternatives.
Over the last few years, though, LJ's missteps with the original core user-base have been increasingly severe: Ads were introduced for non-paid accounts. There were questions of intellectual property: who owns the content users produce and post on LJ? They suspended and deleted accounts en masse without investigation when an unrelated religious group reported a problem. They deleted content which was legal but in potentially questionable taste and banned the posting users while a) claiming it was illegal, and b) not addressing reported users writing non-fiction accounts of similar activities. There have been privacy breaches. And now a permanent privacy breach has been implemented: Facebook integrations that do not permit the original poster to relay "Hey, please don't be a dick and put this on Facebook" except by explicit request. For FB-integrated users, the button is always there on your content, locked or not, and if their comment is cross-posted FB can pick up and repost parts of unlocked entries. Word on the comment threads is the code for adding a FB "Like" button is already in place but hasn't gone live. That shit is insult to injury.
The permanence and persistence of this social media culture, and the movement from anonymized persistent handles to Real Names, is part of why I admire 4chan and probably the key to its persistence: its complete and utter commitment to anonymity. Personally, I like handles. There is a sense of permanence to it and we're not necessarily going to *poof* out of existence, but there is also an anonymity to it and a freedom that doesn't happen when I believe I may run into my boss at any moment.
So then came along Dreamwidth. Open beta started about a year and a half ago. I made an account after whatever fiasco happened last August, but ignored it mostly. Now, I've been spending a little more time there and it's... nice. Like Canada-nice. The owners and many staff came from LJ, signed to the promise of dw as LJ started to implode, and care about it being completely user-supported community. Their diversity statement is awesome. The free service loads quickly, even in the last few days as the userbase is exploding with people fleeing LJ. Paid service is slightly more expensive than LJ, but I think it will be worth it.
Long story short, I see myself making the switch, letting my paid LJ time lapse. After I lose the benefits of paid status, I doubt I'll be logging in to LJ much if at all. That happens near Christmas, but I'd rather take the switch in pieces so I can do a little at a time, lazily and be finished for the holidays. I have a few invite codes if anyone wants to see what the fuss is about. If you're already there, look me up under the same name.
The commentary below is reposted from A particularly erudite Newspost Comment under blanket permission. Feel free to re-repost with or without attribution to the OP. Don't credit me 'cuz it's not my words. It clearly outlines my problems with the current FB integration model and the direction of LJ's management as a commercial for-profit company.
The key issues
1. Anyone who wants to can now crosspost their entries and their comments on YOUR entries, even friends-locked entries, even if you have comments screened, to Facebook and Twitter. It doesn't even have to be malicious; an accidental or careless click is all it takes.
You cannot stop them from doing this, and you WILL NOT EVEN KNOW they are doing it.
2. This also means that if you comment on a journal or community, that journal's owner OR any other community member could reply to you, post that reply to Twitbook, and reveal the comm's existence and your username to Facetwits everywhere. And again, you won't know and won't be able to prevent this.
3. Anyone with a FaceTwit account, regardless of whether they have an LJ account or not, can follow said links and, if the post is public, drop into the conversation. You can't prevent them barging into the conversation except by f-locking your posts; disabling anon comments won't work.
4. If you do choose to enable this connect feature, your REAL NAME from Facebook will automatically appear in your LJ profile. There is NO way to change this except to turn the feature off.
***
But if you don't link YOUR journal to Twitter or Facebook, no problem, right?
Wrong. Anyone who has them linked can out your presence on LJ on purpose or on accident. Whether YOU have YOUR account linked makes no difference.
Won't it be fine if LJ just takes away the option to repost comments on locked entries?
I don't think they will do that, but even if they did, NO. Not for those of us who don't want Facebook to know we have a journal at all. Just what we need -- our business contacts, bosses, casual acquaintances, stalker exes, whoever, all finding our journals where we write things they were never intended to see, in a journal we never told them about because we had good reason not to. "Oh, look, Mare has a profile. What's this hw_reqs thing? *clicks* HOLY CRAP! What kind of pervert reads this?!!" You know -- not to mention that lots of us are members of abuse-survivor comms or other VERY personal groups.
Yeah. Just what we want.
Well, why not just take anyone you can't trust off your friends list? Problem solved!
1. I post art and I write fic. I don't want to f-lock everything. 2. I don't want to have to ditch my communities for fear that someone will crosspost their replies to me. 3. Do you know how Facebook works? Facebook sends bots into its users' personal email accounts, gets all the addresses it can find, matches them up and alerts people to each other's presence -- all without their knowledge or consent. I am convinced it's merely a matter of time before they do the same with Livejournal accounts, and literally send invitations to people on Facebook to "Come check out Livejournal! Your friend LJuser Fullname is already there as incognito_user12!"
In short, Facebook and LJ, not my friends, are the problem.
Well, why not stay until they address the issues instead of just leaving?
Even if they do mitigate some of the damage (and I don't think they will), that's like avoiding getting hit by the 5:10 train and therefore figuring it's okay to lie down and sleep on the tracks. LJ has a record of doing stupid things to its users and then alerting us after the fact. When the next train comes through, I'll be over there where it's safer.
Oh, and there's also the fact that, as this UK news video explains, SUP is turning LJ into a giant advertising platform.
This is only going to keep getting worse.
Editing to add: feel free to copy-paste this anywhere on LJ with or without attribution. Elsewhere on the web, post all you like, but please don't credit me. :-)