Dear LJ Masses. Calm the fuck down.

[penk]

Okay, everyone is going bananas over the new facebook and twitter links. What everyone seems to misunderstanding is that NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

Here is the situation as I see it:

The new functionality allows you to tweet or facebook comment the comment that you're leaving.

The new functionality allows you to crosspost a new posting to facebook and twitter.

That's it. If I'm wrong, please let me know, but nothing I see there warrants the vitriol I'm seeing on a variety of people's comments and posts.

Livejournal is not reposting your private communication to the internet at large without you asking it to. If someone posts on your LJ to a friends locked post, and chooses to retweet or facebook post their comment, that is THEIR CHOICE for sharing THEIR COMMENTS with someone else. They are not reposting your private words any more than they would if they copy/pasted your post to Facebook (which anyone has been able to do, anytime, anywhere).

If someone includes the original post in their comment, and comments on it, and clicks 'post to facebook', then private communication may be replicated, but that is the commenters doing - the same as if the commenter had copied the posting into facebook verbatim and said "Look what this bozo said". Again, functionality that has been there from day 0.

In a nutshell. Livejournal is NOT sharing your private posts to the public without your permission.

Last note - remember that anything you post to Livejournal (or Facebook, or dating sites, or twitter, or whatever) should be considered public information. There is no control over who cut and pastes the posting out to the world at large. This is the way of the internet. "Friends locked" posts mean that the post is locked so only friends can see it, but any friend can copy that post and send it to a zillion people all over the world, and there's nothing you can do about it.

(Edited to add pictures: )
Just to continue - I did take this posting and ask LJ to post it to Twitter and Facebook.

Here's what it looks like on twitter: http://screencast.com/t/Yzg5ZjVkOGUt
Here's what it looks like on facebook: http://screencast.com/t/OGM5M2Q1OGY
Here's what a comment on a friends locked post looks like: http://screencast.com/t/NWJlZDllYTE
Her'es what a comment on a screened post looks like: http://screencast.com/t/MzUyZDc3MGQt

All LJ is doing is immediately posting the comment to Twitter / Facebook. 'screened comments' and 'friends locked comments' are a Livejournal construct, and have no bearing here.

Note that twitter has shared none of the content. Facebook has crossposted a summary. Know your tools, know what they do.

Comments

[randysmith]

Thanks; I appreciate the summary. I was wondering what the cryptic comments on my flist were about.

I do think that making it easier to do something will mean that more people do it, which will have the overall effect of decreasing the amount of privacy in friends locked posts. People pick up contexts for what's "ok to do" from many different places, and what's possible to do easily is one. (I.e. I'd rather they hadn't enabled this for friends-locked posts.)

[jasra]

Yeah, I wish it was smart enough to see the lock and not send the link, but whatever.

[cruiser.livejournal.com]

I.e. I'd rather they hadn't enabled this for friends-locked posts.

This is a good point. Making it easy to do things that would generally be considered inappropriate is a less-than-stellar idea. Certainly, your friends can already cut and paste your words & send them to the world, but automating the process just makes it easy for people to make mistakes - having this feature is like having a "Reply All" option in email that sends the reply to everyone in your address book - sure, it could be occasionally useful, but it's a lot more likely to cause problems.

[penk.livejournal.com]

But it doesn't! That's the point. There is no automation of reposting your friendslocked post. You would have to include in the original content, comment on it, click [fb] [twitter] or whatever, and that would repost the content.

There's no automation here. There is no Reply All.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

So I don't see why "there's no automation here" means that there's nothing wrong with it. The "Reply to everyone in my address book" that BOB!! posits would also not be an automated feature -- users would have to choose to hit that button -- but email users would be incensed if their correspondents started using it, and justly so.

This feature doesn't overall seem like The End Of Privacy, but I do agree that it was unwise to make it available at all on comments to friendslocked posts.

[penk.livejournal.com]

I agree that would be a good 'fix' for this. When someone posts something, they can disable comment retweet or facebook crosspost. That would allay the point you raise, and I agree with that.

What I was mostly ranting at was "ZOMG LIVEJOURNAL IS POSTING MY JOURNAL TO TWITTER AND FACEBOOK AND I CAN'T STOP IT!" blathering going on.

[cruiser.livejournal.com]

I understand your rant. I was commenting on the fact, rather than the blathering.

If I were commenting in the nature of the blather you were complaining about, it would be "ZOMG, LIVEJOURNAL IS MAKING IT EASY FOR MY IDIOT FRIENDS TO POST THEIR QUOTES OF MY TEXT TO TWITTER AND FACEBOOK"

I don't think anyone thinks LJ is doing this

[drwex]

Instead, LJ is making it easy for your friends to do careless and potentially inappropriate things.

In particular, by putting that thing in the place where you go when you hit < TAB > right after typing in a comment, those of us who habitually hit < TAB > < ENTER > because that's what one does to post a comment will find ourselves fucking up accidentally and that's bad.

The feature is idiotic and the implementation is not at all thought out. (And by "idiotic" I mean from a business perspective. Instead of LJ saying "We have unique content with a unique value proposition" they're saying "we're just part of the larger twitterverse/facebookverse so go ahead and give your advertising dollars to those companies because you'll get our content over there, too.)

[jasra]

I saw some links come across yesterday, but other than not wanting to know all of the comments that someone else leaves places (too much noise IMHO), nothing wrong with it.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

See my journal for why this is not acceptable.

[penk.livejournal.com]

I disagree with your points - and you made a statement which is being perpetuated by several folks, and is inaccurate in it's assumptions.

You say:

By accident, it is trivial for a private LJ convo to become very public suddenly, accidentally, and without the permission of the journal owner. Especially if the comment quotes something said by another.

Yes, it's a bit like someone ccing 'all' in a private convo, and yes, a careful person can avoid doing it. But it defaults to non-private and you must remember specifically NOT to cc all. Every time.

There are a number of problems here. One, "CC All" is a mail term. By default, every mail client on the planet includes the original post in the reply. Livejournal does NOT do this.

Second, you are not making a private conversation public. You are making your personal single comment public. It does nothing for anything else in the conversation. All the rest of the comments are private. The only thing being made public is what you are saying. You have to go out of your way by cutting and pasting other content to make other people's comments or points public.

I don't necessarily agree with some aspects of this feature. I think it was poorly implemented. But making statement implying something is happening that is not does not help keep things in perspective.

[geekchick]

You are making your personal single comment public. It does nothing for anything else in the conversation.

Unless your comment quotes someone else's post/comment. If I lock a post, I've locked it for a reason and I do not want that content floating around in public with a link to my username.

[dionysia.livejournal.com]

This.

Let's say I post "I'm pregnant!" and someone replies and cross-posts to their FB or Twitter: "Congratulations, when are you due?" with a link back to my original post. Even though no one can view my original post because it is Friends-Only, now everyone knows that I'm pregnant based solely on the content of the comment.

Yes, people have to physically click the 'repost' buttons, but I can see it becoming second nature and accidental repostings happening, much like it's second nature for me to post without changing my default user icon. More than once I've commented on someone's very serious post accidentally using my default icon, which could be rather inappropriate.

[penk.livejournal.com]

Understand that my position here isn't "there's nothing wrong here". I honestly think that the cross-posting should be disabled when replying to flocked / screened posts. But I've seen 4 posts now on LJ that have said "This new feature opens up my locked posts and breaks all the security", which is utter nonsense.

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

Like I said, I keep my accounts separate for a reason. Several reasons, even. I don't link my LJ to my Facebook or Twitter account at all, and I would prefer others did not circumvent that by doing something that creates links to my journal, even if non-LJ friends can't see the entry in question. If I wanted links to my journal, I would put them there.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

There are a number of problems here. One, "CC All" is a mail term.

Yes, it's called an 'illustrative analogy'.

By default, every mail client on the planet includes the original post in the reply. Livejournal does NOT do this.

Ironically, you quoted my words in your reply. It's how we do things around here. It *is* harder that Outlook's default, but then, there are also browser enhancements that make it easier or even automatic to quote someone.

Of course people can cut and paste private content elsewhere--but that is a very deliberate, channel-switching behavior, and one that most people realize is a purposeful breach of security and social mores. FBconnect is a checkbox right next to the Post button.

There's a reason "Launch Missile" switches have a protective cover on them. FBconnect makes it too easy to do something very damaging by accident. This is a serious usability issue, and one that should be something that I can choose to enable or disable in my journal, not something that you can choose to enable or disable in your comment.

To reiterate the real point, the LJ model is "poster sets the privacy model", and this is a very useful feature. FBconnect makes it too easy to break that model.

overgeneralization nitpick

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

"By default, every mail client on the planet includes the original post in the reply."

I've been using email for nearly thirty years, and none of the programs I've used to read and reply to mail have done this by default. (Uh, Gmail's web interface might, but I use it so seldom that I really can't remember what it does.) So either four (or nine, depending on how you count fairly similar apps) programs I've been using for the purpose aren't really mail clients after all ... or not every MUA on the planet quotes the original by default. (Not even my newsreader does that by default -- it has separate reply-without-quoting and quote-and-reply commands, and a similar pair for posting followups.) When I want to quote the original, I have to explicitly tell my mail program to stick it in there.

This doesn't change your observation that LJ also doesn't quote the parent entry/comment by default, but I bristled at the obviously mistaken assertion that all mail clients do. (Also, as has already been pointed out elsethread, many folks manually paste in bits out of habit, and even without that it's trivial for context the OP might have wanted kept quiet to leak into comments.)

Re: overgeneralization nitpick

[keyne.livejournal.com]

<curmudgeon>This.</curmudgeon>

WARNING: Locked posts no longer private

[blk]

Locked posts have -never- been private, except by the trustworthiness of your friends not to repeat them, either accidentally or intentionally.

All this LJ extension does is make it easier to do it accidentally. I do think the LJ thing is a bad idea, but it's not the end of the world, either.

Re: WARNING: Locked posts no longer private

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Absolutely true. And I have my filters arranged based on whom I can trust not to repost private things intentionally. I also have to trust LJ admins, and GMail, and I have come to terms with that.

But it just got a lot easier to repost things *accidentally*, without understanding the repercussions, and now I need to refilter based on a different kind of trustworthiness.

As usual, with the change buried in the bottom-middle of the announcement, and with no way to override locally (i.e. poster-side, not commenter).

[dbang.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I'm with the "OMG what a fucking bad idea" folks.

I don't care if you've quoted my text in your comment...whether it's an exact quote or not, your comment is likely to give some sort of context of my post, which I may not wish.

It also gives the information to outside people that you have access to one of my locked posts. That's a fact that LJ doesn't expose in any other way and a fact I may not wish shared.

The fact that it is POSSIBLE for people to violate my trust now does not mean it is okay for LJ to implement a feature that makes doing so easy as pie.

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

"It also gives the information to outside people that you have access to one of my locked posts."

Oh, I overlooked that aspect of this new misfeature (oddly, since it's an aspect of the overall LJ model I've contemplated and been pleased by in the past). And it reveals that whether there's any quoted text or leaked content, or not. Ugh.

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

To toss out a correllary to your complaint: it also exposes the fact that you even posted a friends-locked entry, and one might not want to slap certain people in the face with the fact that they're not on one's innermost-secrets filter by having it advertised that there's a recent entry they can't see.

I almost never post anything friends-locked, but I've thought a lot about ways to approach doing so, socially.

Well said

[drwex]

The fact that it is POSSIBLE for people to violate my trust now does not mean it is okay for LJ to implement a feature that makes doing so easy as pie.

Best one-sentence summary of the problem.

[docorion.livejournal.com]

I personally think you and the ZOMG end of the world folks are both right, sort of.

You're right-it isn't the end of the world, or even the end of privacy as we know it. That said, it is an erosion of privacy, in that it makes it that bit easier to spread content which someone had wanted to be private, FSVO private; I do recognize that nothing posted on the intartubes is, in fact, truly private, but one can hide it from a cursory search by obscuring it via a filter.

The new LJ functionality makes this barrier thinner, by making it easier for people to repost such hidden content. With privacy already pretty thin, even a tiny erosion seems huge, and sets off people's alarms. I'm not particularly happy about this development, but since I post little I'm not willing to have made public, it doesn't affect me much. I can understand why others are less pleased.

[jasra]

Someone else tested w/ different results:
http://cvirtue.livejournal.com/1636852.html

[penk.livejournal.com]

Not really different - they're seeing the same thing I was (see screenshots above). The amount of material quoted is a little odd (and she wasn't clear on it either), but the net effect of "I posted a comment on a friends locked journal, and when it was crossposted to facebook, some of that comment was included" is still valid.

Unless quoted, none of the original posters comment was posted.

(For the record, my position here is "It should be disbaled for flocked / screened comments".)