My two cents on Facebook/Twitter repost feature

[alexandral]

Hee, may be am quite late with this , but I could not resist:

LJ appeared to go ahead with a new "very helpful" feature of being able to re-post your comments (in any entry, it appears, locked or not) to Facebook and Twitter.

1. I haven't tested this myself, so I am not 100% sure if the re-posting comments from locked entries work. I have seen posts from people who tried to do so and succeeded , but I am not 100% sure. I am sorry - as a part of my job I do a little bit of computer systems support and my initial reaction to anything is always to double-check it. But let's assume that this works.

2. I don't see any immediate huge difference between ability of anyone who has malicious intent and has access to my locked entries to copy-and-paste and ability to re-post on Facebook/Twitter.

3. The only difference is that this can happen accidentally. Which is hugely possible with the "automatically re-post" checkbox being clicked. Which is a problem indeed.

4. This is just me, everyone is different: I am hugely paranoid and the thought of posting something on the Internet that I can’t openly express in RL makes me very very uncomfortable , regardless private or locked status of the post. I personally never do this - whatever you see in my LJ is what I also talk about with my family and friends and work colleagues. These are databases! They can be broken into by evil Russian programmers! They can be sold to evil advertising agencies! Even if the management now is good, the management can be bad tomorrow and – NOTHING ever gets deleted or removed from databases! For this they have archives!

I lock my personal posts as a first-line prevention measure against idiots, but I have no illusions : I am quite positive that nothing will work against really determined individuals.

4. This is my opinion and my only and I do not think it is universally right or anything, but I just have it:
I do not like some things about Dreamwidth. I do not like the way every time anything happens on LJ there are big posts on Dreamwidth from Dreamwidth’s management/creators of "look how bad LJ is!!!!!!!". I don’t like this attitude and I haven’t seen this happening much on LJ.

In short: LJ, please remove this stupid feature because it can cause accidental damage. But I am not moving and I am thinking about deleting my DW account.

Comments

[intermezzo]

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. ;)

I never thought to jump ship, either, and no matter how many FAIL LJ did (and over the years, it failed. A lot. A lotlotlot), I still stayed loyal. I don't like many things about DW, either, but what it boils down to now is, which is the lesser of the evils? And for me? It's not LJ. Not anymore.

As I said, I'll keep posting fandom stuff (let's face it, the kdrama community is already small here. It's practically nonexistant on DW) and if lj fixes this huge breach of privacy (Facebook has NO respect for privacy, that's a known fact), I may reenable comments. If it doesn't and if LJ keeps failing, oh well, at least I'm all set over there and it'll take just the click of a button to delete the journal.

The main problems I have with this features are
1)facebots. Once allowed, they MIGHT harvest info, even info that are NOT visible to registered users OR friends (say, your name? where you live? your credit card number if you've ever bought stuff from the LJ store, like I did) unless you specifically told them. So I'm not talking aobout flocked entries only. When I signed up 6 years ago and when LJ updated its ToS, nowhere on the registration form or tos was said that bots would be allowed on this site. And I'm paying for this? Why? o_0 I'm afraid the damage is already done. Even if you delete the journal now, your data might have already been harvested so there's no way to protect THAT info anymore. If you pardon my analogy, as of now, LJ is like a house with all its doors and windows wide open, it's practically inviting all sorts of people and things to go inside.

2) I don't see any immediate huge difference between ability of anyone who has malicious intent and has access to my locked entries to copy-and-paste and to re-post on Facebook/Twitter. POint. That might happen, but for me, it's different. Leaving aside the accidental mistake (my actual main fear), the difference between the copy&paste vs repost/crosspost is that while when a troll/friend-turned-into-enemy/whatever copy and pastes your flocked content, they're eventually found out (ofen sooner rather than later) and the community tend to defend the person who got trolled and shun the troll (and that's not a common event for that very reason) with the repost/crosspost feature trolling is a lot easier and there'd be no way to expose the troll because hey, if the troll says it was an actual mistake, there's no way to prove it otherwise, right? Also? that feature actually legitimize and favors the reposting of flocked content. You're right, there's no other way to protect oneself than not posting at all, but...this is now what LJ ToS said. LJ's strongest point WAS security, that's what made it popular in the first place. it wasn't the comms. It wasn't the layouts and moodthemes. It was the security. It was the possibility to talk "behind closed doors" about anything and be (fairly) sure it stayed that way (isn't that LJ unspoken code of behaviour?). And guess what? Security at DW? Is even better, it's a lot more customizable and I SO didn't expect that. I already ranted on my LJ about this whole debacle, which FYI was the last straw, it wasn't the ONLY reason for getting a dw, and why I'm posting my RL post there so I'll stop now. /rant

[jenlev.livejournal.com]

Stumbled across this while flist wandering. Go to "customize Journal Style" page.

In the box titled "custom stylesheet" (should be the third one down) type this: .b-repost-item {display:none}


I gather it's working for most people. What it does is remove the twitter and facebook buttons from the bottom of the comment page which hopefully will eliminate any accidents and help out a bit. I hope so....after I applied it those buttons simply vanished from my screens. And in the journals where other people known to me have applied it, the buttons don't appear when I comment in their journals. I hope this helps. *hugs*

[endlessdeep.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not moving to Dreamwidth either because of LJs current bungle. LJ is my home even if they do ocassionally make a bad decision without consulting us.

It's definitely not a democracy here. They seem to know what is best for us and by golly they are going to give it to us. Whether we want it or not. lol.

Besides, I just don't have the energy to move some where else. :)

[timescout.livejournal.com]

I'm not going anywhere either, though I do have DW account I'll use keeping tabs with those in my f-list who decided to leave LJ. I'm starting to get the feeling it's all blown out of propositon and some of the stuff people are saying make me think there's paranoia at work.

On the other hand I do understand as this is a privacy issue and even though it's not an issue with me (at least atm it isn't) there are others who'd rather not have their LJ associated with Facebook in particular. Apparently Facebook sends bots into its users' personal email accounts, gets all the addresses it can find, matches them up and alerts people to each other's presence, without their knowledge or consent. People are afraid that now that Facebook has access to LiveJournal these bots do the same with LJ accounts and start sending inivitatons at Facebook to come check out a particular LJ.

Then, a word of warning about using code to hide the ticky-boxes:

1. This will only hide those boxes if they are looking at your journal in your style. If they've set things to style=mine, they'll see the boxes.

2. If anyone links their LJ to their FB account, those boxes will be automatically checked when they reply to a public post. And, thanks to your code, they cannot see the boxes to uncheck them. Which means that their comments will now be cross-posted, completely unintentionally and totally contrary to your wishes and plans.