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

Re: Thanks, and a couple of questions...

[cellio]

First, is it considered impolite to give out people's real identities?

If they're LJ users, I take a cue from the user info. For example, my user info contains my full name, so someone referring to me as Monica in a context that ties it to cellio is just fine. If I were referring to you and not using your LJ name, I'd say "Joel" because you give out that much, but wouldn't use more of your name.

I may talk about doing things with friends (who may or may not be on LJ) using first names only, if I don't think there's anything that might be objectionable there. So if I know that Bob had skipped out on work when we went to see a movie I won't name him (even just with a first name), but if he came to a large public party I'd hosted I wouldn't see any problem naming him. I pretty much never use people's last names. Broadly, I use guidelines no looser than those I would use in spoken conversation (and probably am more conservative because of the bit trail).

Second, a meta-question:

People have done that. Check out the lj_nifty community, and in particular the community's memories under "tools" and "toys". (These things do come and go over time, so some links may be stale.)

(While you're looking at communities, news is a good one to monitor.)