How private is your LJ?

[dreamer_easy]

Do you consider your LJ to be your private space, or a public arena, or somewhere between the two? I think of mine as very public, and flock anything I don't want to share with the universe, but I often bump up against people who consider their LJs to be much more of a personal space, and don't want the likes of me friending them, disagreeing with them, etc. I think that attitude is understandable and try to respect it; but it's not always obvious that this is someone's attitude, and suddenly I'm right where they don't want me, ie, in their face. who_daily has caused a bit of trouble now and again by linking to folks who didn't expect the whole of fandom to suddenly turn up in their journal, and who weren't actually looking for a debate, thank you very much. So tell me: how public do you consider your LJ to be?

Comments

[dameruth.livejournal.com]

I generally consider mine to be a pretty public space -- particularly the stuff I post outside of f-lock. Originally I didn't have *any*thing f-locked, but then my LJ username got rumbled to a bunch of people I know in RL, who are good folks but who would probably have heart attacks over some of my fanfic. So, some fan activity had to go (hastily) under lock, which is annoying, but that leaves anything I don't lock really, REALLY public so far as I'm concerned.

I'm surprised you get flack from people whose stuff shows up on who_daily, since you have to *ask* to get on that links list, IIRC. Doesn't make sense to advertise and then get all surprised when people show up, IMNSHO.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

IIUC from the userinfo, who_daily will link to anything you don't ask them to link to, though of course you can also ask them to add you to their watch list, alert them to individual postings, etc. More than one person has been caught out by an unexpected influx of visitors - there are 3300 people watching who_daily!

... wait a minute - drho is one of the mods! My gods, talk about being hoist by one's own petard. :(

[dameruth.livejournal.com]

You're right -- the userinfo indicates that they do trawl and post anything DW-related that they spot. Guess I either never checked their userinfo, or misremembered what was in it. My belief that you needed to request their attention is based on that header to all their posts, the one about:

"Do you have a Doctor Who community or a journal that we are not currently linking to? Leave a note in the comments and we'll add you to the who_daily reading list."

To me, that implied participation required signup, but I was only reading *part* of the FM, as it were. What was that you were saying about checking facts and posting on the net and all that . . .? :D

[outsdr.livejournal.com]

If it's publically accessible, then ... it's public. If someone doesn't want to share something that is on their LJ, they can lock it down so it's not accessible. Otherwise, it's fair game. Getting upset if someone unexpected reads a public entry is like getting upset over someone eavesdropping on a phone conversation being held on a sidewalk.

Besides, I think a number of people like to express false outrage that their "private thoughts" have been "publically exposed." Get real- if a person is that damned worried about their pristine privacy, then they would be either writing in a notebook at home, or just not even writing their thoughts down all.

Dang I'm grouchy at 2 a.m.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Mind you, if you were having a phone conversation on a sidewalk and some random person suddenly joined in, you might well be a bit put out. :)

[off_coloratura]

It's a bit different than that. More like if you were pontificating at large on a street corner and someone stopped to listen.

[purrdence.livejournal.com]

I consider my LJ friends-only, largely because there is stuff on their I don't want my family (apart from Drhoz) or my students to see.

There are some unlocked posts on there, but they're really old ones I haven't got around to locking yet.

[zeusgirl.livejournal.com]

I don't post anything in my LJ that I wouldn't be comfortable seeing on the front page of a major metropolitan daily newspaper.

Even though I use friends filters, it only takes one person to take a screengrab, and repost, and then my private thoughts can be spread across the internet.

So, I tend to be pretty private in what I post.

I also have to approve comments from non-friends, and have disabled (I think) anonymous comments.

It's very hard to have total privacy on the internet.

[purplecat]

I'm surprised you can be on LJ long and not realise that just about anyone can stumble across your posts - I can't have been here more than a couple of months when someone random turned up in my journal comments because they had a google alert on the topic. Obviously that's a little different from a fandom dogpile and, since it's a space I have some control over, I expect visitors to realise that its within my rights to shut conversation down if I think its getting out of hand - that's not ever happened but I got close once to telling two folk they were getting out of line and to quit laying into each other.

I've never felt the need to post "rules of engagement" but then I'm not a big fandom fish. If I were to feel conversations were getting out of hand a lot on my LJ then I might do something like that in my profile, just to make it clear that while anyone was welcome to come and talk about a public post, this is my discussion space and I expect that discussion to happen according to my rules and that means people being polite to each other. Just like you don't trash someone's house simply because they've invited you inside.

So, I guess, I'm saying there seems to be an area where you're happy for people to visit and comment but it isn't exactly a public arena for no holds barred debate. Then of course you have to worry about where the line between "polite discourse" and "censoring anyone who disagrees with me" falls.

[crossoverman.livejournal.com]

If I don't flock it, then the world is free to see it. And if it gets linked from another journal, all the better - if it's unlocked then I want people to read it. That's why I blog, right? For other people to read?

And if I don't want it publicly accessible, I flock. And if I don't want everyone on my flist to read it, I filter.

Very occasionally, a public post will become a private post if it attracts the wrong kind of attention but that's very rare. But I never complain if new people find my stuff.

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

Right. Ditto.

[jondennis.livejournal.com]

I probably put more personal stuff on mine than I should. I do so under the assumption that practically no one reads it. That could change someday I suppose.

[colonel-barker.livejournal.com]

I think it's very much a public space, blogging I think is a form of expression and communication. The very nature of the internet means that it can easily turn from one two communication to many, many more ways.

But other people have other views; that's what makes them people.

Aaron

[southerndave.livejournal.com]

Both my mother and my little brother have figured out how to find my livejournal (the latter on doing a Google search for an obscure and archaic computer I wrote about after he emailed me pictures of it) so the cat is well and truly out of the bag... and, no serious offence meant to those in the rest of the world who wouldn't know me from Adam, but it's only the opinions of people who actually know me (or at least deal with me off-line) that I put much stock in.

My livejournal began mostly as just another social networking thing (I leave serious blogging to serious bloggers; I'm just here to (1) compare notes with friends overseas and (2) to read interesting Famous People's blogs via their own Live Journals, or Live Journal's RSS feeds). Any cases of people "finding me" have either been: friends' friends or random strangers getting into discussions with me about things I'm interested in; or people who's own contributions to pop culture I've commented on (I don't write proper reviews, but have had a few people say things like "glad you liked my radio show" or "why did you think that about my web comic?"

And anything I don't want random strangers commenting on goes under a friends-lock (and my nanowrimo writing goes under a custom friends-lock, but that's more for the protection of the rest of the world from my bad writing than any worry that anyone's going to steal my not really deathless prose...)

[karjack.livejournal.com]

I assume few people read my LJ outside of my friends anyway, I've learned that if you make something public, there is a chance it'll get around. I made an off the cuff post about my response to Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog, never expecting anyone outside my f-list to read it, but I made it public because it wasn't saying anything terribly private. It drew several hundred comments from total strangers and was linked to many places outside of LJ. It blew me away.

I still make plenty of public posts, but I do so knowing any one of them could end up anywhere. It doesn't matter if I think it's a piffling nonsense post or not. You just never know what's going to catch someone's attention. My rule is if I don't want it showing up on boingboing, put it behind a f-lock.

[druidsfire.livejournal.com]

I personally flock most of my posts. The only ones that aren't are the playlists from my radio show, which gets a different userpic, and my tweets, which hardly anyone knows WTF I'm talking about in them anyway. I've disabled both anonymous and non-friend commenting as soon as I could find the commands to do so.

I've been opinionated enough to have made enemies who'd want to stomp around my LJ in cleats and make me upset. I simply choose not to give them the means. They can post their garbage on sites I don't read.

I used to do the custom filter in the past, but I was never quite sure what would happen if I did certain things to the posts in question. These days, I'd only use a custom filter to conspire against a friend or two in terms of getting them a present or doing something nice for them. I don't have time or the energy or the willingness to add to teh drawma by making a custom filter and then saying 'don't tell X person this stuff I'm about to say against them!' - cos someone always spills the beans anyway.

(And yet again, I'm blogging in this LJ at 6am my time...)

[alryssa.livejournal.com]

The vast majority of my posts are friendslocked, because most of my stuff is personal and not really fannish in nature; and that said, there are people with whom I have fallen out with over the years who have vaguely stalkery tendencies and I don't feel comfortable with the idea that they're possibly still 'checking up on me.' (I've had people like that attempt to leave me comments on entries in the past in some sort of vain attempt, I suppose, at 'casual reconciliation', but frankly, if you've managed to piss me off to the extent that I have to ban you from my journal to get you to just leave me the hell alone, you're not likely to ever find yourself in reconciliation with me, ever.)

Basically, if it's a public entry, then I have considered carefully, realise and acknowledge that said posting could have just anyone come along to read it or possibly comment; that doesn't mean that I won't shut them down faster than Windows having a graphics driver display conflict if I feel their comment is inappropriate or just plain annoying in my eyes, however. I own the space, it may be public occasionally, but it's my space, and public or not, I'll do with it as I damned well please.

If an entry of mine is public, and someone else finds it interesting enough to link to for some reason that doesn't involve wankery, I'm okay with that.

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

I consider what I write public, although I am surprised by the poor netiquette of a lot of folks: I understand following a link to a random stranger's opinion, and I understand even posting a response which disagrees, but I don't understand posting impolite responses. Bleah!

I have had a couple cases where I had to remember that it was a public forum, and I should not say something here which I would not want translated into other fora.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Yah - I think part of the confusion arises because, in many circumstances, it's impolite to disagree (Cf ionlylurkhere's analogy with a party. I sorely embarrassed myself earlier this year by drinking a glass of wine at a mate's do and then getting into a debate about refugees. Oy.)

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Well, I have a link to my website on my LJ, and a link to my LJ on my website, so I think mine is pretty much public. I have another journal that I'm fairly sure nobody knows about where I go to shout at the walls and be impolite and such, and if anything is more private than that I keep it in my head.

Hi, by the way, I'm a friend of pbristow's who just friended you. :) (EDIT: I mean *I* just did, not Paul, obviously...)

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

O HAI :) Perhaps I can unsettle one or two of your opinions. ;)

[kelly96.livejournal.com]

I'd say that my LJ is quite private. I'm not keen on everyone reading what I'm saying or thinking at that moment, which is why it's f'locked, but I'll share absolutely everything with my friends. I love and trust basically everyone on my f'list, so I don't mind sharing things with them. If I want something to be public, then I'll post it like that, but otherwise, I prefer to keep everything between my little network of friends.

[puppetmaker40.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of in a strange position on this one.

I have entries that I have locked away but from a few.

But since my husband is rather a rather well known writer in some circles, I have adjusted to the fact that whatever I say is out there and fans of his do read my web log along with his (www.peterdavid.net). So there are topics I don't touch and things I don't say. I think about it in terms of "is this something I would say in public?" or "Is this something that if I said in public I would own up to saying it without a qualm?" If I have any qualms, then it doesn't go out for public consumption however friends might read about it. If I have serious qualms then it just doesn't go out there. I have to think about what I say effecting my husband or coming back to bite him on the bum because I didn't think before speaking.

[ionlylurkhere.livejournal.com]

Your LJ is like your house. A private post is staying at home with a nice glass of wine. A flocked post is an invitation-only party. A public post is a party to which anyone can come (though you can influence who might come by the amount of effort you put into advertising it, which is where fannish newsletters and such come in). A comm is like a club (which may have its own set of arcane rules far more restrictive than anything anyone would feel the need to spell out in their own house) hiring the village hall for a do or something, I dunno.

The behaviour of guests at a party remains their responsibility, not the host's for having the party in the first place.

[randomling]

Complex, as I have three journals. This one is my personal journal, and as such is full of private information and very personnal ramblings. I mostly keep it flocked and consider it a private space.

I also have a fannish journal (I separated out by request from some of my non-fannish friends) which is mostly public, though I do flock some posts, mostly about my writing. That's mostly because I want my fannish activities to my accessible to people who are in my fandom but not on my flist, which does not comprise All Of Fandom - so, public entries it is. I'd be a bit surprised to find that people outside my fandom, or people who are totally non-fannish, were reading that journal, but not particularly offended. (My major fandom is popslash, and so small that I'd be incapable of getting descended on by thousands of angry fans. If I write an angry rant about Who fandom, which is rare, I tend to flock it - go figure.)

And then there is my fic journal. Totally public, nothing locked, and all I post is fiction. When I start finishing and posting original stuff, I suppose I'll need to decide whether to make a fourth (!) journal to keep it separate from my fannish identity, or stick it all over on the fic journal. In any case, I consider that to be totally public - although, again, I'd be surprised if non-fannish people stumbled across it and started to read all the gay porn about pop stars. 'Cause really, that's sort of special-interest, isn't it?

[daibhid-c.livejournal.com]

I was a bit surprised when I got friended by someone I didn't instantly recognise from Usenet. Before then, I'd been assuming that no-one who didn't already know me would be remotely interested in my posts, and the fact someone was seemed worrying.

On reflection, though, I decided I wasn't saying anything in my LJ that I wouldn't say in Usenet, and I knew that was very public.

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

It's pretty damned public, which I'm going to have to change as much as I hate it. I'm going through a bad break-up, and we are using our LJs to hurt each other.

But I've generally considered anything I post on LJ public for anyone to come by and read, comment on, and friend if they're interested enough.

[rarelylynne.livejournal.com]

I generally assume that anything I post is public. Same with email or any other electronic form of communication. It's way too easy to copy and paste.

I just inherently understand that the Internet is a public place, and you never know who will see your stuff. So I manage my public "self" carefully.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Same here. I once attended a talk given by a private investigator who explained that it is possible to get a ridiculous amount of info about people's RLs through the internet, all legally. That's one of many reasons I'm wary of joining Facebook: it encourages this sort of dissemination of t.m.i.

[purrdence.livejournal.com]

That's one of the reasons my facebook account is on friends only there too - I can control who sees it and I don't give out too much info on my profile.

I'm there to play the silly games.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

I use my journal (as pointed out in my userinfo) for ficcage in the main rather than coverage of my RL. Ergo, most of it's public; the only stuff I have under flock right now is original fic (to prevent who_daily linking to it, and also b/c, Brewster not being the most self-confident of writers, I'd like to keep the audience of my original stuff limited for the time being).

[kelliem.livejournal.com]

Nothing on the Internet is truly private, so I consider mine to be very public.

[doctor-toc.livejournal.com]

It's about as private as my lounge. All posts are friendslocked, and I only allow in folks I actually know.

[captainlucy.livejournal.com]

By and large, it's a public space. Anyone can read most of my posts and reply to them, though I do take the precaution of screening all comments from those not on my friends list.

Anything private, thats what the filters are for. Those people who want to use LJ as a private diary have the means at their disposal, if they chose not to use them I feel they don't really have much of a leg to stand on if they find people commenting on them.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I flock lots of things that I think are just slightly personal, memes and so forth (and have several custom flocks for parties, particularly private topics, etc), and consider everything else to be public.

[lynsaurus.livejournal.com]

I f-lock everything except for one, nearly content-free token post. My LJ is for keeping up with people I know in real life. There are things I will write under lock that I will not write anywhere else on the Internet. That being said, I know that even a friends lock is not secure, so there are some things I will not write about. I expect my friends to maintain at atmosphere of kindness in the comments.

[hergrace.livejournal.com]

On the whole I consider my LJ space to be that -- *my* LJ space. I also tend to be a rather private person, so most of my entries are flocked so that only people I consider friends (or very friendly acquaintances) can read them.

Then again, I don't post much, so I'm a relatively boring person anyway. If I want to get controversial, it'll generally be in a discussion that's already underway, or it will be something I'm absolutely passionate about. In general, though, I'm pretty tame, as is my LJ.

[ajponder.livejournal.com]

It's actually quite cool the different levels of public/private livejournal allows, but I consider LJ a public space. It's probably why I hardly ever post here, it's not nearly as fun as posting under an alter-ego. But it is fun keeping up with all the goss about dr who, checking out what other people are up to, that kind of thing. It surprises me that people would complain about comments, why else put stuff into the public domain if you didn't want that kind of attention? But then people are strange. They're contrary - as you know. Which is fine for those who can be persuaded by reason, or see the bigger picture, but many are so caught up in their own dramas and their own sets of belief that logic has no impact on what they actually believe.
So given Live Journal can be slightly private - if anyone complains your comments are unwanted you can always tell them to f-lock themselves. I would. -- just a smidge more politely.

[jvowles.livejournal.com]

Anything posted to the Internet is potentially public, just as anything you say on your cel phone while standing in a crowd is going to be overheard by others.

There's a reason why you can choose to f-lock things.

If I haven't f-locked the post, it's public. (Whether it's interesting or not is another matter entirely...) If I have, it's intended to be limited to a group of friends.

I really don't see what's so hard to understand about that, and personally I feel that anyone who can't get their brains round that basic paradigm has no business being online without supervision.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

In some ways, LJ is like sitting on a panel at a con, where the lights are in your eyes and you can't actually tell if anyone's in the audience unless/until they ask a question or express their opinion of something you said with a rude noise. At other times, it's a bit like having a conversation with friends in the pub garden (on one of those rare days the weather allows such things!). Any of the people sitting at other tables could be eavesdropping, and some days you actually hope they are, because you hope you're being that entertaining... but they usually aren't. And anyone walking by in the street the other side of the fence could hear something too, and you wouldn't know it.

Clearly, sharing intimate confidences in such situations is unwise, and more fool you if you blab something that then goes wider than you intended... But on the other hand, for the person overhearing you in a pub situation to then text all their friends and say "get down the pub, there's a corker of a conversation I'm listening in on!", without at least asking you first, would be considered a bit weird and rude. And yet, in a the overall internet context, linking to stuff that you think people will find intersting is generally accepted, and indeed was the whole original point of "blogging"...

So... Yeah. minority interest panel at a smallish 'con. But every now and then, you find youself visited by all the crowd that just got turned out of the GOH session 20 minutes before the next big session was ready, and you find youself blinking in the spotlight of unexpected attention.

Privacy is what filters/groups are for.

[fazia.livejournal.com]

I just stumbled across an article about a similar idea with regards to Facebook:

"Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy"
James Grimmelmann, New York Law School
http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/20/

"This Article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the law and policy of privacy on social network sites, using Facebook as its principal example. It explains how Facebook users socialize on the site, why they misunderstand the risks involved, and how their privacy suffers as a result. Facebook offers a socially compelling platform that also facilitates peer-to-peer privacy violations: users harming each others’ privacy interests. These two facts are inextricably linked; people use Facebook with the goal of sharing some information about themselves. Policymakers cannot make Facebook completely safe, but they can help people use it safely. "

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Yah - that "Is it public? Is it private? Is it speaking? Is it writing?" confusion plays into so much Internet conflict. Very many of us have discovered our pants around our ankles after posting something we thought would only be seen by a few people. :P

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

Mine's public ish, but I'm not always happy about people linking to my rants out of context because I tend to carry on thought processes from one post to the next, and arriving at one point in the arc generally doesn't provide newcomers with all the information. I don't lock it because I like new people to have a chance to find out what they're getting into, and I can't friend back everyone who friends me without my reading list becoming unmanageable.

I think the fact that people use their journals for different things causes a lot of problems with people who aren't *aware* that everyone use theirs for something different - one person's blog of carefully-considered essays is someone else's braindump and venting station, and apparently it's not always obvious which is which.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

TBH I'm really worried that I inadvertently triggered wank by linking to your posting about not writing girl characters. :( :( :(

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

It's like there are ninety steps involved in this; I ranted ineloquently and with injokes under the assumption that I wasn't talking to anyone new, you decided to share with people you assumed were sane, gobsmacked thought it would make an interesting debate topic, the posters at f_d responded to the angry tone and wording rather than the issue I was hamfistedly moaning about and got annoyed with an injoke they knew nothing about, then some fucker thought it would be a good idea to link to me in mf when I was dissing mf, which really *does* smack of wank, and then I locked my entry to get rid of the mf posters, posted an angry entry, made f_d think I was talking about them, and it went round and round in circles.

... it's amazing how fast these things can build, isn't it? I mean, I barely gave any thought to the rant itself, I was just having a RAH WILL PEOPLE STOP PLACING THEIR PERSONAL POLITICS ABOVE TELLING A GOOD STORY and it went demented. I keep forgetting that just because story is more important than anything else to me, doesn't mean that other people's value systems are so dismissive of the real world. *sigh*

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Nobody reads the words.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

*throws hands up*

Next time, I swear, interpretative dance. Dancing.

Благодарю за статью

[blimysugo.livejournal.com]

Однако, афтар грамотно накреативил! (http://site-sex-znakomstva.ru/)