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

[stargazered]

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%)

Comments

[denise]

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.

[proben]

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.

[denise]

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). 

[marahmarie]

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.