musings on flists
Apr. 24th, 2006 11:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
julesjonesLooking for advice/suggestions:
I've always had a policy on this LJ that I was not locking posts here and I was not friending people unless it was an LJ I would read regularly--and that I would think long and hard about whether I really want to add more to my read regularly list. In effect I use this LJ as the "read regularly" filter and what is now the fanfic LJ as the "friend everyone back but don't always read" filter. There are two reasons for this:
One is that when my RSI is bad, all that scrolling through stuff hurts. I mean that literally. Even when my RSI isn't bad, all that scrolling is one of the things that could make it bad.
The other reason is that LJ is an enormous time sink. Even if I didn't have to worry about protecting my wrists, I'd have to worry about protecting my time. Time spent reading LJ is time not spent writing the next book (or reading other people's books), and there are a great many LJs out there that are fun or useful or offer good reasons for me to want to read them. Yes, I know you can have filters, but I'd have to be absolutely ruthless about using them.
Goings-on in a writer friend's unofficial blog on LJ have led to him re-assessing his friending/friends-locked policy. He's also been using a "first reader" filter so that he can use his LJ as a means of circulating drafts to his critique group in a manner that allows us all to see each others' comments. That's been making me think about whether I should look again at how I handle friending. In particular, there has been mention of the facility to set one of your filters so that it automatically shows as the default view. In other words, I could set up a filter that includes the people currently friended, and when I log into LJ that is the view that shows up when I click on the "Friends" link. I wouldn't have to explicitly set that filter. That would probably be enough to deal with the twin problems of distraction and self-inflicted pain; and it would make it easy for me to set up a critique group filter, and to put friends on that filter even if they're not on my core LJ reading list.
What's worrying me slightly is that in some areas of the LJ sub-culture, there is very much an attitude that if you friend someone, you are obliged to read that LJ. It could be exacerbated for me because I don't f-lock on this LJ, and doubt I'll f-lock in the future other than for special purposes like a critique group, so there isn't even the excuse of friending someone because they'd like to read my f-locked posts. Any thoughts on whether I'm going to be causing trouble for myself by putting people on my flist so that I can find them when I do have time every so often to read more than the core group?
I've always had a policy on this LJ that I was not locking posts here and I was not friending people unless it was an LJ I would read regularly--and that I would think long and hard about whether I really want to add more to my read regularly list. In effect I use this LJ as the "read regularly" filter and what is now the fanfic LJ as the "friend everyone back but don't always read" filter. There are two reasons for this:
One is that when my RSI is bad, all that scrolling through stuff hurts. I mean that literally. Even when my RSI isn't bad, all that scrolling is one of the things that could make it bad.
The other reason is that LJ is an enormous time sink. Even if I didn't have to worry about protecting my wrists, I'd have to worry about protecting my time. Time spent reading LJ is time not spent writing the next book (or reading other people's books), and there are a great many LJs out there that are fun or useful or offer good reasons for me to want to read them. Yes, I know you can have filters, but I'd have to be absolutely ruthless about using them.
Goings-on in a writer friend's unofficial blog on LJ have led to him re-assessing his friending/friends-locked policy. He's also been using a "first reader" filter so that he can use his LJ as a means of circulating drafts to his critique group in a manner that allows us all to see each others' comments. That's been making me think about whether I should look again at how I handle friending. In particular, there has been mention of the facility to set one of your filters so that it automatically shows as the default view. In other words, I could set up a filter that includes the people currently friended, and when I log into LJ that is the view that shows up when I click on the "Friends" link. I wouldn't have to explicitly set that filter. That would probably be enough to deal with the twin problems of distraction and self-inflicted pain; and it would make it easy for me to set up a critique group filter, and to put friends on that filter even if they're not on my core LJ reading list.
What's worrying me slightly is that in some areas of the LJ sub-culture, there is very much an attitude that if you friend someone, you are obliged to read that LJ. It could be exacerbated for me because I don't f-lock on this LJ, and doubt I'll f-lock in the future other than for special purposes like a critique group, so there isn't even the excuse of friending someone because they'd like to read my f-locked posts. Any thoughts on whether I'm going to be causing trouble for myself by putting people on my flist so that I can find them when I do have time every so often to read more than the core group?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-24 12:47 pm (UTC)Thus, my conclusion is that my friendslist is there for my convenience, and if people have a problem with it, tough potatoes. (Again, not really true, but if people make drama out of it, I'll treat that just like any other making of drama out of something not their business. And I'll listen to reasonable polite requests.) In practice, this has worked fine. There are maybe five people out of four dozen who've friended me that I haven't friended back. I don't read the journals of all of the people on my list, even though my default view isn't set to a filtered version. Nobody's complained yet.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-24 03:25 pm (UTC)Part of the problem for me is that while this LJ has ended up being to a large extent an ongoing conversation with other rasfc folk and a few of my other writerly friends from elsewhere, it is my Official Author's Blog. Getting feedback on other people's experiences is useful -- thanks.