aljcommpanel08 community -- we may as well make some use of that, since it exists and is on the topic.]So here's a sticky and interesting question that came up during the "LiveJournal and the Nature of Community" panel last weekend. I don't have a clear answer, so I'm curious to get peoples' thoughts.
One point that came up in the panel was the problem of people deleting posts. If I make a post, I "own" that post, and can do more or less what I want to it. If you think of LJ as a blogging system, that makes some sense: they're my posts, so I can delete or edit them if I want.
But what if you don't think of it as a blogging system? If you think of the post as the head of a conversation instead, ownership becomes much stickier. Do I have the right to delete everybody else's comments? This can become a pretty fraught question (which is why it came up in the panel) -- if others are saying significant but uncomfortable things, do I have the right to delete them?
This question is even sharper for CommYou, because I'm quite clear that this is *not* a blogging system. The differences between LJ and CommYou are going to be subtle, but the primary difference is that CommYou is specifically about conversations, *not* posts: I'm emphasizing the community more deliberately than LJ does. I currently have a concept of ownership written into the stories that is similar to LJ's, including stories allowing me to delete individual responses and entire conversations, but it's far from clear that that is the best solution.
So I'd love to get folks' thoughts on this. I have some ideas of possible middle-ground solutions -- for example, allowing someone to tear a subthread off and take ownership of that, even if the owner removes it from the original conversation -- but nothing definite yet. So insights and ideas would be welcomed.
There are other, related issues -- for example, whether one should be able to retroactively change the top-post silently, which is a fine mechanism for subtle abuse of the conversation. Thoughts on any of these ownership-related points are also invited...
re: tearing
Re: tearing
The core concept is that any "community" on Facebook (which is the initial target) implicitly gets a corresponding CommYou feed for the use of members of that community. Communities include implicit ones like friend-lists, and explicit ones like Groups, Events, and so on. Who can start a conversation within a community depends on the nature of that community, and is somewhat owner-controlled.
In principle, the owners of the community should have a measure of ownership over the conversations. But the fine details here are subtle, because this is not about individual postings -- it's about the *aggregate* conversation, which is the primary focus. (Indeed, the difference that implies is where most of the UI differences come in.)
And really -- regardless of how flexible I make it, the most interesting question is what the default is. Most conversations will wind up using the defaults, so those need to make sense -- the nature of the final product will mainly be shaped by the defaults.
As for the public use: depends on what you mean. There is a long-term story of having "public" conversations, but that's really not the focus -- it's mainly aimed at the implicit and explicit networks built inside social networks. So it's filtered pretty much as much as LJ right off the bat. But yes: there is a story already in there for "ignore all conversations started by [person]", one for "ban [person] from commenting in this community", and a possible one that I'm contemplating of "ignore all comments from [person]". (A harder issue, and less obviously right.)
As to your question, the owner of the original post is, to some extent the "owner" of what is said in "their space." If I were to give an analogy- the original poster is the "host" and has the right to ask folks to leave, change contentious topics, or shut down the party at their discretion.
The people posting in the thread have the right to "leave the party" and take their dicussion elsewhere.
Where this breaks down, is that this is a written, asynchonous medium, and folks can discover that they have been booted from a party in their absence, and that the discussion they have been having has moved on, and they don't know to where. And, as in RL, it's considered rude to kick people out of your house/party.
But I am aware that this is (well, can be) a pretty draconian control-freakish way of looking at it. I tend keep a copy of any really in-depth or lengthy posts I make in other people's journals, in case they get deleted.
A bit, but relevant nonetheless. Indeed, it's precisely things like that -- the non-blogging aspects -- where I'm hoping to do better than LJ. So it's useful to have thoughts from that end of things.
I tend keep a copy of any really in-depth or lengthy posts I make in other people's journals, in case they get deleted.
Useful observation, and just the kind of reason that I care about the issue. It indicates that you feel a reasonable measure of ownership over your words, so it isn't clear that someone else -- even the "host" of the conversation -- should be able to completely delete them...
Responsibility requires control, to the degree of responsibility. If someone's name or reputation is going to be associated with the conversation, they need to be able to moderate the discourse to some extent.
Unhelpful, I know.
On the contrary -- it's a useful way of looking at the question. I don't think it's the only consideration, but it's one worth keeping in mind...
In a more community forum - such as Salon or those with my local paper I believe it is the moderators first - subject to posted guidelines then to the person who started a specific thread.
I would *strongly* like to come up with some underlying principles for the concept of "ownership", rather than be too ad-hoc -- building a system that end users will understand almost always requires a strong measure of consistency. But you're correct that there are subtleties to the issues here.
Clearly: if I were designing a system such as the one you are indicating, we'd be doing it much differently from each other, I think. Which isn't bad.
Yaas. Indeed, one of the objectives of this project is to kick off a round of innovation in this area. I'll know that I've succeeded if a whole bunch of other companies scramble to steal my ideas and improve on them. (Obviously, I'd like to get rich as well. But Changing The World is usually the principal motivation of the serious Internet innovator...)
Personally, I think of LJ as more journalish (due to all of the above factors), so yes, folks have the right (in a general sense, not just a technical sense) to delete their own journal posts / comments thereupon.
However, having the right to do something - however undisputable that right may be - doesn't mean that doing the thing is a good idea. Depending on details of circumstance, it might be rude, antisocial, cruel, or otherwise a poor choice of action / judgement.
[And: I've been on forums where any edited post / comment displays a "last edited on ..." bit of information. Simple, and unobtrusive if designed well; I've liked how it's worked.]
Just so. It's why I'm deliberately using the terms "community" and "conversation" to describe the aggregate and individual things here. There *needs* to be a measure of ownership (because unowned systems like Usenet inevitably collapse under the weight of the trolls), but I'm deliberately tweaking the conceptual model, and trying to avoid making too many assumptions about the ownership system quite yet.
[And: I've been on forums where any edited post / comment displays a "last edited on ..." bit of information. Simple, and unobtrusive if designed well; I've liked how it's worked.]
Good to know. I'm leaning towards that, but haven't made up my mind yet. (The Spark system that we designed at Zingdom disallowed editing entirely, but I've decided that I don't like that...)
And to actually answer the question you asked...
For community building LJ has the best infrastructure for networking, not just the ability to make a connection to people (friending), but that you can "spider" out and see their friends' friends, or through their interests list and find more interesting people you might want to know and/or correspond with. The ways in which communities, interests and people link together makes it easy to make connections in all sorts of ways, and see social patterns (Hey- there are LOTS of Age of Sail geeks in fandom... and there are is an Austen RPG over there... keen!) This ability to make connections helps communities spontaneously coalesce (or congeal) on LJ.
I think forums do a much better job of having conversations, and keeping ownership of those conversations communal. If I start a thread in Television without Pity, or in the Boston Sci-fi Forums, I don't feel as much like I "own" the conversation/subsequent comments as I do when I post something in my journal.
To keep with the party analogy, my journal is my house party, and a forum is a party to which I have been invited, and asked to participate.
Re: And to actually answer the question you asked...
Yes, to some degree that's what this is. It's specifically intended to replace Facebook's forum system (which IMO is almost unusably bad). Basically, I'm trying to provide a mechanism for pleasant, usable forums for any "community" inside Facebook. (And boy, there are a *lot* of kinds of communities in Facebook.)
Anyway -- lots of good ideas: thanks! I'll have to chew on which of those networking ideas make sense for CommYou, and which ones are already served adequately by Facebook. I'm deliberately trying to focus on the communications side of things, and leave the actual social networking to Facebook in areas that they do adequately. Part of what kicked this off was the realization that Facebook does *not* do conversation adequately at all.
And yet...how do those differ from posts at "given-issue@yahoo.com"? Or looking further back, "alt.given-issue"? Idunno.
And again...most of what I read on LJ is the functional equivalent of "what-I-wanna-talk-about-today@yahoo.com"
Most of the time, when I post a comment on LJ, it feels no different from posting a comment on a Yahoo or Usenet group. Never really thought about the ownership issue much, until now.
And while you're right about the Usenet analogy, it has to be noted that one of Usenet's biggest problems was the *lack* of clear ownership. The fact that there was nothing in between a wide open free-for-all and locked-down moderation is, IMO, one reason why Usenet largely died. I need to do better than that...
I'm a moderator on the largest of the D&D fan messageboards - EN World. We have number of policies that bear on ownership and moderation of conversations. Full discussion of them would exceed the limits of what I can put in an LJ comment, actually. But at some opportune time if you'd like to disucss them offline, I can do that...
The easiest way to achieve that is the somewhat fascist approach that once you've put something out there, it can't be changed. No rewriting comments someone's replied to (like the LJ rule), no sneakily changing who can view a conversation, etc.
I think it's pretty obvious users will hate that. It is the usenet model, but as a practical consideration there you just don't have control over anything once it's been released into the wild, and it's harder to form a close community with it for precisely that reason. Giving users at least append capabilities if not edit is good. Having a mechanism for inviting in people as they become relevant to a conversation is probably vital. Changing the visibility of a conversation or thread is probably bad, but you can let a user start a subthread with narrower visibility as a sidebar. If a user wants to delete their own comments, they should probably be able to, as long as child comments are still accessible. How to make comments accessible on deleted conversations is harder, but you probably give users some interface for getting at any comments they've made in the past.
Of course, it's still arguable that in a system that's going to be blasting out notifications of all the content users write you really can't put any effective withdrawal in place. If you delete your comment I can still quote it somewhere else if I got the text of it sent to me, so you can never *really* make anything go away.
Some hard questions, certainly...
Having a mechanism for inviting in people as they become relevant to a conversation is probably vital. Changing the visibility of a conversation or thread is probably bad, but you can let a user start a subthread with narrower visibility as a sidebar.
I particularly like both of those, and hadn't written them in yet. Onto the story list they go.
Of course, it's still arguable that in a system that's going to be blasting out notifications of all the content users write you really can't put any effective withdrawal in place.
Well, keep in mind that this *isn't* Salon. It started from the same place, but I'm revisiting all assumptions and designs, and one of them is that I'm not assuming quite as much blasting as we were at Zingdom. In particular, while the multi-modal stuff is still in the story list, it's much further *down* the list than it was for Salon -- I'm focusing on making the system work as a really great FB app first. So whereas AIM conversations came in the first month in Salon, they're probably 6+ months down the road in CommYou: my priorities are just plain different. (And the whole idea of SMS conversations is on hold until I can make the economics make sense. It's a fine idea technically, but untenable at 5 cents per message. It may have to wait until I have the leverage to make some big deals.)
And that said: this point is already true to a lesser degree on LJ -- the people I responded to may have gotten emails of the comment I'm deleting. But folks still seem to find value in deletion, and I think that says something...
Another concept to consider is the idea of "banning" users, which also ties into ownership. Another variant here is a concept that was part of a MMORG that some friends of mine were developing (which never came to fruition) to deal with the problem of obnoxious players ruining your fun. In their solution, you could remove another player from your view of the world, and you would simply never appear to each other or be able to interact. (The particular structure of their game made this more workable than in many MMORGs.) A similar concept could apply to conversational systems -- while blog "owners" sometimes ban users who are obnoxious or are comment spammers, there are people I wouldn't mind being able to "disappear" from my view. They're clearly not bad enough to justify banning, but I find them annoying and I don't feel they contribute anything useful, so I'd rather just not see their comments, rather than trying to skip over them before they piss me off.
I think editing of top-posts should definitely be allowed; lots of blog authors rely on "community editing" to fix misspellings and other minor errors. Whether it should be allowed silently, I dunno. I certainly think the default should be that a link gets added, perhaps a newspaper-style "this post has been updated since it was published" that shows a version with redline/strikeout markings.
Useful -- thanks!
We're all familiar with the mailing list concept of changing the subject line when the conversation wanders; this could serve the same purpose more effectively.
Yaas. I'm starting from the assumption that conversation drift *will* happen, and giving some thought to how to deal with it. Probably won't be in the first beta, but I'm hoping to have a decent approach to this before the main release.
Another concept to consider is the idea of "banning" users, which also ties into ownership.
Oh, absolutely. I've already got three or four variants of "ban" written in already.
In their solution, you could remove another player from your view of the world, and you would simply never appear to each other or be able to interact.
Hah! Well, it's a good thing that Trenza went under when it did, back in 2000 -- I almost patented this.
(Trenza was best described as Second Life overlayed on the Web. I spent a *lot* of time on the social networking side of that, and wrote a far-reaching patent that the rest of the world still hasn't caught up with yet. I posted about it many years ago: the core concept was an idea of "dynamic winnowing", where each person's view is composed of the people *he* wants to interact with. There were all sorts of interesting complications from this, including the sort of "ban from my view" you're talking about, readjusting the view when in active conversations, and an idea of "Acquaintances" -- halfway between strangers and buddies -- that still doesn't exist anywhere else. Indeed, it'll be interesting to see how many of those ideas wind up eventually making it into CommYou, where they might really shine: it's much easier to do this stuff in text than in 3D.)
Anyway -- yes, the concept of banning that you're talking about isn't too different from the old Usenet killfile. I haven't decided how much to work that in -- it's a *little* iffy as part of an ongoing conversation -- but it might well happen across the board.
I certainly think the default should be that a link gets added, perhaps a newspaper-style "this post has been updated since it was published" that shows a version with redline/strikeout markings.
Not bad -- I'll consider that. It certainly matches one of the common idioms on LJ...
Interesting. I don't know if I entirely agree -- LJ *does* allow it, and that mostly works okay -- but it's useful to know that you've seen examples of it working badly. That matches my intuition that it's a bad idea.
One possible compromise to deletion might be to make it only visible to people who have already posted in it, and not to anyone else.
A useful middle-ground suggestion. I'll consider that -- thanks!
That said, LJ *is* built from a blogging model, and so the first poster should have full rights.
Other more conversational models can be found in discussion board systems. In those systems, any person can edit, or sometimes even remove the content of or the entirety of a post, but can only quote others if there is any interaction.
I'm intrigued by your notion of subthreading. In a bboard world, I suppose what you would be doing is creating a new entry point to the middle of a conversation, while retaining all the conversation with context, on one page.
That does have problems when threads go to a different topic though. People are terrible at revising e-mail subject lines on mailing lists, for instance. A new entry to the conversation should force the poster of that entry to title, rather than cloning the existing topic of conversation title, to hopefully avoid some of that.
Now I'm seeing some sort of conversation 'cloud' with people poking new holes into the cloud, to either access an established thread of conversation, or to start a new one in the cloud.
The real problem is that f2f conversations are ephemeral, and time is a real component. That isn't really the case with online material, except for some realtime chat systems like IRC, where there's no editing, and there's no history for newcomers to see.
Edited at 2008-01-24 09:17 pm (UTC)
How you do mean?
But what if you don't think of it as a blogging system? If you think of the post as the head of a conversation instead, ownership becomes much stickier.
Well, yes, but that's at least partially because if you don't think of it as a blogging system, OK, fine, but you haven't told us what the conversation is organized around. Or put another way, how did this particular assortment of people get into this particular conversation.
I fear I'm being unclear, so I'll describe more. Sorry if I'm belaboring the obvious.
Here on LJ, the organizing principle is the individual (ignoring comms for the moment). The participants in a discussion are there because they find one particular person in that conversation interesting or otherwise worth following, and that person initiated a discussion with either a designated subset (flocked, filtered) or all comers.
Meanwhile, back on just about all pre-social-networking fora -- bboards, Usenet, emaillists, MUDs -- the organizing principle is a topic or activity; the participants in a discussion are there because the topic or activity appealed to them, and generally they joined because they were seeking out further opportunities to discuss a topic or engage in an activity.
Rarely, a "topical" style forum will organize around a purely social organization. Such discussions are like online parties; their purpose is to socialize with the group of people there to socialize with. Typically such groups are by invitation only or are secret or both (for which reason I will cite no examples :). Participants are there to discuss anything with the other participants specific to that group. I do mean to be clear here that while all successful topical forums will develop a thick coating of socializing and of-topic chatter, I am referring to a forum expressly for the purpose of a (semi-)private party.
In each of these circumstances, what the rules of ownership are/should be can be different. I think it matters enormously what the organizing priciple of a "discussion" -- or more accurately space -- is. And I can't tell that from here. What are you imagining?
Topic- or group-specific conversations are also possible on some of these platforms, though I can't of course say whether that's still a focus for CommYou.