LJ meta: trolls

[cellio]

Now that LiveJournal has eliminated invite codes, there are (apparently) more troll accounts -- people create a disposable account simply to harrass people and then move on. People who run communities are having trouble with this because it's extra administrative load to ban them, delete their comments, etc. This complaint I understand.

I gather that some people have created troll communities with provocative names and added people as members without their consent. This complaint I definitely understand, as the presumption is that you choose your communities. I would like it if being added to a community (as opposed to adding myself) generated an email challenge/response cycle, actually, like some mailing-list software does.

Some people are also upset that trolls add them as friends. They are, apparently, upset at seeing certain names on their friend-of lists. This complaint I do not understand; no one has any control over who lists you as a friend, so how could any thinking person hold it against you if someone objectionable supposedly reads your journal? I was recently added by someone I didn't recognize, and when I went to the journal to investigate I found one "this is my journal" message with about 20 comments saying "take me off your list you filthy troll". (The comments, and later the entry, have since been deleted.) Now I don't have any personal experience with this person, troll or not, and have no basis for judgement, but the reactions seem extreme to me. Besides, isn't that just what they want -- to get people worked up?

By the way, a post in news today said that they are working on breaking the "friends" notion into its two different parts, subscriptions and access control. I look forward to seeing how they do that. I wonder which parts will be public (the way friends are now). I also idly wonder about the sociological effects when people are able to designate some of their "friends" with "I actually read you" and others as "I don't follow you but I trust you with my secrets". I predict lots of angst among the high-school contingent.

Comments

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

they are working on breaking the "friends" notion into its two different parts, subscriptions and access control

I actually do this already, through the use of what is probably too many custom friends groups. :) It is limited in taht you can't give someone access without also having to read their journal on your friends page, but the cases where one might want to do that, are, I hope, smaller than those of the other three subscription/access combinations.

Re:

[goljerp]

It is limited in taht you can't give someone access without also having to read their journal on your friends page

I think that that is not the case. I have a user listed as a friend, but I actually read her blog directly, so I have a custom friends filter named "Default View", which doesn't include her, and when I'm logged on, I don't see posts from her journal on my friends page. Of course, this filter has to be edited whenever you change your friends...

Re:

[cellio]

I use custom filters occasionally for protecting some entries, but most of my non-public entries are simply friends-locked. I use custom filters for reading, but only as a tool for prioritization (and then not often).

As goljerp said, there is actually a way for you to grant someone access without having to read the journal. I don't do this myself; I just don't list people whose journals I don't want to read. (In some cases, people I would otherwise read have posting styles that I don't care for on a friends page, like gazillions of posts per day or a tendency toward large graphics sans lj-cut. I just read those journals directly instead.)