LJ etiquette 101

[cellio]

My friend grouchyoldcoot is a relatively new user of LJ (but has been around the net for a long time), so he asked me about the etiquette norms. LJ itself doesn't seem to have any beyond the guidelines for indecent material, so I thought I'd start a discussion here. Related topics often come up in blog_sociology too.

(Let me get this out of the way early: the word "friends" is very wrong in this context. Personally, I think of it more like a "subscriber" model. But I will use the word "friend" here, because that's the LJ lingo.)

LJ is big. Really really big. Over 5 million users, half active, or there-abouts. The vast majority of them are teenagers, and their norms probably differ from those of my circle of friends. I haven't been a teenager for a very long time, and to the best of my knowledge none of my LJ friends are teenagers. These are my opinions; YMMV, especially if your demographic varies.

Adding friends: Some people like to be asked before you add them; others don't care. The user info might contain a hint. I generally do not ask; I figure that if they put it out there for the public to read, there's no difference between reading discreetly and subscribing explicitly. If I see that the person has a very small friends list, I am more likely to post a comment fairly promptly upon subscribing.

Introductory comments: Some people like new subscribers to pop in and say hi explicitly; others don't care. I personally do not leave comments that consist entirely of "hi, I added you"; that sounds kind of high-schoolish to me. The first time I post something of substance, though, I'll often add something like "by the way, I found you via so-and-so".

Recipricocity: Some people expect you to add them back if they add you; others don't care. My advice is to not get into the game of keeping score; add the people you want to read and/or the people you want to give access to your restricted posts. While I don't automatically reciprocate, and it might be for reasons ranging from general content to grammar/format/spelling to the number of posts per day to a high concentration of quizzes to, in one past case, not speaking the language the journal is written in, I do periodically pop into the journals of the people I didn't add back. Journals and posters change over time, after all, and I may subscribe later. Or I may just pop in once every couple weeks, catch up, and maybe leave some comments. Usually it's just about managing my reading list and is not at all personal; there are only so many hours in a day. :-)

Quizzes: Mistakingly called "memes", these are the entries along the lines of "what LotR character are you" or "what color eggplant are you" or whatever. They usually have a graphic (sometimes large) and boilerplate text, with no original content. There are gazillions of them out there. Personally, I dislike them and appreciate it when my friends put them behind lj-cut tags, especially if they're doing a bunch in one fell swoop.

Other "memes": there are lots of things called memes floating around. My recent interview entries are part of one of them. There are also surveys floating around, and some others. I personally like the ones that involve original content, that tell me something about the person posting them. I really like the interview meme because not only does it tell us something about you but it encourages interaction. I think that's kind of neat. Yeah, it's a journal and not a bulletin board, but if you didn't want some level of interaction with your readers you'd just keep a private journal on your home computer, right?

Long posts: there is a convention that long posts should be partially or entirely behind an lj-cut tag so that people don't face excessive scrolling when reading their friends' pages. The definition of "long" varies. You'll get a feel for the local definition among your own friends just by hanging around. There's also a convention of putting large pictures, which consume a lot of bandwidth, behind a cut, particularly if you're posting more than one.

Ok, what basic ("101") topics have I missed, and what do the rest of you think about these?

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I've heard people say that LJ is "alt.fan.me". As such, your LJ, your rules. Feel free to make your LJ the sort of place you want it to be.

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

A lot of people use the subject line to indicate the nature of the post, i.e., [Friends] or (meme).

A lot of people try to match the user picture to the nature of the entry. Again, I do that, using a work related icon for work-related posts, a sheep icon for meme posts, etc. This allows people to identify the type of post easily.

Some people do daily posts, keeping a true journal of what's going on. Others only post when they think they have something interesting to say. Others post precisely because they have nothing interesting to say. You're not obliged to read or comment on any post.

There are different approaches to user pictures. I try to put a common icon in all of mine, simply to make my posts easier to identify. Others don't.

You'll be more likely to be friended by someone new if you make intelligent and witty comments in their journal.

Often, you find new friends by reading the friends lists of your friends.

That's what comes to the top of my head. Of course, if grouchyoldcoot is a friend of yours, he's welcome to monitor my journal. I once knew a fellow by the name (actually CB handle) of Grouchy Turtle. Yes, he was both.

[aliza250.livejournal.com]

Paid users have a friendsfriends page, the collection of all their friends and all of *their* friend. Anyone can browse the friendsfriends page of a paid user.

Some people make an announcement before they do a major cull of their friends list.

Some people make a significant distinction between people they know in RL, people they know through assorted online contexts, and people they know only through LJ. Some do not.

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

There are a number of landmines around "friends-only" posts. It's obviously poor form to blab something you're told in confidence (which is implicitly true of friends-only posts that you can see.)

A harder problem is keeping in mind that not everyone you are friends with is friends with each other (i.e. your "friends page" is not a newsgroup). So just because you can see friends-only entries on both journals A and B doesn't mean they are in on each others' friends-only entries. Given the complication of custom friends groups, that may be true even if they are LJ friends with each other. (For that matter, not everyone on your friends list necessarily reads each other's public posts, which is easy to lose sight of, especially when you all know each other in real life.)

Many people flag friends-only posts that are limited to a subset of their friends in some way that suggests the stricter limitation, either by tags in the subject (e.g. "[No cellio] Surprise birthday plans!") or by a similar note in the body. Bottom line, though, is unless they actually list userids or you see comments from someone, you can't really know for certain who - other than you and the author - can see it.


Related note: many people post things that are not as, umm, thought through or diplomatic as if they were "publishing" in a forum that wasn't so closely tied to their identity. Many folks see LJ as a personal place (even if open to public reading) for venting or working through "authentic" feelings. This often leads to hurt feelings or anger when someone reads said post as "a veiled message to them" or otherwise as an official, considered public statement. I try to either friends-lock such posts or add a disclaimer that I'm too close to something and it should not (yet) be taken at face value or both, but not everyone does. It saves a great deal of drama when you see something raw in a friend's LJ and your first instinct is to be pissed/hurt, if you talk to them by another channel to clarify - and go into it giving them the doubt about your reading of it.

Of course, grouchyoldcoot has been around email, bboards, newsgroups, etc. long enough that the beartraps that lie in text-only "communication" should be all-too-familiar, but people still lose track of it in every new environment that looks like face to face dialogue.

[cellio]

Excellent points -- thanks! There are landmines out there, and it's important to remember that.

[azurelunatic]

And furthermore, even if you can see a username in the comments, there's no way of telling if they can still see it, because the poster may have altered the filter since they posted.

LJ Etiquette

[anniemal.livejournal.com]

I'm still figuring it out.

My "friends" list is short, and my "bookmark" list is long. You are right. There are only so many hrs/day. So to anyone not on my "FL": I am reading you maybe, but not unless the people I already know in real life and/or care about aren't taking up all my attention and thought. I don't expect anything of anyone, and hope no one feels let down.

My cardinal rule is to not post something I don't want the whole world to read. Unless I:
A.) hide the identity of said person, and
B.) know for sure they won't find out I've written anything because they shake their heads at computers in general. (Yes, I know many.)

So my first entries were insipid. I have offended enough people to know how easily I give offense. Thus try to pick my transgressions instead of getting nasty surprise responses.

Eh. I am coming more o the atitude of "It's my journal, and I'll bore if I want to." I will also probably offend some who read one comment or post and don't know me as a whole. I have a statement I make, but don't feel yet: (Expletive) you.

As time's gone on, and I've come to feel freer, I find I like seeing what gets said. Sometimes someone takes a read on what I've written that I didn't see or intend when I wrote it. Sometimes it stings, sometimes it enlightens, or both.

I don't know what to say to newbies about LJ etiquette. It's a matter of watching what as many others as you have time to read write, finding others you're comforable with, finding your friends whoa are already here, and time and experience. I still offend, transgress boundaries, commit faux pas...but I have a better idea abou whether it's OK than 1.4 yrs ago.

My best guess.

Re: LJ Etiquette

[cellio]

My cardinal rule is to not post something I don't want the whole world to read. Unless I: [...]

Yup. Remember that a public entry can be read by anyone, and might be archived (so even if you delete it later, it may come back to haunt you). There is a saying from an earlier time: "If you would be upset to see it on the cover of the New York Times, don't say it in email". While I think that exaggerates the point a bit, you do need to remember that written words are a little more permanet than spoken ones, and written words in public places even moreso.

The flip side of that, as tangerinpenguin points out, is that you will live a much happier life if you try to give other users the benefit of the doubt.

[cellio]

Thanks! I rarely turn down compliments. :-)

Grammar (and spelling and basic conventions like complete sentences and paragraph breaks) greatly increase the readability of your journal. If you're just writing for yourself then maybe you don't care, but if you expect or want to attract readers, you need to consider these things. You don't have to be perfect, but you shouldn't be sloppy.

A similar idea is style of your own journal. Once someone adds you he'll read your posts through his own friends page (most of the time), but most people want to check out a journal's past entries before adding it. If your journal is yellow text on a fuscha background with 8-point type, at least some of us will give up.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Here (http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=75) 's the faq entry on how to do LJ cuts. I found out recently that not all LJ'ers know how to put their own text into the link.

[jeannegrrl.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I think this is a well-written and comprehensive FAQ. The one thing I might add is what "meme" really means. I often wonder how it came to mean "quiz"

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

I think it's also nice when people put "not work safe" stuff behind a cut and label it as such. But then again, if someone consistently posts "not work safe" topics/pictures in their jounal with or without a cut, it's unlikely that they're on my friends list anyway.

Also I'm horrified at this obsession that LJers seem to have with lousy grammar, stupid spelling, and no capital letters. It really annoys me. I think it's just common courtesy to present yourself in an intelligent manner. But then again, I'm an elitist snob in that respect.

Not Child Safe

[katydidagain.livejournal.com]

In addition to "not work safe", "not child safe" or "mature audiences only" or "adult material" are good ones to use for quote, indecent, unquote posts/pictures.

[jducoeur]

One important detail on Reciprocity: the biggest landmine there is often when you *remove* someone from your friendslist. Some people take this as more of A Statement than is intended, so it may be worthwhile to pay attention to peoples' attitudes towards the matter...

[cellio]

Very true. This is part of why I'm conservative about adding people now (didn't used to be); I don't want to hurt feelings if I later decide I'm not as interested in following their journals. People react to a drop more negatively than a non-add.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

There's also a convention of putting large pictures, which consume a lot of bandwidth, behind a cut

There's a feature now that will hide images on your friends page and replace them with an icon you can click to see the image--I have this turned on because I subscribe to a couple groups that sometimes have people posting wide pictures that screw up the layout in the browser.

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

So, what is the feature called (so I could find it in the help) or where is it? I've been dying for something like this recently.

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

This is a good basic coverage. Well done.

Thanks, and a couple of questions...

[grouchyoldcoot.livejournal.com]

Thanks for all the info, folks. I have been on line for a long time (geez, I just thought about how long!), but the social environment is more complex here.

So here are a couple more questions. First, is it considered impolite to give out people's real identities? It seems to vary a lot between individuals, so I'm curous what the ground rules are.

Second, a meta-question: it would be easy to write a python script and scrape enough 'friends' information off people's pages to sketch out the social network. It might be a fascinating little dataset. Is this sort of thing considered hostile?

Re: people's real identities

[magid.livejournal.com]

In the journals I read, the general tendency is to (descending order):

1. give someone's LJ name, sometimes later referring to them by a shortened form ("Bitsnbytes" becoming "Bits", for instance)
   
2. give someone's first name if they don't have an LJ name, or sometimes in locked posts
   
3. use an initial or two to refer to someone

I prefer to keep online and real life identities separate, and assume that's everyone else's default, too.

[siderea]

The most important norm I've found is a meta-norm:

Norms are defined locally.

That is to say, there are not many "LJ" norms, but there are norms to (fuzzily bounded) groups of people. So it's much more important to pay attention to the norms of the people you actually flist than of "LJ" in general. (Edifying stories on request.)

This is a natural consequence of the "your journal, your space" norm, which several have already mentioned. YJYS cannot be stressed enough. The metaphor I use is, my public posts are me hanging out on the front porch of my place; you're welcome to come up on the porch and chat, but you are my guest in my space, so Role-Play Accordingly (as the saying goes.) Locked posts are invitation-only discussions in my living room; RPA.

This seems to be one of those few universal LJ norms, though it is sometimes applied in different ways. If you conduct yourself like a guest in someone's home, and it will help.

Of course, different people coming from different cultures have different ideas as to how you should behave in someone else' home.

Also, since, as Miss Manners points out, it's rude to talk with someone about a gathering to which they were not invited, it's not OK to talk about others' locked posts, except to those people who post in the comments of them (they were at the party, too), and then only in private (where you can't be overheard by people who might not have been invited).

Some people put guidelines and rules on their info page. Always read them. For some reason, some people get their nose out of joint over such disclaimers and instructions. I'm grateful, myself, when someone troubles to explicate their social assumptions so I don't have to guess.

A couple of other random additions:

An LJ meme is a parlor game. That's how they function.

This is not an ettiquette issue, but advice from another hoary old net oldtimer: the optimal way to use LJ so that you experience it as is typical (and not marginalize yourself) is to:

* flist liberally, and if necessary use filters to manage the number of journals on your flist. (Remember, filters not only are used for access control, but for display control.)

* Check your friends page(s) daily. LJ may look Usenetish, but because it's personal, it works better considered Emailish. It's like checking an email account -- if you don't do it, you marginalize yourself. It's better to skim daily, and not read thoroughly, than to read thoroughly but intermittantly.

I know people who don't use their friends page to follow LJs, they try to go to the home page of each of the journals of their friends. IMHO, it works poorly -- most of them don't keep up because it's too much trouble to visit many journals. Talk about self defeating.

Finally, I recommend the discipline of posting something, anything, daily. This is like the old days of BBSs -- someone who only downloads is of less social status than someone who contributes.

[cellio]

The journal-as-home model makes a lot of sense to me.

An LJ meme is a parlor game. That's how they function.

Yes. And I think what I like about the ones I like is that they stimulate (or can stimulate) conversation, which gets back to the whole social aspect of LJ. The other ones ("which 1980s fad are you" et al) serve as games but not as social activities. Some people take the quizzes (because that's the game part) but don't post the results.

I agree with your usage advice, though I try not to add anyone to my friends list who I expect to never read because I don't want to give that person a false impression. (I'm not saying you do; I wouldn't know.) LJ provides a way to easily filter people out of your default friends list, but I never use that. I do have several reading filters that I apply in different contexts, including a rough and ever-changing sort of my subscriptions into several priority-based buckets. If I'm in a hurry I may only read bucket #1 right now, but I'll come back and pick up bucket #2 later in the day. That sort of thing.

Include a note on spoilers, too

[lifewithmikey.livejournal.com]

First things first: I found a link to this entry on cahwyguy's LJ.

This is an excellent primer on LJ user etiquette/protocols. Thank you for writing this.

One thing you should include, however, is yet another function of the lj-cut: hiding spoilers! Sometimes LJ users are so wrapped up in the excitement of events on TV (including game shows, reality shows, and sports contests) that they run to their computers and post away without considering other users. Some LJ "friends" or fellow members of the communities in which the posts is made may not have had the opportunity to see the event in question yet they inadvertently view the final results without the proper warning.

Thankfully, everyone on my friends list who posts spoilers knows better, but I've seen some violations of this rule in various communities, mostly those dealing with reality shows.

Re: Include a note on spoilers, too

[cellio]

Hello! Thanks for the kind words.

That's a very good point about spoilers. Thanks for reminding me! Before ubiquitous internet access you were largely limited to spoiling shows for your real-world friends who taped the show for later; now you can easily spoil things for people who won't receive the broadcast for hours.

[alice-curiouser.livejournal.com]

One thing I would also mention to new users: if you must post a photo of your new nipple ring, or something similarly ookey, use the LJ-cut! A lot of people read LJ at work, and the rest of us may not want to see it. If it's questionable, let people decide for themselves if they want to see it.

[cuio.livejournal.com]

Two things:

We have the same birthday, which makes me happy in a very middle school way.
You mentioned that you live with many, many books. YOu might be interested in my new favourite thing ever, BookCrossing (http://bookcrossing.com/friend/erulissenen). Folks register books on the site, recieve a unique ID number for the book, which they mark on it, then leave the books in public. Someone else finds them, goes to th site and enters the ID and gets to learn a little about the book's journey and share information about it.

So. Cool.

[cellio]

BookCrossing sounds nifty. Thanks for the link! I like the idea of spreading books around in that way.

[aliza250.livejournal.com]

Different online media have different quoting conventions. The commonest one I've seen on LJ is to put text in italics when quoting a piece of a post or comment.

Many of my friends will post a notice when they've been uncharacteristically away from reading for a while, saying something like "let me know if you've posted something important I should read."

When posting a link to an interesting web page or news article, it's polite to credit the person whose LJ or blog you saw it in. (It's also a great way to introduce mutual friends with common interests.)

[cellio]

Mentioning people by LJ name is a way to make people aware of each others' existence in general. For example, I was quite deliberate in mentioning grouchyoldcoot by name; he's new to LJ and several of his in-person friends read my journal, so it was a way of letting them know he's here. (Of course, they did have to look at his profile page, but that's ok.)

[aliza250.livejournal.com]

A few more notes about "quizzes", memes, what-have-you:

Some quizzes are silly fluff like "what LoTR character are you most like", where you answer a few vague questions and you get pattern-matched to a chunk of canned image and/or text. (The best of this category, IMNPHO, are the ones that satirize the whole quiz mindset.)

Some quizzes are at least slightly more serious, like the ever-popular plethora of Meyers-Briggs personality analyzers (are you INTJ or EMAF?), political ideology mappings, etc.

Some so-called quizzes are really random scenario generators, where you enter your LJ userid and perhaps answer a question or two, and are handed a scenario involving your friends or interests, like "you had a party where Friend1 hooked up with Friend2, Friend3 and Friend4 got into a huge argument about Interest1, and there was a jam session with Friend5 playing the ukelele and Friend6 playing the drums." This is an automated version of a game I remember enjoying in junior high school - and remember, a lot of LJ users *are* in junior high school. Some of them are just fancied-up versions of the old Unix "fortune" program, which would deliver a random selection from a list of short quotes or sayings, much like opening a fortune cookie, and about as personal. These are silly games, but some of them are quite clever and/or amusing.

In non-LJ usage, a "meme" is an idea that can spread and evolve. In LJ usage, a meme is any kind of imitative herd behavior, anything from "post a list of books you own that you don't think anyone else on your friendslist does" to "put a rainbow stripe in your next post if you support gay marriage" (which quickly mutated when someone wrote a random-stripe-generating toy), to Americans posting "I've voted" on Election Day, to the list of 5 questions to answer in your journal posted weekly in fridayfive, to some really powerful community expressions like "No Pity. No Shame. No Silence", a meme from August 2004 that spread from someone posting I wondered for a moment what it would look like if just for one day, everyone who had survived sexual violence were visible as a survivor, if we could actually see the extent of it, if we could all know just how very not-alone we are.

Most memes are pretty trivial, though - current examples rolling through my friendslist have people posting the distance and travel time between where they grew up and where they live now, concatenating the first sentence of the first post of each month of the past year into one paragraph, or posting the 7th line from the 24th page of the book closest at hand.

Think of memes like party conversation - for every serious conversation, there are a dozen groups of people swapping stories about the stupidest haircut they ever had.

[miekec]

Stumbled across this entry. Wonderful write-up, and good discussions to read. Thx.

[cellio]

Thanks!