But Really I’m Not Actually Your Friend But I Am

Over on LiveJournal there’s a bit of an argument over exactly how the ‘friends’ lists should be managed, and it brings up the question of just what a ‘friend’ means within these systems and what behaviours that implies.

If I read your journal, am I your friend? Or are you a friend of mine? Not necessarily; the other person may not even be aware of your existence. Or the relationship is weighted; they feel like a friend to you, but you’re an acquaintance to them.

When you make it a friend-or-nothing choice and tie concrete benefits to that relationship though, then there’s bound to be trouble. Putting somebody on a friends list is a convenient way of being able to browse journals you’re interested in, tempting you to add people to the list even if you don’t really consider them friends. But then that also causes you to appear as a ‘friend-of’ on their lists, which is a relationship that doesn’t necessarily exist, and forces information into their profile that they can’t control. That also opens up your private entries to that person as a side effect.

It looks like the way they’re leaning is to separate people into ‘friends’ and ‘readers’ with only friends getting the additional friends-only post access, and the ability to ban ‘readers’ from showing up in your profile, so you don’t have to tolerate offensive names and such showing up in your info.

One wonders why they would bother listing readers on your profile at all, but apparently a lot of people want to know who’s reading them and consider it ‘stalkerish’ if you read them without revealing yourself. But then the expected way to ‘reveal yourself’ was to make them a friend of yours, with all the problems noted above…

Hopefully the new system will satisfy most people, but this whole discussion reveals a lot of attitudes about the relationships between bloggers that I hadn’t really thought about before. Why do I care, on my own separate site here? Well, the same kind of thinking can be applied, even if the formal system isn’t exactly the same, through things like linking and comments. I also do have an LJ account, though it’s really only for making comments on others’.