LJ Ratings: Right Goal, Wrong Paradigm
Dec. 1st, 2007 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
major_clangerA week or so ago ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
purplecthulhu noted a worrying correlation between the topics of my weekly IT Law seminars and real-world events, prompting him to ask for advance notice of future subjects so he knew what disaster he should be hiding from. I noted in reply that the next seminar was going to be on Privacy, and suggested that LJ/6A would presumably be doing something like make all our posts public.
Well, they were a bit more imaginative than that.
I have mixed feelings about this. To be charitable to LJ/6A, I think they want LJ to succeed as an online community and recognise that this means either ghettoising it to a particular demographic or trying to make it all things to all people. The latter option is doubtless much more tempting, but it has profound implications for the sort of environment LJ can be.
A phrase that's been bandied around a lot in the context of fannish/geek hangouts - real world or online - is 'safe space' (a concept I discussed before in light of nipplegate.) Unfortunately people can have very different ideas of what a 'safe space' is: for one person, it is an environment where one is free to act in ways that are normally not sanctioned by society; for another, it is somewhere free from stressful and upsetting stimuli. On the one hand we have the users who see LJ as somewhere they can safely, for example, swap fanfic whose very subject matter might turn their workmates into a lynch mob, and on the other are users who see LJ as a precious haven free from the stresses that upset them in their day-to-day lives. It's not even hard to imagine that the same person may hold both points of view. As LJ expands, it becomes harder and harder to satisfy these interpretations without somehow partitioning it into an array of 'safe spaces', all of which are 'safe' in some different way.
A further factor complicating all this is a privacy issue that is affecting most online communities at the moment: the 'what if my boss sees this?' (or, just as often, 'what if a potential boss sees this?') question. Many LJ users don't hide their real ID, or do so only against superficial searches. I know I've been a bit worried at times at some of the content anyone reading my LJ would find by looking at my friends-page, although making my LJ non-searchable seems to have mitigated that issue.
Other virtual communities have tried to deal with this in varying ways. Second Life, for instance, has 'adult zones' with different acceptable standards of behaviour to those applying generally. But LJ works on a fundamentally different paradigm to SL: in SL, the 'where' is a place in its virtual geography, whilst in LJ the 'where' is an individual or community journal. Why is this significant? Well, we're used to the idea that different rules of social conduct apply in different places, and we can choose whether or not we want to subject ourselves to those rules by deciding which places we want to visit. In SL, it's the same: the rules and ratings apply not to you (or your avatar) so much as the places where your avatar is.
Contrast LJ's new rating system. It labels individual journals, which for most LJ users are congruent with their identity as a person within the community. It's no longer where you go that's being labelled and controlled, it's who you are. To my mind the key failure of LJ/6A has been to misunderstand this and to apply rating measures appropriate to one paradigm of the virtual world onto another one where they are perceived very differently. Aggravating this is the system of allowing other users to rate posts (and by implication the users who make them). In a geographical virtual community this would be bad enough, but it would at least involve labelling a bit of space as 'adult'. In LJ, it is far more personal.
There's an oft-quoted saying about never ascribing to malice what can be explained by incompetence. I think LJ/6A are trying to find ways around real issues posed by the growth of LJ, but I also think they've tried to apply a solution chosen without a proper understanding of the sort of environment it's appropriate for.
purplecthulhu noted a worrying correlation between the topics of my weekly IT Law seminars and real-world events, prompting him to ask for advance notice of future subjects so he knew what disaster he should be hiding from. I noted in reply that the next seminar was going to be on Privacy, and suggested that LJ/6A would presumably be doing something like make all our posts public.Well, they were a bit more imaginative than that.
I have mixed feelings about this. To be charitable to LJ/6A, I think they want LJ to succeed as an online community and recognise that this means either ghettoising it to a particular demographic or trying to make it all things to all people. The latter option is doubtless much more tempting, but it has profound implications for the sort of environment LJ can be.
A phrase that's been bandied around a lot in the context of fannish/geek hangouts - real world or online - is 'safe space' (a concept I discussed before in light of nipplegate.) Unfortunately people can have very different ideas of what a 'safe space' is: for one person, it is an environment where one is free to act in ways that are normally not sanctioned by society; for another, it is somewhere free from stressful and upsetting stimuli. On the one hand we have the users who see LJ as somewhere they can safely, for example, swap fanfic whose very subject matter might turn their workmates into a lynch mob, and on the other are users who see LJ as a precious haven free from the stresses that upset them in their day-to-day lives. It's not even hard to imagine that the same person may hold both points of view. As LJ expands, it becomes harder and harder to satisfy these interpretations without somehow partitioning it into an array of 'safe spaces', all of which are 'safe' in some different way.
A further factor complicating all this is a privacy issue that is affecting most online communities at the moment: the 'what if my boss sees this?' (or, just as often, 'what if a potential boss sees this?') question. Many LJ users don't hide their real ID, or do so only against superficial searches. I know I've been a bit worried at times at some of the content anyone reading my LJ would find by looking at my friends-page, although making my LJ non-searchable seems to have mitigated that issue.
Other virtual communities have tried to deal with this in varying ways. Second Life, for instance, has 'adult zones' with different acceptable standards of behaviour to those applying generally. But LJ works on a fundamentally different paradigm to SL: in SL, the 'where' is a place in its virtual geography, whilst in LJ the 'where' is an individual or community journal. Why is this significant? Well, we're used to the idea that different rules of social conduct apply in different places, and we can choose whether or not we want to subject ourselves to those rules by deciding which places we want to visit. In SL, it's the same: the rules and ratings apply not to you (or your avatar) so much as the places where your avatar is.
Contrast LJ's new rating system. It labels individual journals, which for most LJ users are congruent with their identity as a person within the community. It's no longer where you go that's being labelled and controlled, it's who you are. To my mind the key failure of LJ/6A has been to misunderstand this and to apply rating measures appropriate to one paradigm of the virtual world onto another one where they are perceived very differently. Aggravating this is the system of allowing other users to rate posts (and by implication the users who make them). In a geographical virtual community this would be bad enough, but it would at least involve labelling a bit of space as 'adult'. In LJ, it is far more personal.
There's an oft-quoted saying about never ascribing to malice what can be explained by incompetence. I think LJ/6A are trying to find ways around real issues posed by the growth of LJ, but I also think they've tried to apply a solution chosen without a proper understanding of the sort of environment it's appropriate for.
