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

[senmut]

I don't meta very often at all, but... I have a blanket permission on my AO3. Considering putting that over here on DW too. Still not sure what the kerfluffle is, if the subject was public access? But that's me and thinking knowledge is supposed to roam free if the sharer didn't limit it to begin with.

[muccamukk]

I like the idea of linking to fanlore like you linked here where it's a whole debate with lots of people back and forthing. Linking to fanlore write up of one meta seems more or less the same as just linking to the meta. Since anyone could have added it to fanlore, anyway. So I guess ask the person if they're still in fandom, and I'd think it'd be okay to link if not.

As I said last post, I really like the older posts for context, but I can really see not wanting an off the cuff rant linked around for five hundred people to look at ten years down the road. I said lots of shit ten years ago that I don't want to be my fandom legacy.

[copracat]

I have a inherently contradictory opinion. I think anything public on the internet is linkable. I think anyone linking posts should consider the community the post was made in, the norms of that community. Partly because it's good community behaviour and partly for the linker to save themselves grief. In the end you decide how much and what kind of grief you want. If you take the view that if it's public it can be linked then communities who don't agree will likely be angry. If you explicitly ask every single poster, then you've taken on a lot of work and as you've said, there are posts where the OP is not contactable.

I reckon be consistent, be clear, have opt outs for people if you chose proactive linking, make the guidelines easy to find, make sure the mods are easy to contact, be able to react quickly. You seem to have a lot of that covered already/you look very willing to cover it.

I know my community (media fandom) so I have an explicit okay to link to public posts in my DW bio. I know a lot of fans who meta do, so it's worth knowing that if you didn't already. I think some have it in their sticky post.

The fanlore issue is interesting, and I don't have an answer for you. The point of fanlore is that it's a communally created fandom resource. It's surely lost half its value if you can't point people to it. People not wanting to be linked or quoted on there is an issue for fanlore to address, not people pointing to fanlore.

[deadfinch]

Trying to make public discussion entirely opt-in sounds too difficult (if we're unsure about linking to Fanlore articles because the referenced posts are old and were possibly linked to without permission, to what degree do we investigate link permission on other posts? I.e., can we link freely to someone's meta that has more links inside of it, or do we have to check that all the people further down the rabbit hole also gave permission?). I can also understand the source of some people's discomfort, though, so I'm not 100% sure how I feel. My default assumption is that things publicly posted within fandom are okay to circulate within fandom, unless the author explicitly requests otherwise, so that informs my reaction.

I fall on the side of "linking to a Fanlore article is okay," at least.

[(Anonymous)]

Rather than asking whether it is acceptable to link, might it be worth raising the issue of consent?

When the creative commons licenses first launched, a lot of bloggers (quite self-importantly in hindsight) put up their commercial re-use policies. Might it be worth trying to normalise people expressing their consent with regards to linking?

I mean... The issue isn't so much linking per se but rather what happens when people continue to get linked and scrutinised when they don't actually want to be subject to that level of scrutiny. That is the fail-state we're worried about right?

[graveexcitement]

I haven't read a whole lot of the relevant discussions, but it seems to me that a lot of the differing opinions appear to be based on people's different ideas of what social media should be like? As in... well, if I post something publicly (on Twitter, Tumblr, DW, Mastodon, etc.), I do so knowing that potentially anyone could wind up reading it (though realistically only a few people actually will.) But I guess some people post things expecting that only their followers/subscribers will look at it and talk about it, and they feel their privacy has been invaded if a whole lot of people from outside their circle start looking at it and commenting on it?

So in general I think that if someone has posted meta on a site that has good privacy controls, like Dreamwidth or Mastodon, and they've posted it *publicly*, I think that means it's fine to link without asking. Because those two sites have great privacy controls for if you only want your access list/followers to be able to see a certain post. So if you're posting it public, that means you should be okay with it being publicly discussed; if you're not okay with that, maybe make it access-locked instead?

I'm less certain about Tumblr and Twitter, because you can't privacy lock a given post, you can only privacy lock your entire tumblr/twitter. And also for Tumblr, the commenting tools are horrible -- replies get lost easily, but reblogs necessarily also spread the original post. At least on Twitter you can reply to a post and your reply won't be as easily lost, & there's threaded reply chains. But Twitter also has one of Tumblr's problems of making it very easy to dogpile on people for the crime of having Bad(TM) Opinions.

So I guess I am more uncertain about Tumblr/Twitter because of the bad privacy options on those sites. So maybe asking permission first for those would make sense? But my underlying ethos is still "if you're posting something online, *publicly,* you should Be Aware it is in fact *public* and may become the subject of public discussion." (Side note: This is part of why I like DW and Mastodon a lot! Better privacy controls! Yay!)

(Also, like... it's not like the point of this comm is to link to *Bad* (TM) stuff, or to link to stuff just to ridicule it? Because those were/are some of the more flagrant issues on Twitter/Tumblr/etc -- retweeting/reblogging ignorant people, Terrible Takes, and so forth, so that people can dunk on them and whatnot. Those were situations where lack of privacy controls led to a post being spread like wildfire with the OP having no way out except to delete their blog. That shit sucked, but... we're not doing that? So I don't see as much of an issue with linking without permission.)

[cimorene]

Yes, this is a good point. In fact, there has been an effort already in media fandom to normalize standard consent in profiles - IIRC raised by podfic craze some years ago - and many people included link, quote, remix, etc permissions in that consent.

My view is that anyone with blanket permission to link in their profile probably intended to give permission for newsletter links as well, but I suppose you could still stumble onto an exception somewhere.

fanlore issue

[cimorene]

I would have assumed that people linking to fanlore pages is something people who create them expect, but if someone has recently posted something that was linked without their knowledge from fanlore, they could wind up with unwanted traffic in the event of a controversy.

I'm not sure how likely that is to happen, though. I, too, would be inclined to leave the burden of permission on Fanlore there, but perhaps if writing a post that I anticipated being... hot? controversial? popular? or just... arousing... disagreement or something?... then I might exercise restraint and not quote directly from the parts of the Fanlore article that point directly to recent, specific posts?

[cimorene]

Also, like... it's not like the point of this comm is to link to *Bad* (TM) stuff, or to link to stuff just to ridicule it?

This is a worthwhile point even though historically meta debates have led to controversies without anyone having posted something just to mock it - all that's required is reading someone's meta post via the newsletter and making your own post disagreeing and linking back which then appears in the next newsletter issue.

But this meta-debate scenario is not really the same thing as the kind of dogpiling scenarios engendered by Fandom Wank or - what was that ancient Mary Sue mocking community on LJ?, and doesn't provide the same sort of inherent motive to attack, I would think.

(In the metafandom troubles, wasn't the issue more people who were annoyed by influx of disagreeing comments even if those comments were made with basic attempts at civility? And I mean, I can sympathize with that, to a degree.)

Re: fanlore issue

[batwrangler]

Your example is exactly what did happen: Fanlore recently made a page without permission of a an old LJ post the that OP wouldn’t have left public today, but which, back in the day, WAS functionally private and was ranty on account of recent grief. Fanlore was tone-deaf to pick that post rather than the OPs actual fannish-content posts.

Re: fanlore issue

[copracat]

Yes, there's how you or I might choose to behave based on long and occasionally fraught experience, and separately how fanlore should be guiding its editors and setting rules for citations and what have you. I didn't read in depth the discussion that brought up the fanlore issue, and it seems the mod here responded quickly and appropriately to the OP's concerns, but if OP doesn't address it with fanlore or, in the event that doesn't get the response they want, take action in their own space to restrict access it's just going to keep happening to them, right?

Are we saying the same thing in different words?

[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]

Tumblr users might be more used to having their posts linked. Isn't is commonly accepted on Tumblr that linking (that is "reblogging") is okay and in fact, the nature of the site? The important thing being clear credit to the OP which is not an issue on a link newsletter? I am not an expert however!

[copracat]

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

[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!

[graveexcitement]

yeah, i think that's worth considering too? it does go hand in hand -- the nature of the site is to reblog, but there's also no useful privacy controls whatsoever so no one has control over whether a post is seen by Just Their Followers or by Half The Entire Site.

which like you said, is the nature of tumblr, so i dunno. maybe that means more people there go in Expecting that their posts are in the public sphere, like i do? which would make linking without permission more okay.

but if some people were considering their own blog more of a slightly more private sphere, just without the option to actually make specific posts private, that's a little more of an issue. (i mean, i saw quite a few posts labelled Don't Reblog, as a desperate attempt to make sure the post didn't get spread around, but people didn't always listen. that said, those were more often venting or personal posts rather than meta, i think.)

[graveexcitement]

these are good points! i hadn't really thought of those. (i was too young to ever really be on LJ/read the old newsletters, which now that i think about it is context i should've put in my original comment? this is what i get for posting at 6am...)

Re: fanlore issue

[batwrangler]

I think we are in agreement. Fanlore seems to be of the opinion that the OP’s wishes/concerns are irrelevant. It’s the tension between holding people accountable for every single thing they ever said regardless of context and not letting people cover up patterns of actual bad behavior. This is what all fair-use vs copyright comes down to in the end. Who controls the conversation and who gets to write the history and what happens iin the face of diverse perspectives (good faith) and competing narratives (sometimes good faith, sometime not).

Also: The past was a different country. AOL Hometown, GeoCites, lots of user-owned sites where the user ran out of money for bandwidth usage or lost their ISPs... things were demonstrably NOT forever on the internet. And the cost to get on the internet was HIGH in terms of tech know-how and actual service fees....

[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.

[batwrangler]

Speaking for myself, what LJ was in the old days was a privately moderated forum. It was having a salon or house party over which you set the rules of discourse. It was one step more accessible than a printed zine and a couple steps less universal than a usenet group (I guess reddit is the usenet of today?) plus arguably more permanent than fan email lists (which may or may not have had web archives).

[quinfirefrorefiddle]

My issue with... one of those communities, don't remember which- was that they liked to give "content warnings" for posts... Without ever talking to the OP about them- they'd let you know they were linking, not mention they were adding a content warning, and never respond if you asked them what the content warning was about. I got a warning for ableism, I think it was, on one post, and I don't think I ever figured out what the hell they thought was ableist- it wasn't a post of disability particularly. But bam, according to them I was ableist now, and everyone coming to my blog through that link was expecting me to be, and it really skewed the discussion.

[batwrangler]

There was also not generally a drive to get followers as followers: you paid for the bandwidth you used, you weren’t generating revenue from page views. Too much attention - even positive attention - could make your site fall over (and possibly bankrupt you), like being mentioned on slashdot (aka slashdotting) or having Neil Gaiman link to a thing of yours.

[graveexcitement]

huh, that's very different from the "accrue followers until you hit Critical Mass" general goal of tumblr/twitter! but of course, twitter/tumblr only pay for your bandwidth because they want to profit off of you... hmm.

Re: fanlore issue

[copracat]

Also: The past was a different country. AOL Hometown, GeoCites, lots of user-owned sites where the user ran out of money for bandwidth usage or lost their ISPs... things were demonstrably NOT forever on the internet.

Oh yes. I was but a lurker on Usenet but stopped going there when it got Google-grouped.

And the cost to get on the internet was HIGH in terms of tech know-how and actual service fees....

When I was a wee fan mailing lists were paid for and maintained by individual fans however, in what is probably the only contrary example to the disappearance of the early web, the Blake's 7 mailing list still has a publicly available searchable archive of the list posts. Going back to 1992!

[graveexcitement]

that makes sense! i can see how it would be considered more private by default than i had been thinking.