forthwritten | to cross-post, or not to cross-post

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to cross-post, or not to cross-post

I'm currently debating how much involvement I want to have with LJ.

no_lj_ads has a pretty thorough summary, as does damned_colonial. I am becoming more and more uncomfortable with giving LJ my content. I'm unhappy with the way they roll out code (such as affiliate link hijacking or the gender identity you can choose to state) then furiously backpedals when someone notices. I like transparency and discussion and openness; I like that DW solicits user opinions and tells us about upcoming changes (such as with cross-site reading and changes to the update page) and DW is pretty much the place that I like and feel comfortable hanging out. In contrast, LJ is becoming the place where I don't feel comfortable or welcome but will go to see my friends.

So anyway: if I stop cross-posting, is anyone going to miss it? Comments are open on the LJ entry.

In other news,

liv is hosting a giant non-fandom friending meme. There are loads of interesting people posting (hello new people!) and you should totes read/post there if you're looking for new people to read on DW.

ETA: Something

liv does is post a weekly list of DW posts at her LJ (example) - would this work for LJ people?

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I would really miss it. I would scoot over to DW to see you, but to be honest, probably not on as regular a basis as I check LJ.

For me, I do understand that people feel alienated, exploited and ignored by LJ. But I really, really appreciate the community that I have on LJ, and I don't want to break that up by moving over here.

And I genuinely don't mind the way that the LJ site is run. It's a company, I am buying a service off them and they have a perfect right to monetise their offering. I would like them to be perfectly gender-sensitive, but few private companies are, tbh. None of the 'gates' have impacted on me or even annoyed me in any way. Sorry, I just can't share the outrage, and I really don't want to risk losing a very precious space for the sake of a set of abstract principles that I don't subscribe to.

Obviously, though, I don't want you to post somewhere that you don't trust. Ultimately, you have to make the decision that's best for you.

You're one of the people I'd miss most.

Breaking up that community is one of the things I find most wrenching about this decision. I'm thinking about posting a weekly set of links directing people to DW posts so they get alerted that I have posted, but my content isn't on LJ servers. Would that work for you? And obviously I'll keep my account so I can read and comment on my flist's entries.

I think what I object to is them changing people's content. I paid so I could have greater control over my content and how it's presented; changing affiliate links is fundamentally against that. The decisions they've made about advertising may not affect me now, but I rather suspect that they will in the future and will become even more intrusive.
I don't like the feeling of apprehension I have when LJ announces something, and for me that kind of swings it from something I'm prepared to tolerate to something I'm not comfortable with.

Aww, thank you.

The list of links would definitely work for me, if you felt comfortable with it and also if you didn't feel it was extra work and hassle.

Oddly enough, one of the reasons I don't want to move to DW and cross-post, as I know some people have done who haven't wanted to move away from LJ but who also want to keep up with DW friends, is that I don't want to duplicate my content all over the net. It's not that I trust LJ more than DW, but at least with LJ I know where my content is. I have too many social networking profiles that I don't use and should delete as it is.

I would definitely miss you. Although as I'm probably moving myself over at some point soon, it might not affect me, or not for long, anyway.

Also, re the damn-colonial's post, that's all very well if you're doing the journalling thing to meet new internet people, but I'm not. The vast, vast majority of people on my LJ are RL friends who I want to keep up with, and I'm not going to just drift away from them in real life because they won't move with me on the iternet.

Yes, ditto to this, also. I don't want to move city (to use damn_colonial's metaphor); I've done that far too often in real life already, and my LJ circle of friends has been the one source of stability.

I would like to move over to doing what forthwritten currently does, blogging on DW and feeding it to LJ. But this would really only be something I do for a while to set a good example in the hopes that the people I want to continue to have on my flist, in time and with encouragement, follow. I'd like to trailblaize and get people to move with me, but if years passed and nothing changed, and all my friends were still on LJ, I'd probably move back.

I do get what you and

glitzfrau are saying. I think what's nudging me away from LJ is that many of the offline friends I have on there have stopped using LJ and mainly use facebook. Offline and online communication aren't as melded on it as they used to be.

*waves* hi, new person here via the friending meme. i'm mulling over the same questions right now, facing the same problem: i want to vote with my feet/put my money where my mouth is, but at the same time there are personal ties to people who don't mind LJ. it's a conundrum.

*waves back* hi! Yes, it's a difficult decision to make (witness me tying myself in knots over it).

I think I'm going to carry on cross-posting and reading LJ with the same frequency as I do DW - which means carrying on as I am now. I always have a DW tab and an LJ tab open in my browser. I'm in the process of removing people who solely post on DW from my LJ flist, but there are a lot of people on my LJ flist who have no intentions of moving over to DW, and I don't want to stop reading them.

damned_colonial's post is interesting, but I don't know if I like the moving city metaphor. I didn't move to DW because I wanted new friends, I moved because I appreciate the politics and thought behind DW. I have RL friends whose politics I don't understand or agree with, but we still manage to rub along reasonably well. Given that my only involvement with LJ is basically reading my flist, and I don't give them any money anymore, I figure it's a bit like hanging out in a city square that I don't like very much, but that is central, but I have no reason to complain about the reasons for not liking because it isn't a city in the control of the council who gets my tax money. Or something.

"I always have a DW tab and an LJ tab open in my browser"

Same here. I wouldn't stop reading or commenting at LJ, but I'm getting increasingly uncomfortable with giving them my content. I suppose I feel a bit differently about it because I paid for a perm account - which I happily used for years and don't feel resentment about purchasing, but at the same time I feel sad that I'm using a service I wouldn't choose to financially support now.

I kind of get the city metaphor, probably because I recently did this. I don't see it as swapping one group of friends for another or as people being interchangeable, but rather as somewhere different offering you the chance to make new connections and friendships.

I can see how having a permanent account would make this a more highly charged quandary for you. I moved over to DW permanently when my paid account ran out and, at the ground level, put my money into a different system run by different people but, for me, for the same net gain.

I feel a little bit curmudgeonly because my immediate response to somewhere different offering you the chance to make new connections and friendships went "but I don't want to! I like my old friends!" It's less of an actual truthful reaction, and more a feeling of being a bit overwhelmed right now, and having enough trouble keeping up with the friends I have.

I think it's a different quandary - at least it means that, in the immediate future, my readers will see adverts for DATE HOT ASIAN WOMEN and EXOTIC MAIL ORDER ASIAN BRIDES on entries discussing my Asian identity. I think I'd be much more eager to change my presence at LJ if that was a factor.

LJ actually reminds me a little of living in halls, where you had the choice to meet someone either in a public place (a pub or a cafe) or in your bedroom. There wasn't really an option if you liked someone enough to want to get to know them outside a pub or cafe but not want them in your bedroom, and it was a way of socialising that I was profoundly unhappy with. In my laboured analogy, LJ has the option of interacting with someone in communities (a cafe or pub) or friending them and so allowing them access to your journal (inviting them to your bedroom).
In contrast, being able to subscribe to someone/have them subscribe to you feels a bit like inviting someone round to your house for tea or dinner without feeling obliged to let them into your more private spaces. Thinking about it, it offers a different way of interacting with people that I feel much more comfortable with.

And yes, I have felt overwhelmed by it before, even with my quite gentle easing into it.

I loathe content generated advertising. I can understand that it makes a good business model, but ye gods and small fishes it makes my skin crawl. And that's without me having to try and work out what types of advertising posts about my identity would bring up.

I think your analogy works well. (It also made me realise how atypical my halls experience was. I lived in one of a series of small houses on campus. Which meant that we had a space which acted as a living room off a kitchen. So my halls was a DW experience rather than an LJ one.)

Erk, that should have read "at least it means that, in the immediate future, my readers will not see adverts for DATE HOT ASIAN WOMEN and EXOTIC MAIL ORDER ASIAN BRIDES on entries discussing my Asian identity". Which rather changes the meaning!

Thanks. I found socialising in that environment stressful, and now I have the options offered by DW I'm starting to find LJ's friending system doesn't really do what I'd like it to do.

My brain added in the not! Mostly because I read and re-read that comment several times wondering how it made sense, and then had a mini-epiphany.

I did have a vague wonder yesterday about how the DW options are going to tie into my quandary about acquaintances/friends and how it will play out in that context for me. When do I go from just subscribing to giving access. (Oh hello overthinking.)

I find the city metaphor interesting, but the assumption that one's friends are tied just to that city is completely at odds with my own experience -- i'd call those people acquaintances. My *friends* are people who transcend geolocation. I mean, YOU're a friend, and you live way over there [gestures approximately York-ward] where you live.

I've long tended to think of internet locations (blogs, journals, et cetera) more in terms of houses/homes (i get into this a bit in the comments on the "LJ > DW migration" post i made a few days ago) than full-fledged cities. I guess i think of the internet as being one vast city, tho' certainly with different neighborhoods. LJ was one neighborhood, DW is another. I still visit friends at LJ, and i have LJ friends who occasionally manage to visit me here at DW. [shrug] At any rate, that's the internet metaphor that's worked for me for almost a decade now.

I like that metaphor. It makes sense. I think part of the reason I had trouble with the city metaphor is that it doesn't work for my life, and my experience of friends. My friends are scattered. Not just around the country, but around the world. Which is also the same with my internet usage. There are people I only associate with on DW, some on LJ, some on blogspot, some on wordpress and on and on and on.

Yeah, the weekly (ish, I'm not very regular about it) roundup is my compromise after much soul-searching this time last year. I have got to the point with LJ where it's positively annoying to use, and they have offended my principles and made me feel unsafe. So I really really don't want to be there, and I don't want to provide content which help them raise money for increasingly icky advertisers. In fact, in a perfect world I wouldn't even be providing them with page views or the minuscule benefit they get from the fact that I read and comment on friends' posts there.

The problem is that the last thing I want to do is punish my friends because LJ has pissed me off. If I stopped using LJ, I'd lose touch with some people I care about, and I'd force other people to put themselves to inconvenience to read my posts on a site where they don't feel comfortable. I may think my reasons for feeling uncomfortable on LJ are "better" than some people's reasons for not liking DW, (or in most cases, simply not liking change), but that's not the point. If they're not comfortable here, I don't want to force them to be here.

I think

damned_colonial has a powerful point with her moving cities metaphor. Based on that argument, my intention is that when cross-site reading lists finally happen, I'm going to prune my LJ f-list severely, and only read the people I really care about on my DW page. I'm going to stop bothering to read people just cos they happen to post interestingly, when I have no personal connection. There are plenty of those on DW, and I want to support the site by building up my main network here, just like Skud describes in her metaphor.

The tricky bit is people who are my actual friends, who don't want to move, and who would be much less part of my life if I abandoned LJ altogether. It's all very well to argue that if they really cared about me they'd keep in touch other ways, email, phone, Facebook etc. Well, yes, they do really care about me, and they would keep in touch other ways. But I personally find those other ways a lot more effort than simply reading down an aggregated friends page and exchanging comments. I simply don't have time or energy to maintain as many close, meaningful connections by email and phone as I do by LJ and DW at the moment, and I would rather sacrifice social networking purity than sacrifice the connections.

I am also hesitating to delete all my old content off LJ, because if nothing else that would break links. I am beginning to think that it's the morally right thing to do, and at least importing into DW means not having to remove it altogether. (The fact I have a permanent account doesn't bother me; I paid $150 for 6 years of something that brought a lot of joy into my life, and I don't feel the need to cling on to it because of that money. At least it does mean I don't have to choose between giving LJ more money, and seeing horrible adverts everywhere.)

The tricky bit is people who are my actual friends, who don't want to move, and who would be much less part of my life if I abandoned LJ altogether. It's all very well to argue that if they really cared about me they'd keep in touch other ways, email, phone, Facebook etc.

This is the main, really the only, reason that I keep crossposting at LJ. Especially since I don't have Facebook so LJ is the way that I keep in touch if I don't send personal emails. I really don't want to lose contact with those RL friends.

I am also hesitating to delete all my old content off LJ, because if nothing else that would break links.

I'm too much of an archivist at heart to ever delete my old post. They're there for good.

I keep butting up against these issues. I tend to use "vague feeling of apprehension or dread" as a gauge for my interactions with people on LJ (and, theoretically, DW, although it hasn't yet been an issue) - if I feel like that about someone's posts coming up on my reading page, then it's time to part ways. Problem is, it's now official announcements from LJ.

On the other hand, there are people on LJ that are staying there and I don't want to lose contact with them or force them to a site where they aren't comfortable. I don't think I'd maintain a close connection with them through email and phone either for similar reasons - besides, I just like getting the glimpse into their life that isn't written for me that journalling offers.

So yes, I think I'm going to do something similar to your weekly roundups and try to find a compromise between staying and feeling resentful, and leaving altogether. I don't feel resentment over paying for my permanent account for similar reasons, and I'd rather not let it get to the stage where I do feel resentful about supporting LJ by letting them use my content.

I'd probably forget to look at DW, to be honest. I only have two people that I read on here. I'd move over if I could take my LJ chums with me, but I don't think that's going to happen. I would miss your posts.

Would a weekly set of links to my DW posts work for you? That's what I'm currently inclined towards doing.

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