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I think there are more possible options -- for instance, my personal preference would be to prohibit external search engine and site-wide searches of my content, but permit searches of my specific content -- e.g. people could come and search my posts on snails, or whatever, but if they searched Google or DW-as-a-whole for posts on snails, mine would not come up.

Which mostly has to do with me feeling like this is my social life, and that therefore I'm under no particular obligations to the internet as a whole to make it universally searchable.

You know, that last part is very compelling to me. When I initially set up my LJ, I opted to allow search engines (even though I didn't actually expect anyone to find my posts that way) on general principle: it just seemed like good internet citizenship to be searchable and discoverable as a default.

But your comment makes me wonder where I got that idea, and why I bought into it. It feels like part of a certain "information wants to be free" internet ideology: Access! Link! Share! Create! Comment! Connect! Consume!

(These thoughts inspired by

oyceter's IBARW post On knowledge and knowing and audience)

There are certainly places and spaces where I do my part to free the ole information -- but, despite the obviously-strong bias in various parts of internetlandia, I see no particular reason why online social networks, as such, should be places where people feel a need to be making themselves constantly available to all comers.

It's the difference between a performative model and a social model. Much of the blogosphere is performative, but a lot of other social spaces really aren't, and there's no particular reason why they should be.

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Now with actual poll on Dreamwidth!

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