idonotlikepeas, posts by tag: meta - LiveJournal (original) (raw)
21 September 2010 @ 03:20 pm
Oh my god Facebook whatever
Okay, guys, I meant to say something about this before but I was much more interested in posting fun music stuff and I was kind of hoping it would all blow over. Oh, well.
Some people on my friends list are still cranky about the Facebook crossposting thing. I think a lot of that is just because people don't exactly understand how it all works, so let me clear up a few of the myths I see floating around out there by explaining the feature briefly:
* If you want to connect your LJ with your Twitter or Facebook accounts, you can do that now. You have to go and do it deliberately yourself. Facebook doesn't know your LJ username unless you tell it what it is. LJ does not know your Facebook name unless you tell it what it is. Your friends list is not being mined for these things in any way. It is an opt-in deal.
* Once you have connected up your Facebook and Twitter accounts, you can choose to cross-post entries that you yourself personally have written by checking a box at the bottom of the entry page when you post it. If you do that, the entry goes out on those services (with a link back to LJ).
* You can also post comments that you yourself have personally written in exactly the same way.
That's it. There is no button that says "take this other person's entry and put it on Facebook" and there never will be, because that is insane. If you weren't upset to begin with or if you misunderstood any of these and now are less upset about the feature, please do stop reading now, because the rest of this entry is addressed to everyone else.
Now, I like to think that I have made it clear when I don't like things that LJ has done in the past. It's come up. Hell, I told off the GM in news comments over basic accounts being axed. I'm not blindly in favor of anything LJ does just because it's LJ doing it, and I sincerely hope nobody reading this believes that. I also have no particular plans to even enable the Facebook or Twitter connections on my account because, basically, Facebook is a big "eh" as far as I'm concerned and posting the first 140 characters of an entry minus the space for the URL to twitter just doesn't do it for me. So please take what I am about to say in that context.
LJ just turned off the crossposting checkboxes on protected entries for non-Cyrillic users (because Cyrillic users are thrilled about this feature rather than angry), but if I'd been in charge they frankly wouldn't have bothered. This button does not repost the entry it is being commented on anywhere, it does not take anything except the comment you, yourself, personally wrote, and crosspost that. Yes, it is possible for someone to deliberately copy and paste content from a locked entry and then put it into a comment and then check the box to send it to Facebook. If you think about it, that actually requires one more step than it would require for them to just copy and paste the stuff to Facebook directly, because they wouldn't have to check a box saying "post to Facebook" then. I want to repeat that, because it's important. LiveJournal's scary feature that enables people to repost your locked content is actually marginally less convenient for the purpose of violating someone's privacy than making a Facebook post of your own. The only thing it really makes more convenient is putting the same comment (the comment you wrote) in more than one place.
The reason you can repost comments is simple: some comments are "+1" or "I'm sorry, that's terrible. :(". Probably nobody cares about reposting those. But some are long, involved, interesting things that are pretty much the equivalent of an entry. Hell, I can recall one time when, in response to someone's entry, I wrote a filk of "Teddy Bear's Picnic" which involved a bunch of teddy bears getting drunk. That strikes me as the type of thing that, if I wanted to share stuff on Facebook, I might want to repost. It does not make sense to prevent me from doing this just because I wrote it as a comment on your entry rather than entry of my own. A lot of people seem to have the idea that the person who owns the journal owns the comments to it as well. That is not the case. By US law and by LJ policy, the person who writes the content owns the content, period, end of discussion, no matter what that content actually is or whose journal it is in. If I write a comment on your entry, it is not something over which we have joint authorship. They're my words and I can do with them what I like. If I quote you in that comment, that portion of the comment consists of your words and I better hope I'm within fair use guidelines.
The risk is that I might copy and paste your entry into my comment and send it (less conveniently than normal) to Facebook, except that if I do that, I am an asshole. LJ has no power to prevent me from being an asshole, and they are not actually making it any easier for me to be an asshole with this feature. What they are doing is making it easier for me to take something cool that I might have said and promote it to a different audience. LJ is not in the business of sharing your protected entries. Why would they be? Most of their business comes from people who protect part of their journals. This feature does not in any way threaten your privacy; the only thing that does that is the presence of an asshole on your private filters and that is the risk you have always accepted since the first time you created one.
I know some of you don't like Facebook. I can appreciate that. Facebook is kind of icky. But a lot of people like it. Based on their usage, I'd go so far as to say that more people like it than don't, even on LJ. This is a case of the developers giving people something they want and like. The fact that you personally may not want or like it does not mean that the developers should consider your wishes more important than those of the people that do want the feature, of whom there are probably more than of you. If they want to continue to exist as a business, LJ has to pay attention to the majority of its users, not just the loudest ones.
And lastly, I want to say: LJ has done some questionable things. I think it's a very good idea to call them on it whenever they do, because outcry from the customers can get stuff changed (as you can see from the fact that they emergency-patched the site to remove those checkboxes). When you freak out about something like this, which is entirely harmless? You lose credibility for when the big stuff really happens. Be angry, guys, but use your anger responsibly, or else people will stop paying attention to you.
15 March 2009 @ 11:29 am
Excuses!
Due to all the stuff going on, being sick, and etc, I haven't read LJ for almost a week. I just paged through about 500 entries, so I am certain I missed important stuff. Sorry about that, guys. It isn't that I hate you. (Except those of you that I hate. You know who you are.)
27 February 2009 @ 12:31 pm
Personalities, names, and such
Have you ever taken a personality test like the Myers-Briggs or Enneagram? If so, did you agree with the results? And what was your type?
On personality tests I tend to vary a lot. The MBTI indicator has the following range: I am always I (although I vary from strong to weak I), sometimes N, generally T, and half and half J/P. The last time I tried it was INTJ, but I've gotten completely different results at different times, except for the I; I'm always an I (which means, remember, that I regain energy by being alone, not that I'm terrible at interacting with other people). The T seems to vary less these days too. I used to keep whatever the most recent type was in my interest list on LJ, but I think I stopped doing that.
Generally I agree with whatever result I get at the time that I get it. I'm okay with INTJ right now. This is an INTJ kind of time.
The enneagram is even less reliable. I don't think I've gotten the same result any time - I just did it again and got 1 (reformer). Last time I got 9 (peacemaker) and the time before that I had 2 (helper). Unlike the MBTI, though, I've never actually been administered this by a person, so maybe I'm missing out there.
In general, I think personality tests are fun to play with, but I wouldn't take them too seriously. They're trying to measure something fairly complex with a very limited toolset and a very limited potential set of results. Furthermore, they must deal with the GIGO problem (garbage in, garbage out) - you're filling the thing out yourself, and what you perceive about yourself is not always accurate. (This is why it can help to have someone give you the test, since they can root around a bit and make sure you're not flubbing it.) A more interesting question to me is: based on what you think about yourself, are you okay with how you are? If not, what do you plan to do about it?
What's the story behind your username?
I could write an answer to this one (and have before, several times), but I'm actually curious. What do you guys think the story behind my username is?
20 January 2009 @ 05:12 pm
Spam
Since several of you messaged me about this:
A spammer came into my journal (and those of several other Abuse Team members) and spammed my entries, including comments from lots of you. If you commented in my journal recently and had notifs on, you probably got notified about them. Sorry about that. I've switched from screening non-friend comments to blocking them for a while, which will prevent that kind of madness. (I'll switch back if I can figure a way to do it without putting you guys at risk for that kind of thing again.)
Current Mood: 
annoyed
06 January 2009 @ 10:30 am
sup, LJ, layoffs, and such
A lot of you have probably seen the Valleywag post about LJ laying off most of its staff. I'm not going to link to it, because it's mostly wrong.
That said, LJ did lay off about half of its U.S. staff (and apparently some number of Russians earlier as well, although I don't know much about that). With, yes, no severance and basically zero notice. The main cuts seem to be in the areas of design, marketing, and management, although they also got rid of probably the last programmer they should have gotten rid of. And they definitely got rid of the worst possible designer they could have gotten rid of. (No offense to other folks in their departments who might read this.)
Does this mean the site is dying? I don't think so. I wouldn't say it's a /good/ thing, but basically from what I can tell they decided to cut out people they figured were redundant between their Russian and U.S. offices. The main problem is that they did it in a really stupid and morally dubious way. In terms of the long-term health of the company and the service? We'll see what happens in the next few months. And I really hope there's a news post about it today, because the rumors I see floating around are more destructive than anything else.
I see a lot of people on my friends list making backups of their journals. That's a good idea. Backups are always handy to have, because you never know if something will fail or your account will be hacked or who knows what. But don't be afraid LJ is going away next week. (On the other hand, if you plan to leave out of anger... well, I understand your feelings.)
ETA: Backup guides:
http://brown-betty.livejournal.com/284083.html (Windows)
http://antennapedia.livejournal.com/238132.html (Mac)
I haven't used either of these myself, but they've been recommended to me. (I use the jbackup perl script that's included with the LJ distribution, which should work for Linux users.)
30 May 2008 @ 11:53 am
Congratulations are in order
Just a quick note to say congrats to 
legomymalfoy for winning the advisory board election! Illegitimi non carborundum, Jen. We know you won it fair and square. :)
29 May 2008 @ 09:58 am
Quick notes
I have two totally unrelated things to post about. It's quicker to do them both at once, so here you go.
First: a friend of a friend recently had some really rough things happen to him. Full story is over at http://jazzerat.livejournal.com/47535.html. As was said to me (via the same friend), "He seems to find comfort in the support coming out of the woodwork today. He was brutalized by complete strangers. Some concern from the same can't be a bad thing." I think you all know what to do, if you have a few spare minutes.
Speaking of a few spare minutes: just a reminder that the last day of voting in the LJ advisory board election is today. Polls close at 9 PM Pacific time. I advise any of you who care to look at the poll post, and if your candidate is one of the ones that currently has no chance of winning, please switch at least your third-place vote to one of the candidates that can still win.
24 May 2008 @ 12:47 pm
Elections
I've been meaning to write about the U.S. elections, but let me just summarize that post: go back and read my previous couple of posts about the democratic primary and add a month or two of no particular changes. Obama is still the person who's going to win that primary, although that fact is at least becoming more obvious to the rest of the world. We should also see poll results picking up in the next few weeks as people who previously said they wouldn't vote for him (in support of Clinton's nomination) start switching over since her candidacy is DOA.
But what I really want to talk about today is the LJ advisory board elections. I know some of you have been unhappy about the way LJ has gone lately, and this is pretty much your best chance to affect the direction of the site. Now, as it happens I know a few of the candidates, mostly from LJ volunteer work, and I'd like to recommend that everyone vote for legomymalfoy in the first slot.
I've worked with her for a couple of years on the support and abuse teams, and I have to say that she's extremely even-handed, creative, intelligent, and sweet. She has a great handle on the site from every angle: as a user, as a technical support person, as an abuse team member, even as a writer of fan fiction and an aggressive member of fandom. It's rare that you find someone who can bring together all those different points of view in a consistent way, but Jen is such a person and I have already voted for her in first place without the slightest hesitation. And if my recommendation isn't terribly significant for you, let me also point out that presently she is the best way to keep jameth from winning. And you do not want him to win. Trust me on this.
(If you're looking for second and third slot candidates, I would steer you towards imc and rebelsheart.)
Regardless of whether you vote for my preferred candidate, at least get in there and vote; if you've ever complained about something that LJ has done, this is your chance to actually do something meaningful to affect what it does in the future. It is rare that a company actually encourages the creation of an oversight board composed of users, and this is behavior that one ought to encourage by participating. And, if you please, spread the word; push a different candidate if you like, but encourage your friends to participate. More involvement can only help, and it only takes about twenty seconds to vote!
20 March 2008 @ 04:37 pm
LJ
There are probably two or three people who haven't seen this, so if you've been following the latest kurfuffle, go over here: http://community.livejournal.com/lj_2008/3846.html
Based on a conversation we (volunteers) had with some of the management people at LJ, I think the apology in that post is sincere. My impression is that the mistakes the fledging LJ, Inc. has made so far have resulted from inexperience and lack of knowledge of the product rather than from malice or rampaging commercialism. On balance, I think it's worth giving them a chance to see how they do.
Also, for those of you who've been exchanging links to the Anton Nossik interview, here's his response to it: http://anton-nossik.livejournal.com/16069.html
My takeaway from the second link: the guy's a complete putz, but he isn't in charge of anything at LJ. As far as I can tell, he's basically a consultant.
02 March 2008 @ 11:39 pm
Yeah, I keep doing that
I just read back from skip 680, so if I commented on an old thing of yours, that's why. And if I failed completely to comment on something you might have expected me to comment on, well, that's why. I need to stop doing that; even a few days of not reading LJ tends to bury me.
Also, have a random iTunes-related meme I ganked from placeboweek:
How many songs total: 7879
How many hours or days of music: 21.4 days
Most recently played: Guster - Happier
Most played: Indigo Girls - Midnight Train to Georgia
(runner up is Mary by Oingo Boingo, which might be higher if I didn't have multiple versions of it)
Most recently added: Yael Naim - New Soul
Sort by song title:
First Song: The Men of the Robert Shaw Chorale - A-roving
Last Song: Big Audio Dynamite - 2000 Shoes (play count: 0)
Sort by time:
Shortest Song: A Silver Mount Zion - Long March Rocket Or Doomed Airliner (0:06)
Longest Song: Grateful Dead - That's it for the Other One (20:53)
Sort by album:
First album: The Chipmunks - The A-Files
Last album: Smashing Pumpkins - 2007-10-16 - Orpheum Theatre
First song that comes up on Shuffle: Bob Dylan - Blowing in the Wind
Search the following and state how many songs come up:
Death - 31
Life - 82
Love - 372
Hate - 39
You - 644
Sex - 13
ETA: Oh, yeah, since chasethestars asked in comments and I'd been meaning to mention: the Tie-a-day posts are on hold until LJ decides it's okay with posting my picture posts again. For some reason it's just been eating them lately.