![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Another machine I have an account on has recently created a "journals" newsgroup, which I will refer to here as cabal.journals. The idea is that cabal users will post their lj/blog/mono/whatever diary entries into it along with a subject-line tag to say whose they are. So, if my username on cabal was herringl, this entry would appear as something like:
From: localpart@domain
Newsgroups: cabal.journals
Subject: [herringl] cabal.journals
...
And any comments would start a usenet-style thread.
I was initially a little uncomfortable with the idea, so I thought I'd set down what I thought about how I use LJ, and how that interacts with such nntp-gateways. During the gestation of this essay, OpenID has come along, so excuse me if my thoughts about that are a little dysmature, as it were.
So, what do I use LJ for? I can divide my entries up into a few broad categories:
Now some of these are obviously things that I want to achieve wide readership, so are posted publically. Some of them I don't really care who reads them (so are posted publically). Some I want to be extra sure that googling parents, future employers, current co-workers and so on can't read, so get friends-locked. Some I only want a few close friends to read, so can be posted to small friends-filters.
cabal.journals provides a means whereby people who don't want to use their own RSS aggregator of choice can read my public entries. I don't feel I can post any of the categories of friends-locked posts there since I don't know all the people with accounts on cabal, and I know that at least some of the accounts on there are pseudonyms. Also, while I can be pretty sure I'll never friend a co-worker on LJ, I can't really say to sysadmin@cabal "no, don't give that person an account because I don't want them to see bits of my journal". Furthermore, there's absolutely no way of restricting who can read my postings to cabal.journals, so I want to discourage people I actually know reading my witterings there, as they could read more of my LJ via a method where I can restrict readership (LJ or OpenID currently).
The downside of propagating articles to cabal.journals is that because the propagation technology is one-way, it means I have to go chasing after comments in more places than I do now, and that I might end up with two different conversations out of sync with each other in response to the same entry. Experience suggests that people aren't good at following instructions of the form "you can read this in this medium, but please go and comment on it over there". I clearly also have an interest in my friends maintaining journals in the same place, as it makes keeping up with them easier. If everyone I wanted to keep in touch with had LJs this would be ideal; blogs that can be syndicated to LJ are OK, but there's the faff about keeping up with comments (LJ doesn't currently extract comments from syndicated entries and put them into the LJ-feed).
OpenID will complicate matters, I think. If Fred is using blogspot, and starts wanting to OpenID-filter their posts, then the current LJ-feed mechanism is going to become inadequate (already, you can't usefully friends-lock an LJ-feed). OpenID should make it possible for people to read my LJ, including some friends-locked posts, without them needing an LJ-account, although I'm not sure if this can actually be usefully made to work yet.
I should address some of the supposed advantages of cabal.journals. Firstly, it has been opined that LJ-comments are a pretty ropey way of holding a discussion, particularly between third parties - if you're not the journal's owner, you can't get LJ to email you all comments to an entry (and AIUI the RSS support for comments on LJ isn't useful), so keeping up with old discussions is hard. Also, the comments interface to LJ isn't great for large discussions. I must accept these criticisms of LJ. I think the answer is to fix LJ, though. Many of my LJ-fiends don't have access to cabal, so LJ is currently the only place that discussion can carry on and be participated in by all readers of an entry. Maybe if it could be fixed such that comments went both ways that would help...
Also, it has been pointed out that some LJers have a very autocratic view of what goes on in their LJ, and will delete comments or whole entries on a whim, or if something someone says offends them. Also, users may be de-friended by someone, and then be unable to read the long insightful comment they left in a locked entry in that person's journal. This, I think, is a social problem. Whilst posting to cabal.journals would stop me deleting discussions on a whim, there would clearly have to exist a mechanism where I could require cabal's newsmaster to do so for me (if a commenter disclosed confidential information about me, for example), and that's a whole extra can of worms, unless the relevant policy is exceedingly well-written. So, dear reader, you'll have to take it on trust that I won't behave like an arsehole here ;)
In summary, I remain unconvinced that cabal.journals is not a bad idea. It addresses valid problems, but not in a manner that seems to be compatible with what I reasonably want to use my journal for.
[As an aside, I've added the facility for readers to tag my entries. Friends can create new tags and so on, too. Please don't abuse these powers.]
From: localpart@domain
Newsgroups: cabal.journals
Subject: [herringl] cabal.journals
...
And any comments would start a usenet-style thread.
I was initially a little uncomfortable with the idea, so I thought I'd set down what I thought about how I use LJ, and how that interacts with such nntp-gateways. During the gestation of this essay, OpenID has come along, so excuse me if my thoughts about that are a little dysmature, as it were.
So, what do I use LJ for? I can divide my entries up into a few broad categories:
- Essays on things I consider important or interesting (e.g. the comments on the Lancet's paper on the death penalty)
- Essays on professional topics (e.g. the organic milk rant)
- More or less lengthy/interesting comments on what's going on in my life
- Plugs for events or church services
- Writings about what I'm doing at work
- Requests for help
- The odd meme
- Keeping up with my friends, both "real" and "online"
Now some of these are obviously things that I want to achieve wide readership, so are posted publically. Some of them I don't really care who reads them (so are posted publically). Some I want to be extra sure that googling parents, future employers, current co-workers and so on can't read, so get friends-locked. Some I only want a few close friends to read, so can be posted to small friends-filters.
cabal.journals provides a means whereby people who don't want to use their own RSS aggregator of choice can read my public entries. I don't feel I can post any of the categories of friends-locked posts there since I don't know all the people with accounts on cabal, and I know that at least some of the accounts on there are pseudonyms. Also, while I can be pretty sure I'll never friend a co-worker on LJ, I can't really say to sysadmin@cabal "no, don't give that person an account because I don't want them to see bits of my journal". Furthermore, there's absolutely no way of restricting who can read my postings to cabal.journals, so I want to discourage people I actually know reading my witterings there, as they could read more of my LJ via a method where I can restrict readership (LJ or OpenID currently).
The downside of propagating articles to cabal.journals is that because the propagation technology is one-way, it means I have to go chasing after comments in more places than I do now, and that I might end up with two different conversations out of sync with each other in response to the same entry. Experience suggests that people aren't good at following instructions of the form "you can read this in this medium, but please go and comment on it over there". I clearly also have an interest in my friends maintaining journals in the same place, as it makes keeping up with them easier. If everyone I wanted to keep in touch with had LJs this would be ideal; blogs that can be syndicated to LJ are OK, but there's the faff about keeping up with comments (LJ doesn't currently extract comments from syndicated entries and put them into the LJ-feed).
OpenID will complicate matters, I think. If Fred is using blogspot, and starts wanting to OpenID-filter their posts, then the current LJ-feed mechanism is going to become inadequate (already, you can't usefully friends-lock an LJ-feed). OpenID should make it possible for people to read my LJ, including some friends-locked posts, without them needing an LJ-account, although I'm not sure if this can actually be usefully made to work yet.
I should address some of the supposed advantages of cabal.journals. Firstly, it has been opined that LJ-comments are a pretty ropey way of holding a discussion, particularly between third parties - if you're not the journal's owner, you can't get LJ to email you all comments to an entry (and AIUI the RSS support for comments on LJ isn't useful), so keeping up with old discussions is hard. Also, the comments interface to LJ isn't great for large discussions. I must accept these criticisms of LJ. I think the answer is to fix LJ, though. Many of my LJ-fiends don't have access to cabal, so LJ is currently the only place that discussion can carry on and be participated in by all readers of an entry. Maybe if it could be fixed such that comments went both ways that would help...
Also, it has been pointed out that some LJers have a very autocratic view of what goes on in their LJ, and will delete comments or whole entries on a whim, or if something someone says offends them. Also, users may be de-friended by someone, and then be unable to read the long insightful comment they left in a locked entry in that person's journal. This, I think, is a social problem. Whilst posting to cabal.journals would stop me deleting discussions on a whim, there would clearly have to exist a mechanism where I could require cabal's newsmaster to do so for me (if a commenter disclosed confidential information about me, for example), and that's a whole extra can of worms, unless the relevant policy is exceedingly well-written. So, dear reader, you'll have to take it on trust that I won't behave like an arsehole here ;)
In summary, I remain unconvinced that cabal.journals is not a bad idea. It addresses valid problems, but not in a manner that seems to be compatible with what I reasonably want to use my journal for.
[As an aside, I've added the facility for readers to tag my entries. Friends can create new tags and so on, too. Please don't abuse these powers.]
(no subject)
While the majority of my LJ posts are public, and I don't mind if they appear in another format, I don't really want to make the effort. If somebody comes up with a "plug-in-the-username" script to feed the public articles elsewhere I might go to that much effort, but no more. If I post stuff I decide to restrict access to, I'd rather that I knew who had access.
Even in these early days it's already getting annoying to try to follow conversations about the same post in two different places.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
Perhaps the solution is to make the comments field even smaller - thus forcing people to post long comments to their own journals. Some people are so long-winded they have to do this regularly anyway ; ) . As a rule of thumb - if your comment is important enough to you to want to keep it you should copy it to a private entry in your own journal anyway. You're unlikely to remember a long time down the line whose journal you put it in anyway.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
The 'autocratic' remark is interesting. It suggests the assumption that a journal should be 'democratic'; that a blog is some kind of public resource which has a responsibility to its users to be unchanging and reliable. I don't see my journal like that at all; to me it's a strictly personal forum in which I can air my own frustrations, joys and opinions, and share interaction with my friends. I do make a policy of either deleting or making private entries which turn into Grand Controversies or for other reasons become stuff I'm not in the mood to be coping with; and I do that because the only responsibility I have within my personal forum - my personal space, essentially - is to keeping myself happy and stable. I don't have any responsibility to provide reliably available content, nor to accommodate people on my f'list if they want to use my personal experiences as fuel for a moral maze debate. If anyone wants to do either of those things, that's what their own journals are for.
So in LJ, control over who can ram their opinions down my throat is technological; it's very interesting to observe that the exact same control is available in real life but it's managed socially instead. If someone in a pub takes something I'm stressed or upset about and spouts insensitive nonsense at me on the subject of how I should be doing things differently, then I can walk away from them, which takes away their ability to invade my space with their ignorance, or angrily tell them I don't appreciate their insensitivity, which puts pressure on them to back down. In LJ I take away the facility which allows them to spout by removing the entry they're spouting on; remarking on insensitivity online usually doesn't work because the social constraints of face-to-face interaction aren't present. And to be perfectly honest I think the ability to control one's personal forum very definitely should exist, because if I let other people dictate what went on in my personal space it wouldn't be personal space any more.
I think the reason cabal.journals exists is because there are one or two strong forces within the cabal which do see personal space as largely irrelevant and the products of one's mind as public resources. You yourself are something of a subscriber to the "I am (here to provide) a public service" philosophy, which is why you're not rejecting the idea of the newsgroup out of hand as I am; but I also don't think you're entirely comfortable with your whole life being a public service, or you wouldn't feel the need to think about using cabal.journals in such depth.
A response from the cabalist
I'm sysadmin@cabal, and cabal.journals was my idea, although at least some users have supported it.
I don't want to have this discussion here for the very reasons that lead me to generally avoid LJ and led me to create cabal.journals. I have written a long article to cabal.journals which explains why I don't like LJ and why I don't want to have a discussion here. The lack of ability of non-cabal users to participate is indeed suboptimal. If
I would like to make one factual correction.
This will probably be my only posting in this thread.
[Cabal's sysadmin]
Re: A response from the cabalist
.. which, predictably, I'm not going to see because I don't read cabal.journals; the gulf remains. I'm not all that interested in a medium war really; to me this is an issue of radically different personal approaches, and that kind of disagreement is just a fact of life. I'm very familiar with the way having strong opinions about things occasionally cramps one's style, but I also know that the consequences of the aforementioned opinions are solely my responsibility; if I don't like the effects of having them, I can either come down off my high horse and compromise my ideals, or live with the cramp. There's no point trying to change LJ or persuade established users that it's a bad idea, simply because of the scale of the thing and the resulting inertia. The best anyone who doesn't get on with it can do is arrange read access in a form they like; it's certainly not reasonable to expect people who are perfectly comfortable with the original to adopt or prefer a new form. The only ones who'll do that are those who already have some particular motivation to do so.
The question of lurkers is also irrelevant to me as an LJ user, since I make almost all my posts friends-locked and vet people I add to my friends list pretty carefully; it's pretty rare that I'd be caught out by pseudonymous accounts when I don't automatically friend people who've friended me. I'm happy to live with my idea of acceptable minimum risk, which with LJ is really no worse than the real-world risk of someone accidentally or maliciously repeating something you said to someone you didn't want hearing it.
Re: A response from the cabalist
I don't think anyone is expecting people to do this.
(S)
Re: A response from the cabalist
I'm not sure why I would want to post my journal in an entirely public medium and indeed I think that 'friends only' is one of the best features of LJ - I clearly don't want the *whole world* to know about my sexlife or the address of my house but I might want to tell the people I actually know about these things.
I'm presuming that the idea of cabal.journals is so that everything is 'public' (fsvo public, I know that I don't know most of the users of cabal for instance and would treat them as public) and no-one can go back and delete or edit postings. I personally don't delete stuff (except for multiple posting, grrr interface) and I only edit for grammar or f***ed up html...
If I were using cabal.journals I probably wouldn't say a lot of the things that I do say on LJ. I would say *even less* if it were actually public and searchable by, say, parents because there are people (parents) I do not wish to read everything I write.
I can view LJ like 'talking to my mates at the pub', I would view a public newsgroup as roughly equivalent to publishing in the tabloid press. I want a forum for 'talking to my mates' not one for being the tabloid press. If I wanted to be a columnist then I could do that on LJ or I could get some other form of blog, or I could use a newsgroup... where ever I thought my audience was, but that is not my intention (and never will be, I can't write essays).
Yes, I could use email for the purpose of talking to my mates but I wouldn't meet anyone new that way and further there would be more of a 'I am sending you this and want *you* to resond/help/etc' than a 'here is something that I will let you read, do what you like' feel to it. Besides, threaded comments are much better than email responses.
(no subject)
(no subject)
I already chase comments in multiple places for the various versions of my diary, and this is no bad thing since it gives me more fairly directed things to do when I'm bored. I could always aggregate the various places if I cared anyway.
I don't have any ability to restrict access to my comments, but I've never seen the need. If I don't want to say something to everyone, I usually want to say it to nearly noone, and in that case the best way to achieve secrecy about things is not to entrust it to the ether but to communicate directly with the trusted individual.
People's opinions vary, but if you don't like LJ's centralised model, you don't like typing into teeny little boxes with no editing capability, you hate the inability to view threads properly, and think that reading LJ is akin to descending into an e-sewer of the worst sort... *deep breath* then cabal.journals isn't a bad solution.
(S)
(no subject)
Personally, I wasn't happy when I heard about cabel.livejournals. A lot of the journels I read belong to people with cabel accounts. Even more cabel people comment on those posts. I enjoy reading both entries and comments and fear that if people start commenting in the cabel newsgroup then I will lose out on something I enjoy as I don't have access to cabel.
(no subject)
Having read the discussion in cabal.journals, it seems to me that the key is that there are two different roles people want from forums: a place for discussion (for which newsgroups are well suited) and a place to share thoughts without necessarily provoking discussion (which LJ is arguably better suited to). sysadmin@cabal's position appears to be that the latter is not a desirable feature in a forum.
(no subject)
Come to think of it, at least one of them has been explicitly denied a cabal account.
(no subject)
a) I like livejournal, I do actually like the personal space model of things, and I don't often get into the sort of conversations where people start censoring things.
b) I do appreciate that some people like reading things through a news interface, and for at least one friend that news is much less hassle for his RSI than the web is. As a result when it becomes straightforward to do so I will possibly gateway my journal there. It's largely public anyway.
c) Already however I'm finding the duplication between the two places irritating. I don't mind reading stuff and comments there, but a lot of the time I'm reading the same article in both places, with little or no commentary in either, and it's getting a bit wearing.
d) the inability of non-cabal users to participate seems particularly annoying to me, given the apparently motivation is mostly for greater openness.
That's come out more negative overall than I expected. I don't think it's a bad idea per se, but for me it doesn't add anything.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
In unrelated news, I am writing an article called "Why my car should be a boat." In it, I am specifically ignoring questions as to why the previous boat sank.
(no subject)
Firstly, it has been opined that LJ-comments are a pretty ropey way of holding a discussion, particularly between third parties - if you're not the journal's owner, you can't get LJ to email you all comments to an entry [...] so keeping up with old discussions is hard.
[...]
Also, users may be de-friended by someone, and then be unable to read the long insightful comment they left in a locked entry in that person's journal.
I use gmail as an admittedly clumsy workaround for both these problems. I have a gmail address where LJ comments (and only LJ comments) are sent, so if I want to find an old discussion, I can search my mail for words I remember from the post. I've had good luck with this so far.
Needless to say, archiving things with gmail shouldn't be the answer to problems with LJ itself. LJ is a very poor way to do certain kinds of conversations, gmail or no gmail. For example, certain memes/games that take place in comments invariably die after a few days, since the original post will have fallen off the bottom of everyone's friendslist and people will stop checking it. Some interesting political conversations do manage to stay alive because enough people are commenting that all the participants are regularly reminded to check the post (and I confess to occasionally "strategically commenting" so that the largest number of people will check it) -- but just as often, that doesn't happen, and good conversations evaporate as a result.
Anyway, thanks for this series of observations. I've never heard of cabel, and it sounds like the sort of thing I'm profoundly uninterested in. I'm one of those people who refuses to "read here, comment there" in general (though I'd resist the description in your post here of "not being good at following instructions"!).