Special Edition: TWM Content Poll

[thisweekmod]

Hello all! After the most recent kerfuffle, I thought I would take this opportunity to ask what folks felt would be the best practices for the newsletter regarding certain sites and types of links.

I have made a Content Poll-- it's not long, and if you don't like any of the options you can totally post a comment here instead. It asks about etiquette regarding Dreamwidth/LiveJournal communities, Fanlore pages, Fanlore-found links, and what to do when an Original Poster is not available for contact.

All these questions assume the post being linked is not locked or private, and that the entity doing the linking is a newsletter.

Edit: Some further context for why linking and linking permissions is so hotly debated in fandom (Fanlore).

My own answers are currently along the lines of: community posts are probably fine to link because they were posted widely to begin with; Fanlore pages made through explicit permission of OP is best, but for certain historical meta it's okay to link anyway; linking to Fanlore to provide further context is fine; no way to ask for permission means no link; if the OP has completely disappeared from fandom and/or online, it's fine to link their stuff.

But I want to know what you think! :)

The comments here are open, and I encourage you all to discuss your thoughts with me and with each other. We've had some really good discussions in the last few days, and I'm interested in seeing what you all think about these specific linking situations.

If you can think of anything else that might be missing from either the poll or the editorial guidelines, please let me know.

Thank you! ♥

Comments

[batwrangler]

The internet was far more restricted in reach and scope back in the LJ days. It was possible to have unlocked discussions that were functionally private. Major news media weren’t mining social media for click bait. What we chose to leave public then isn’t what many of us are choosing to leave public now. Many of us are torn by the desire to not burn down our past by obliterating our older online presence but without the time or emotional spoons to go back and try to sequester stuff that we would not post in “public” now. Since moving completely to DW, I’ve personally stuck with keeping most of my posts access-list only which makes connecting with new people harder, but I don’t have the personal bandwidth to leave my online home open to all comers.

[copracat]

That seems like a good reason to consider older posts differently to current posts, and older platforms differently to newer platforms.

[batwrangler]

Yes, exactly. And, to assume the very best intentions, when people trying to preserve orphan or threatened works (such as Tumblrs lost in the purge) insist that their right to “archive” trumps the OP’s copyright, you end up in court and have bad actors with deep pockets using a so-called “right to be forgotten” to squash dissent.

[graveexcitement]

ahhhh, this makes sense. i was never really on LJ; my formative experiences were on twitter/tumblr, where there is very little expectation of privacy. i mean, people can say "don't reblog," and people sometimes listen, but... well. (plus in general when i was young, people were pushing the "NOTHING you do on the internet is ACTUALLY PRIVATE" thing pretty hard.) thanks for the insight!

[kore]

Yeah, this absolutely. The reason I spoke up about that post was that it had been made 13 years ago and there was only a fanlore page for it last year. That seemed....hinky.