(Untitled)

[shreena]

While I don't think that livejournal's latest facebook/twitter thing is very sensible on their part or useful, all it does is draw our attention to something that is already the case: that posting personal things on livejournal entails trusting your friends' list. Before this change, if I felt like it, I could have cut and pasted your innermost

Comments

[gnimmel]

Yes, I think this is more or less my view of the changes too.

[gnimmel]

Although having seen some more discussion elsewhere, I think there is a potential 'poor awareness of boundaries' issue; that is, someone deliberately linking a post to facebook to publicise it, because they think it raises useful points, without checking whether it's locked. I've seen people who I wouldn't want to defriend link on LJ to locked posts for this reason a few times. Obviously this is (accidental) privacy-breaching wherever it's done, but it ending up on facebook would probably be worse because people tend to have more in the way of work colleagues and family as facebook friends.

[absinthecity]

*nod* there's always the argument that if you don't want people to see it, don't post it. However LJ has historically nurtured a culture in which people do post stuff that's semi-private (its graded security function is now widely seen as LJ's "USP") and I think it's short-sighted of the owners to completely disregard that. It's worth noting as well that people do pay for it

[sparklielizard]

My thoughts too. People always could copy and paste. This is just another way to leak the contents of someone's journal. One person's rather threatening post to her friends list made me laugh because I know she's guilty of copy and paste when she shouldn't have before ;-)

[absinthecity]

*nod* totally. I'm quite tempted to "cull" the very people who've posted accusatory and suspicious entries threatening to get rid of readers who cross-post, because all it tells me is that they don't trust me.

The worry is far more about accidental cross-posting as I see it, and I think that's a reasonable concern.

[sparklielizard]

Heh - if I culled everyone who posted that, I think my friends list would halve ;-)

Is it really possible to accidentally cross-post though? Are people really that daft? I always liked to feel that LJ has a slightly brighter than average users - you've got to be fairly with it to understand, say, custom posts.

[absinthecity]

Most of my friends are chilled about it or haven't noticed/don't care, fortunately.

I think you're probably right, but I guess it only has to happen once on an "I didn't know you were looking for a job" type comment to mess with someone's life...it's stuff in communities where you don't necessarily know the general level of intelligence (and may be specifically requesting this sort of advice) that will probably be the most problematic.

As ever though, all this tells us is that we all need to get lives and stop asking for help from strangers on the internet (joke).

[blue_mai]

I agree and think there's a bit of unnecessary alarm going on, although that's also because it's not entirely clear what one side can do without the other's consent and so on. There is fairly regular linking and discussion of posts within LJ, but I don't think I've seen much that takes it outside (not from people I read anyway), and it's obvious that pretty much everyone on my friendslist uses it as a personal site. There's already an observed etiquette about not linking pseudonyms and real names, it seems to work

[shreena]

It's not as simple as just clicking one button - which I agree would be easy to do accidentally - from what I've read (I haven't tested this personally) you have to click again to confirm and also you'd have to be logged into Facebook and/or Twitter at the same time. Which would be possible to do accidentally but I think it would be highly, highly, unlikely.

[shreena]

Or, in short, if you're worried about it - as long as you're logged out of Facebook/Twitter on the browser that you use for LJ (you could use a different browser for them entirely), there is no way even if you did accidentally click once and then again to confirm, that you would end up posting anything on Facebook/Twitter.