What is this brave new world, that has such features in it? A commenter's paradise, a nightmarish dystopia, or just another alternate universe?
It's called Disqus -- a free, third-party hosted comment system that can be plugged into other platforms like WordPress and Drupal, but not journal services built on LiveJournal code (and yes, Disqus does allow for threaded comments and email notifications).
Comment cultures -- the norms, expectations, values and practices that coalesce around commenting systems -- are driven by both social and technical factors. The tensions, conflicts, and debates thus play out differently in different cultures.
Outside of LiveJournal, there was an extended blog debate last year about comments being fragmented across different places, rather than concentrated on a single post, and who owns comments. But the issues and dynamics differ from the recent discussions around the etiquette of directing all comments to Dreamwidth in crossposts to LJ, and the solution emerged through comment aggregation services that pull in comments left on other sites to the primary blog post, rather than shutting down comments in one location.
Simple tools to import and export comments -- both the comments you post, and the ones others post on your site -- are built in to the new Disqus-style comment systems without controversy, and data portability is the byword on everyone's lips. Yet the concept that the presence of your comments on a site may imply that you support the site hosting your comments is hardly unique to Dreamwidth detractors.
Dreamwidth essentially inherits the comment ecology of LJ, and the short-term costs (and relative priority) of further innovation -- both social and technical -- are prohibitive. But there's nothing inherently natural, inevitable, or even automatically optimal about this LJ/DW comment culture, no matter how familiar. The current rhetoric and beliefs around control over comments (viz. redirecting and importing) are products of that social/technical culture -- shaping even the questions and assertions posed around fannish norms or copyright -- and would play out differently (or not at all) under other comment ecologies.
Last year, I posted about my ambivalence that Dreamwidth would be built on the LJ codebase (vs., say, Drupal) and therefore effectively be locked in to some social/technical choices and locked out of others -- for instance, retaining LJ's code for managing comments rather than converting to Disqus. Now, I can readily think of several compelling reasons why Dreamwidth arguably shouldn't use Disqus (or a similar plug-in like JS-Kit), but my concern then and now was that the debate was really a moot point, since it was never really a viable option for the LJ codebase.
And you know, I can and do live with that -- but I also consider it a less than ideal tradeoff. One thing that does bother me about both LJ and DW is that certain features that would be free to me on a Disqus-type system -- specifically the ability to edit my own comments, and to get them automatically emailed to me -- are limited to paid users on LJ/DW. There are areas where a tiered array of features and options stratified by ability and willingness to pay seems reasonable and acceptable; for me, this isn't one of them. I'm also frustrated by the lack of RSS feeds for comments on LJ/DW; sure, I can get them via email if I track a post, but RSS feeds give me more options and flexibility and they've been standard features on other blog systems for quite a while now.
(For what it's worth, I did import all comments along with my LJ posts to my DW journal, but set all my imported entries to private. I couldn't get a good enough handle on the potential ethical issues of reproducing other people's comments in a different space without their [fore]knowledge or permission. I provisionally decided that I'd feel comfortable moving comments to a new site/service/host if I were losing or shutting down the old one [i.e. my LJ], but I wasn't comfortable mirroring comments so that they appeared in two different places. And I am not comfortable with some of the breezy dismissal and outright mockery that I've seen in response to people raising concerns about comment importing -- even or especially when I don't share or necessarily agree with those particular concerns, nor have any problem with anybody who's DW journal imported comments that I'd made on their LJ.)
ETA: see also the sequel to this post.
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chasethestars
chasethestars
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It sounds like a deeply stalkery world to me, but...I should probably sort out how to implement this for my WP stuff.
Though I am finding that most WP themes still don't support all the commenting options available in the code, which is...a problem.
(Although actually, thinking about it, on that project we've had to make an explicit statement that commenters retain copyright to their comments but the moderators may edit or delete anything posted to the site. But our concern is more people making off with our collective material for print projects, because that's come up as an issue.)
Edited 2009-05-08 03:20 am (UTC)
(The whole copyright thing online feels like a crude instrument ill-designed for but increasingly pressed into use as a stopgap for collapsed or conflicting cultural and ethical norms. Sometimes I think that Creative Commons licensing might help and other times I wonder if it will just further muddies the waters.)
The project I'm working on involves people who're very concerned -- and rightfully so, for historical reasons -- about appropriation of their words and experiences.
Lacking a polite way to say, "Stop being imperialist shitbags!" we've gone with a firm assertion of copyright. *GRIN*
I'm the same way. And online, it's almost like a version of the Red Queen's dilemma -- as new tracking and discovery tools and practices emerge, I have to expend more labor in maintaining those partitions.
The project I'm working on involves people who're very concerned -- and rightfully so, for historical reasons -- about appropriation of their words and experiences.
So much of the internet has been built by people who were so convinced that information wants to be free that they never considered the needs and issues of people for whom that's always meant "you're laying claim to free access to and use/misuse/abuse of our information in ways that harm us."
Yeah, it's interesting to try to turn some of these things around -- one person's Brand New Day is another person's inappropriate use of information. Although there are ways to build online social spaces that won't behave in a universal-access way, it's also hard to figure out that universal-access is not an ideal model until something has gone wrong.
I am glad you said this. I have felt uncomfortable with it too, although I personally think once something is posted on another person's journal it belongs to the journal's owner. But mocking people who don't share my beliefs, no.
I am actually very uncomfortable with the tone of much of the discussion happening about Dreamwidth, both here and and at LJ. Disqus sounds great. I agree, it bothers me that I can't edit my comments here, and if that is basic elsewhere? Interesting.
It's not a matter of your beliefs; the law is very clear. What you write, you own. Possession is not copyright. This is well settled law, from long before the internet; if you write someone a letter, they own the physical object and may sell it. They do not own the copyright to it, and cannot publish it, except to whatever extent "fair use" allows.
The only question with comments is the breadth of the license that the poster is allowing you. You do not, and never will, own their comments.
And I'm not sure that everybody in this broader conversation defers to the law as final arbiter of ethics and etiquette (rather than one among many factors and forces to consider).
Similarly, you are granting limited implied licenses when you make comments on livejournal; to LJ itself, to the journal owner, and to other commentators. You are not giving up your copyright, nor is that license infinite. And I very much doubt any judge would rule that limited license included reprinting the comments wholesale on a different platform, owned by a different person, with, perhaps most importantly _different Terms of Service_.
That last part is probably the clincher; you on Dreamwidth have a legal relationship with the company. Anyone posting here also has a relationship, by choosing to make that post. The people you are republishing _never chose to make that post_, yet Dreamwidth will claim a license over their work.
As I said, I personally do not have a problem, as long as my comments remain in the same context. But I do not blame one bit the people who are not happy. And I suspect they have a strong legal case as well if it ever came down to that.
And in an LJ fandom context, it does seem relevant that certain internal cultural norms are actually more restrictive than copyright law -- e.g., the general expectation that you need to obtain explicit permission before remixing someone else's fan fiction story or writing a sequel set in their fan fiction universe.
I don't specifically approve of mockery of those who have a different opinion on the comments-importing than me, but I've seen so much criticism that was both uninformed and incoherently outraged - like the people making it weren't trying to find out any truth about anything, and were just really pleased to have found something to be yelling about - that some sarcasm has been hard to avoid.
Anyway - my main point personally is more pointing out that reposting someone's comments made to my journal has been an option for me for a while now - see here what
Thank you for a great post. I wish everybody would read it - and will probably pimp it accordingly! :)
Yes, this. I mean, it's just really so much idiocy, driven by a radid, irrational hate of DW and/or anything new and I just...have long since lost the little patience I had for people like that.
It doesn't help that in the comment thing they are coming from such an inexplicable place to me that even the coherent, non-knee-jerky ones might as well be speaking Martian for all the sense they make to me.
I do take your point about the prior art of stuff like exporting XML and the WordPress import tool and coComment. But from my corner of LJ, none of them had yet made so much of a ripple in LJ's comment culture, much less a sea change. The existence of technical possibilities doesn't immediately or automatically steer or trump the social dimensions of comment norms and practices. /bad Bruno Latour impersonation
But it would be cool if there was a way to automatically grab, say, delicious bookmarks/comments and insert them as comments to the post -- especially when so many people in fandom are using delicious for fic recs.
I don't follow. By importing comments along with your entries, you are not misrepresenting them in any way. Contrast this with, say, non-obviously editing a post that someone has already replied to -- that is recontextualization with possible negative effects.
Furthermore, I hold that any comments made in your journal are partly yours -- they are part of a conversation with you. Commenters certainly deserve the right to delete any comments they've made, but that should be opt-out, not opt-in.
I provisionally decided that I'd feel comfortable moving comments to a new site/service/host if I were losing or shutting down the old one [i.e. my LJ], but I wasn't comfortable mirroring comments so that they appeared in two different places.
Now I'm curious. My argument above was based on the assumption that what you objected to was the recontextualization, but I guess that's not it.
Could you explain what makes backing up comments different (ethically) from mirroring them?
I am not comfortable with some of the breezy dismissal and outright mockery that I've seen in response to people raising concerns
*sigh* Mockery can stop people from raising concerns, but that's never because it has actually resolved those concerns.
So maybe it's ultimately not a bad or wrong situation, but I couldn't anticipate how other people (my commenters) would feel about it.
(In reality, I've basically dodged the issue -- I did import comments along with my LJ entries but immediately reset them all to private, so they function as an online backup accessible only to me.)