On asking permission to link

[feuervogel]

A friend asked on the book of faces why some people on livejournal ask for permission to link/share on twitter/facebook, because "everything on the internet is public," so you should assume that people will link to your public content, and if you don't want to be linked, flock everything.

I said that an LJ/DW is semi-private/semi-public, with a generally known audience of a certain size, and linking widely opens the discussion to people who don't necessarily know the OP and can lead to harassment. Also some folks don't have the time or mental energy to dedicate to moderating a contentious comment section. Or they're just done talking about the subject and don't want to anymore.

He's got a few more questions based on my responses.

1. How often does this security by obscurity approach tend to leak in practice?

2. Who is your intended audience for public posts?

3. What steps do you take to make these social norms about linking known to visitors accustomed to the rather different norms that prevail in places like Twitter, Tumblr, and the traditional hyperlinked web?

Discuss. And, yes, feel free to link.

Comments

[kriski]

hm. i lock mostly everything. i used to have a couple of public entries with inconsequential or clearly fannish content, but that was years ago. these days i lock everything, exceptions to the rule are rare.

i personally wouldn't mind people linking to my public posts, seing as i posted them publicly with deliberation. but then again, i use this chanel for mostly private conversations with a select number of likeminded people. i am not an active fan anymore, so i haven't needed to formulate a policy on public entries that are public with the specific fannish audience in mind, but would also be open to the general public. my gut immediate reaction is, if i can't or don't want to handle the comments anymore, i'll just close the thread. no idea how feasible that policy actually IS for an active fannish content contributor. sorry, not much help there.

[ckd]

This is often described as the difference between "public" and "publicized". Other examples have included things like court records; if you have to physically go to the courthouse to read juicy divorce stories, you won't see as many as you will if they're all online...and the really juicy ones will get linked and go viral.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

I guess a piece of context for my question (Hi! Friend here. :) ) that might be relevant is that I'm fairly far on the "paranoid about computer privacy/security" end of the spectrum. I completely agree with you that (e.g.) putting court records online vastly changes the nature of how that information is likely to spread: I tend to believe that information shared publicly online will eventually "leak" and spread broadly (at least if it's interesting to someone: there probably isn't a broad audience for updates on my toddler's nap schedule). If that somehow doesn't happen, well, lucky you (but keep crossing your fingers: who knows what the masses will stumble upon next year).

The upshot of all that is that I'm reluctant to recognize a clear distinction between "public" and "publicized" for online data, whether divorce records or anything else. It's too easy for someone to wander through just in passing, and it's too easy for them to share, and it's too easy for the sharing to go viral. Which brings me back to my original question. By its very nature, LiveJournal is online data. If you post something publicly here and your blog is read by more than a couple of close friends (or their blogs are read by more than a couple of close friends), having an interesting post eventually "get publicized" seems pretty likely. Hence my question.

Mind you, all that is much less true if the online data is protected by some sort of password or login credential requirement. Sure, someone could still copy and paste your content, but that's always a more involved process than just sharing a link, and it's less likely that a well-meaning person would go that far. (And hey, if they did, at least your original blog wouldn't be the place all those strangers went to post comments.) So the odds of the usual exponential spreading are a lot lower if there's a password in the way.

That's why I've been especially surprised that it's LiveJournal where I've often run into the "ask before sharing" culture. One of the things I've always liked about the LJ platform (I've been a user for 10 years or so) is how easily it supports sharing a post with friends only (or even to share with a specific filter, or to set a default reading list that's not your full Friends list). So why is it here that this "public posts are really only meant for my friends" culture has become established, in one of the few places online that makes it easy to enforce that for real?

My thoughts on why culture is different here

[beth_leonard]

Unlike many of those other platforms, LJ also has a culture of pseudonyms. Asking if you can repost something originally posted under a pseudonym under your own real name makes sense to me. (Funny that I use my real name here and somewhat of a pseudonym on the site that requires real names... although people do introduce me at social gatherings as "Amber and Peter's Mom" so maybe that is my real name too.)

I don't reply to my brother-in-law's public posts under my real name in ways that mention our relationship out of courtesy. i.e. I say "That drawing is so cute." rather than "My niece's drawing is so cute." Likewise I don't repost them as "my brother-in-law says.." even though they're public.

Just my $0.02.
--Beth

[beth_leonard]

Other thoughts on the topic that aren't really responses to the specific question -- I leave posts public on LJ that I really only intend for friends, because sometimes those friends have friends-of-friends that they might want to pass the question on to. Especially with the political questions, I like it when people bring in subject matter experts or counter-examples to general statements. I'd rather not argue with the random folks who comment on everything Obama says on G+, but there is generally a lot of interesting discussion on Live Journal.

--Beth

[kirin]

Yeah, I think part of the paradox you point out (the culture of not-ever-really-public along side actual decent non-public posting tools) is... well, not a coincidence, but things that evolved from the same root culture, rather than either being a consequence of the other. And that longstanding root culture, from way back in the early days, is one of semi-anonymity and a general feeling of separation between this space and the "outside world". It's the same reason that the LJ community (and ex-LJ community) gets especially annoyed at any sort of real-name requirements, why marginalized creative communities (used to) gather here, and so on. So even though obscurity is not security, I don't find it odd at all that people who've grown up and/or spent a lot of time in these communities are especially careful about altering the context of someone else's content. A lot of people here display carefully managed identities with extremely variable overlap to what they display elsewhere - putting things into a different context is seen to weaken that choice of separation.

[corneredangel.livejournal.com]

2. Who is your intended audience for public posts?

Same as it's always been, since my Day 1 on LiveJournal, thirteen years ago. People who know me and who I know, and people who are interested in what I think and what I have to say because of who I am on the anime scene.