dw_suggestions | Optional "Re-Posting" to add on to current "Share This Entry"

Entry tags:

Optional "Re-Posting" to add on to current "Share This Entry"

Title:
Optional "Re-Posting" to add on to current "Share This Entry"

Area:
Share This Entry

Summary:
A re-posting option (that can be turned on or off, so up to the poster) that allows posts to be shared and appear in journals and reading pages like re-tweeting: redirects to the original post (so original poster still controls it)

Description:
The "Share this entry" of Dreamwidth is reaching a point where it's lacking, as it depends only on email and nothing else! Keeping what it has now (emailing), more options should be added. Like Re-Postng, only if the account or community turns this option on. This can be like Retweeting or Replurking: It appears the journal (thus counted as an update) and consequently the reading page of those subscribed to that journal, but it shows the original post and redirects you to it once clicked.

I believe Facebook has something like this, where "(user) shared -> (details here)" and it's the original.

Therefore the original poster still has all power of their post, should they want to edit or delete it. The problem with sites like Tumblr is that reblogging makes it an entirely new and separate post, so the original poster loses control of it (like if they wanted to delete or edit, they cannot because it will still circulate around, even when they delete their accounts). This will help with the exposure of many posts that can welcome plenty of discussion with this already excellent commenting system.

Also, not everyone wants their posts to be reposted in such a manner, even if their account is primarily public, because of personal and privacy reasons. The option to turn it on and off will be required (including whole communities to have the option to turn it on and off, since some communities are personal?)

Reposting also should not be an option for locked posts, obviously for privacy reasons.

Also if possible, individual posts can have the option to be reposted, like how currently some posts can have specific levels of content ratings.

As for a count of how many times it's been reposted, I'm not sure if that is required, but it seems to be consistent with most places that allow this form of sharing, so maybe on or off?

Dreamwidth's always been wonderful in keeping good privacy options, good flexibility when it comes to filters and keeping power to the poster. So if it has a sharing option like this, it should have one that upholds its ideals while still giving us that option to spread posts around. At the moment, the ideas and points I have suggested keep the reposting of Dreamwidth posts to just other Dreamwidth accounts, just to keep this simple first.

Poll #18013 Optional "Re-Posting" to add on to current "Share This Entry"

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 50

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
14 (28.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
17 (34.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
15 (30.0%)

(I have no opinion)
3 (6.0%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (2.0%)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

(Please note, this is an older entry let out of the suggestions queue very belatedly.)

Reblogging/reposting other people's posts is one of those Perpetual Suggestions that people feel very strongly about, and I tend to reject them from the queue because the discussion inevitably turns into "letting people reblog my posts would be terrible and awful and you're bad for wanting to do it" vs "letting people reblog my posts is the best way for me to find new readers and you're bad for not wanting to let me do it". I let this one through because it's different enough from past suggestions that I think it's worth having the discussion again, but it is a hotbutton issue and many people feel very strongly that reblogging is a massive privacy violation.

Things I don't want this discussion to focus on: how a reblogging/reposting/etc feature would be terrible and awful and nobody should ever want it

Things I do want this discussion to focus on: if you want a reblogging/reposting/etc feature, how you'd want it to work; if you don't like the idea of a reblogging/reposting/etc feature, how you would want it to behave so that you can comfortably ignore it.

Edited 2017-02-20 20:02 (UTC)

Hi Denise,

thank you for looking into it.

>>>if you want a reblogging/reposting/etc feature, how you'd want it to work

I kind of like the way how it works in LJ - with single click it creates new post draft (which I can edit, e.g. add my own thoughts/comments), and the system has basic markup allowing to mark reposts as such.

Ideally would be to have it working on both posts originally created in DW, and on posts coming in via RSS feed (e.g. from LJ).

I understand that not everybody would want to have this feature. Is there any way to make it part of a Style? (e.g. as a JavaScript in the style)
It would enable users who want to have repost feature to use it, while users who don't want this feature can just choose different style.

With best regards
qvb.dreamwidth.org

I like the way this suggestion approaches it, despite not wanting re-posting of my stuff. Optional to the journal owner on a per-journal or per-entry basis, public entries only, especially if it's opt-in, is kind of my favorite approach.

That said...it runs the risk of option fatigue and being an Often Undiscovered Feature if it's opt-in. But opt-out is not my ideal, so...yeah.

I don't know if it's a good idea, but it's a not-bad-to-me idea.

(If it *was* going to be added, options to share on other media like Twitter might also be something some people would like, but...that complicates it again. I'm not sure it needs complication.)

Re option fatigue/undiscovered/etc: one way to make it work might be to have a "make this post shareable" checkbox next to the Crosspost This Entry checkbox on the Create Entries page, that gets automatically greyed out for security levels other than public. For example. (This would probably mean that unit would need retitling, but it seems to me like the place it would go...)

I do like the idea of sharing posts somehow. If I recall correctly, LJ added an option like that at one point, right? I think they made it so that the original poster had to explicitly allow the sharing of the post, is that true?

So, that could be a thing! It could be an option that goes next to the comment permissions: "Allow this post to be re-posted?" I know that Option Overload Fatigue is a problem to consider, though.

Edited 2017-02-20 20:31 (UTC)

With changes:
- notification to the original poster every time the post is re-posted (with maybe the option to turn the notifications on and off)
- possibly the option to add one's own thoughts above or beneath the repost (as on twitter with the retweet with comment vs just retweet)

With changes = This.

That makes sense and, as somebody else said, the ability to explicitly disallow sharing.

Yeah, this was my primary comment -- in the services that allow this sort of Sharing, I frequently (but not always) want to add some commentary.

But otherwise, I think it's a fine suggestion. I actually *do* this fairly often, in the form of linking to posts; a formalized Sharing mechanism, that is easier to use and embeds with proper full attribution, seems worthwhile to me. Indeed, by making it easiest to share *with* attribution, it might help avoid accidental credit-stripping...

Yeah, this, absolutely.

IIRC much of the objection when LJ did a "share" button was that it would repost the original on your journal as a new post, which many (including me) saw as one-click plagarism.

Something more akin to Twitter's RT facility, where the link to the original is clearly maintained, would be fine by me, although I don't think I'd actually use it.

A bit of thought would be needed re non-public entries (both on who can see them, and on whether the evidence of who can see them leaks information about the original poster's filters), and perhaps there should be per-post (and *maybe* per-account) opt-outs?

I like this option if it is opt-in (say, it has to be generally allowed in the journal settings, and then each post also has an "allow this post to be shared" ticky-box) and notifications for it can be turned on.

I'd like the option to exclude reblogs from my Reading page so as not to see the same posts over and over, especially if the reblogs don't contain added commentary.

Good idea.

I'd like that, too.

Agreed. This is an area where Facebook might actually have it roughly right (it happens occasionally): aggregating together all the shares you see of this post, with their commentary (and the original, if you also see that directly), into one copy that is visible on your Reading page.

I suspect that may be a pain to implement, but it would be nice.

+1 for this. Something like a ticky box in account settings somewhere like "include reposted content on my reading page" would make it easy to opt in/out of.

I'd like to perhaps differentiate reblogs with commentary, and reblogs without commentary.

Advanced filters including reblogs as a thing that can be filtered in or out, perhaps with/without commentary.

Collapse/un-collapse all reblogs on this page, like cut tags.

Add a URL argument to remove reblogs from the reading page, like feeds/personal/community already have.

+ I have no objection to this as long as it includes global options on the readers side of "never show reblogs on reading list" and "only show reblogs with commentary from the person you follow".

A feed with reblogs is v. Different from one without and I know which kind I like better, ok.

A share button that automatically opened a new post with an accessible link + some metadata + space for commentary (more like AO3's share options) might also be a good compromise -make it super easy to link without reposting.

Would it be possible to do a sort of semi-reblog? Like on RSS feeds, where you only get the first few lines and then a click to the original post? A lot of what I don't like about reblogging features is that the OP isn't getting the clicks/impressions/views on their site or blog. If there was a method of truncating the repost with a pseudo-cut-tag that leads back to the user's original post, I think it would bother me less.

Alternately,

syderia's suggestions for notifying the original poster is nice. That is one thing I do like about Tumblr's reblogging system - you can see a list of who has liked/reblogged a post. (Possibly a notification system would require a "daily digest" email process depending on number of reblogs, though I have no idea about the coding cost for something like that.)

Edited (Typo) 2017-02-20 21:04 (UTC)

I'm against this because I think the introduction of a reblog-like feature would make Dreamwidth lose much of its distinctiveness. I like that any entry - even just a link roundup - necessarily has some original content. I think that helps to force a slower pace of interaction and more genuine connections, which is much of what I'm here for.

If this is implemented, some features that would make it less bad for me are:
- A reading filter that strips out reposts
- Not available for locked entries; for public, opt-in per-post
- Ability to edit an entry to turn off reposting, i.e. if an entry is getting out of hand, existing reposts would remain but it couldn't spread further.
- Perhaps reposts could be a link-and-excerpt rather than the whole post, to encourage adding commentary and keep more control (and traffic) in the hands of the OP? (This is just an idea; I'm not confident that it's a good one.)

Could the opt-in-or-out be an account setting?

ie a setting with options for "default all my posts to reblogable" and "default all my posts to non-reblogable" and then a per-post setting to vary this on the post entry window?

For people who are happy to have their entire journal reblogable, making them tick 'yes' on every single post seems an unnecessary hurdle.

Yeah, that's fine. What's important to me is just making it really unlikely that I'd allow reblogs accidentally.

My with changes is most of what everybody said upthread, especially optional notifications and the ability to exclude them from your reading page (even better if that could be reading-filter-specific).

Also in favor but with these changes:
*not available for locked posts (what happens when a post is first posted publicly then locked later, though?)
*not available for comments
*option to turn it on/off for your whole journal (default is off)
*option to turn it on/off for posts made in communities so it's not dependent on maintainers and you remain in control (default is off)
*option to turn it on/off entry-per-entry
*options to repost as-if or quote and post
*option to not see any reblogs on Reading page
*option to collapse/expand all reblogs on Reading page
*option for filter Reading page & subscription filters to exclude reblogs
*notification to original poster (if one can reblog a reblog then both posters get notifications)
*a 'comment on the original entry' link included in the reblog 'box' if reader is allowed to.

Also just a thought: how would this work with copyright infringement or problematic content? Would the entries which reblogged it get deleted?

+1

I also want to state explicitly that I would hope that allowing per entry would still work easily when the journal default is off. I am often frustrated by the extra steps I have to take to make public posts in my journal while I have it defaulting to access list.

Because it's going to come up, here's the FAQ I wrote a few years ago about LJ's repost features [ http://www.livejournal.com/support/faq/313.html ].

The original implementation [ex: http://exampleusername.livejournal.com/619.html ] would place the text of the original entry into a new entry authored by yourself, as if you had copy and pasted the contents. You could then comment on (or edit) the entry as you liked.

The second implementation [ex: http://exampleusername.livejournal.com/911.html ] worked like a standard retweet - the original entry would become part of your journal but any comments, likes, statistics, etc... would count to the original entry and author. There is no ability to add commentary.

I'd want the second implementation. The first actually is a copyright violation because scraping an entire post is out of the bounds for Fair Use and I tend to melt down around that issue. So I'm going to vote "with changes" on this...thanks for clarifying both LJ implementations, that's very useful.

I moved to DW from livejournal, where the user experience used to be (before all latest updates and moving servers) quite similar to DW style. Re-posting in lj is widely used feature and that is the reason why I asked for it despite the previous discussion was over several years ago with the negative decision made.
It is not completely clear why re-posting feature would violate privacy, when anyone can re-post any post manually just copy-pasting the content and adding something like "Originally posted by as ". The result would be absolutely the same except you need spend a little more efforts to achieve it.
Are there any DW regulation that consider manual copying of posts with the links to the original as a privacy violation? If yes, then further discussion is clearly does not make any sense.

I should admit though that re-posting is not a critical feature, you can easily live without it or do your manual exercise if you need to re-post.

I think this is a case of Russian-culture LJ use being very different than English-culture LJ use! (When I was still working for LJ, I was always so fascinated how two separate groups of people using the exact same platform could develop such wildly different cultural rules.) I know that reposting is widely used in Russian-culture LJ use, but English-culture LJ use generally considers copy/pasting someone's post into your own journal to be very rude, even with credit ("originally posted by so-and-so"). People view it as "taking their stuff".

Ultimately it comes from different views of 'private' vs 'public' -- like, a lot of people on English-culture LJ view their journals as just written for their friends even if the entries themselves are public, because people feel like they know exactly who their audience is. People who feel that way think of reposting as a privacy violation because it's putting their entries in front of a wider audience. (It's not that either view is right or wrong, it's just how the culture developed!)

So basically, in having this discussion I'm looking for a way that would work for both cultural views and not leave either 'side' feeling like the feature was badly designed or was violating their cultural rules.

Are there any DW regulation that consider manual copying of posts with the links to the original as a privacy violation?

If you copied the entire text of someone's entry and posted it to your journal, even if you credited the original author, they could report that as a copyright violation (because it copied their work). We wouldn't automatically remove a copy/pasted post, though; the original author would have to report it as a copyright violation.

That is an incredible difference. In "russian" segment, if someone re-post you with the original link, it is not just acceptable but usually considered as a good thing by the person whom you re-posted (in fact, people even encourage others to re-post); when in English speaking segment it is very rude. Probably, every segment uses private journals for slightly different purposes.

I'd suggest to add that into FAQ explaining the difference, as we have more and more English speaking people having "russian culture" and that may lead to confusion in future.

Yeah, there are people on the English side that are more positive towards getting a wider audience for their posts (as you can see by the people here who are interested in having their posts rebloggable!) but it's more rare. Culturally, it has a lot to do with whether you use your journal more as "intimate conversation among friends" or "platform for sharing my ideas", but even in the sections of English-language LJ that were aimed more at sharing content, like large parts of media fandom, people really don't like having their content out of their control. People like to know that if they ever needed to remove themselves from the internet (because of people threatening them with real-life danger, because someone at their job found out that they like to write stories about sex on the internet, because they're getting suddenly divorced and their spouse is threatening to bring printouts of their journal to the court, etc), they could do so quickly.

I've often thought about writing up some of the cultural differences around how various groups of people use the site (it always fascinated me when I still worked for LJ), even if not at the formality of an official FAQ, but it always seems like the kind of thing that's way too complicated and easy to get wrong (and get wrong in an offensive way).

There's also a thing (perhaps you might recall) that started, I want to say, back between 2006-2008 when Digg, the link-sharing website, was sort of reaching peak link-sharing. At the same time blog CMSs were just getting the "automated re-posting" thing together so you could basically push a button and republish someone's post or a blurb from it and the link to it (but either implementation would post on their blog as your post's title for the title and your post's content for the content, or your post's title for the title and a link and blurb if it was cut more RSS-style).

The problem with that, as I recall, was bad actors on the intertubes would set up reposting blogs solely to repost your/other people's post(s) (sometimes working in collusion with each other; other times, acting as lone wolves) - which, if you had good search engine rankings to begin with, could sink those rankings pretty fast (for, in Google's eyes, having "bad-quality" backlinks), but not before sometimes building up their own rankings at your expense by linking to a higher quality blog (say, yours) than their own.

I've actually watched a few of my posts/entire blogs go that way in Google for exactly this reason.

There was eventually such an uproar that in many circles it became just not done to re-post, even if you weren't spamming or trying to game SEO, and I think Google eventually adjusted their SERPs to account for (and bury) most of these sorts of spammers, but the damage was long done for a lot of people's blogs by then.

Just another reason reposting eventually fell out of favor but...that said, if it's done right (more RSS-style - blurb/link) by non-spammers/non-search engine gamers, I'd think it might help rankings the same as any good quality backlink would, not to mention having the ability to do it on a site where your friends or online crew hangs out can help bring your posts before more eyes, which is good if that's what you're after.

Edited (clarity) 2017-02-22 09:15 (UTC)

* not available for locked posts
* doesn't reblog the whole post, shows the title, attribution and exerpt (e.g. first paragraph) with a link to the original post -- I think this addresses the "they're stealing my posts" problem, because it isn't the whole post, but it's still more informative than just a link.
* styling to make it clear that this is a reblog (e.g. indented with a border around it)
* encourage the reblogger to add commentary by making the reblog open as a new post with the "reblog" markup pre-filled in the post (like with polls)
* notification to original poster
* option to set an allow/disallow reblogging for your journal as a default
* option to turn it on/off per entry - that is, similar to, say, comment settings, there would be a drop-down list with the options "journal default", "allow reblogging" and "disallow reblogging"

* doesn't reblog the whole post, shows the title, attribution and exerpt (e.g. first paragraph) with a link to the original post -- I think this addresses the "they're stealing my posts" problem, because it isn't the whole post, but it's still more informative than just a link.
* styling to make it clear that this is a reblog (e.g. indented with a border around it)

I love both of these suggestions.

I might set the default excerpt level with the same control as the RSS feed options -- one can have title only, short excerpt, everything outside the cut, or whole thing.

I've been thinking about how to make a really great reposting system on LiveJournal for a long time, and after considering both of LJ's attempts I think the best approach is to stop thinking about it as a repost/reblog/retweet and instead look at it like embedding.

To start, an author would mark their entry as repostable. This either occurs as an option in the editor, or it happens via inserting a piece of code in the entry the way LiveJournal does. This would place a button in the entry that any reader could click on to repost that entry.

When the button is clicked a new entry is started in the editor with an embed code for the original entry. The reposter can add commentary above, below, or around the embedded entry but cannot change anything inside that entry. They can post to their journal or to a community, they can make it access-only, private, or public, and they can enable or disable comments - in short, they can structure this entry just the same as if it were another entry with no repost.

Now there's a new entry somewhere on DW that has that first entry embedded in it. Immediately the system places a comment on the original entry stating that the entry was reposted, who reposted it, where, and maybe include a few lines of any text surrounding the embed (sort of like the pingback system on LJ.)

Inside this new entry the embedded post is clearly marked as such. The embed clearly displays the original author, any metadata (time/date, location, userpic, etc...), and not only shows the comment count but includes a quick-reply form so that readers can reply directly to the embedded post. The repost button would also be active so that new readers could embed the original entry in their own journals or communities.

If the original author chooses to stop making the entry repostable, then the embedded version will disappear from the reposts, but those repost entries and any comments on them will remain. The embedded version will also respect the privacy settings of the original post - if public then everyone can see the embed, if private then no-one but them can see the embed, and if made access-only then only a select few will see the embed.

This idea is fascinating to me. It makes me wonder if it could be done just with a (probably large) chunk of code that people can copy/paste into their entries: one that makes a new window pop up with the Create Entries page open on it and the embed to the original site already inserted. Kind of like I saw someone share a textarea chunk of code that created a poll with just a "Kudos" button.

You would probably still have to leave it up to the reblogger to manually let the OP know, I'm guessing, but it could be an interesting work-around!

My 'with changes' echoes a few of the other suggestions here - make a 'repost' basically just a shortcut to a partially-generated entry, with a nicely formatted link to the the 'reposted' entry already filled in. I feel like that hits a nice middle-ground between making it easy to reshare something awesome someone else wrote, and keeping the feel of DW as it's been. Plus with a link, the original writer still has full control over things, and if they delete it/change security on it, nothing on the repost has to be changed, the link will just redirect to the appropriate error page.

This makes sense to me, along with the ability of DW authors to have some kind of per-journal default and per-post option on rebloggability.

I’m not sure if this should be part of the same discussion or not, but I would really like to be able to share my own post to a community I am in. AFAIK the only way to do anything like this is to make a new post in the community and have a link back to my original post at my blog, but I’d like to have the same post appear both places so any comments at either location are visible from my blog.
I’m not really sure of a better way to describe it, other than to say it would be like how you can share to a community on pillowfort (if you’re familiar with that?) or is there a way to do this that I’m just not aware of?

I ran into this recently too. Even a tickybox when you post to a community that said, "Show this entry on my Subscribers' Reading Pages?" would be really cool.

- Change the "share this entry" icon from the email-with-chain-links to the now-standard "<" symbol for sharing.
- Include the present email option, text fields with copyable standard HTML, plain text, DW HTML, and maybe BBcode links, and a "post an entry" link.
- Content for the sharing would be approximately "[username]'s entry, [title] at [link]."
- Possible enhancement to the new update page: allow the person posting the entry to create a summary of their entry as well as slug.
- If the original author has created a summary, include it in the stuff that's shared.

If you've seen

miss_s_b's link roundup posts, copying several link-to-me blocks into one entry might look like those.

Edited 2018-12-12 18:40 (UTC)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Optional "Re-Posting" to add on to current "Share This Entry"

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

My "with changes"

Re: My "with changes"

Re: My "with changes"

With changes...

Re: With changes...

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject