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

[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.