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

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>