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

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

[By the way, a post in news today said that they are working on breaking the "friends" notion into its two different parts]

Very interesting. I really do wonder how much angst and drama could have been avoided just by using different terms than "friends" and "friend of". Of course it's not guaranteed that people would calm down if they used something more neutral, but I find it absolutely bizarre the way people weight the implications of the term "friends" as far more important than what actually /happens/ when one friends/is friended.

Re:

[cellio]

I really do wonder how much angst and drama could have been avoided just by using different terms than "friends" and "friend of".

A lot, in my opinion. "Friend" was a poor choice of word; it doesn't describe the relationship, but it's emotionally loaded.

Now, though, I suspect we will get a new round of angst and drama when they make the change. That's when people will find out which of their "friends" don't really want to read what they write, and which want to read them but don't trust them with access. Of course people can do both of those now -- not read a journal and use filters to block some people -- but with an explicit split it will all become a lot more public.

Unless the idea is to continue to publish a "friends" list to the world but let the individual user flag them for reading, access, or both privately. I'm not sure that would be a good idea, though.

Re:

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

[Unless the idea is to continue to publish a "friends" list to the world but let the individual user flag them for reading, access, or both privately. I'm not sure that would be a good idea, though.]

Why not? Offhand I would tend to favor that approach because it gives the people greater control over content access while providing a layer of abstraction over the drama-inducing parts of the process. Doing it explicitly accomplishes the same functionality but as you observed the potential for drama when people see how people actually treat their content is much higher.

Re:

[cellio]

In this case, "not sure" meant "I haven't thought about it much and am not yet convinced", rather than "I think this is a bad idea".

If I were setting up this system from scratch, I would publicize the subscription list, for two reasons: I suspect people want to know who's interested enough in what they write to subscribe, and we want to make it easy for people to mine each others' subscriber lists for additional interesting reading. (I think that's how most of the connections among strangers occur on LJ -- someone reads a friend's friends' list and likes some of the journals he finds there.) I wouldn't publicize the access list at all; no good can come of it. (The owner of the journal is free to tell people which access groups they're in, if any.)

Given the current reality, I suspect you're right that continuing to publish the amalgomated list is the right thing to do, because visible change carries disruption and drama.

It should be interesting to see what happens.