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

[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.