Friends List Policy

[gusl]

Don't ask my permission to add me. Adding me amounts to (A) giving me permissions (B) adding to your browsing convenience. It couldn't possibly bother me.

The (A) property above is meaningful to the system at a deep level, unlike (B) (one of my complaints with LiveJournal is mixing up those distinct concepts). So, if I'm no longer interested in somebody's journal, I take them off my LJ50 friends group. This does not mean I don't want them to read my friends-only posts. If that were the case, I would take them out of my friends list.

If it were to happen I want to read somebody's journal, but don't want them to read my friends-only posts, I would create a "privacy" group to use for those posts. Basically, I would no longer use a "friends list", but instead a "reading list" and a "trusted reader list".

Comments

[evan.livejournal.com]

You overestimate the common man. :)

For example, I'm on a bunch of people's friends lists because my username is "evan" and they have friends named "Evan".

"users I trust" is ok, but at the same time I don't really trust a lot of the people I allow to see my friends-only entries. (For example, if there was some higher level of trust that became available later, like, say, maintaining the communities I run while I'm away, I wouldn't a generic list of "people I trust" would become doubly confusing.)

So it could be "people I allow to see my friends-only entries", but that's too long and goes back to "friends" again.

Basically, once the friends list is done away with, it's difficult to pin down exactly what the "trust" list should be at all. Right now, it's basically the union of all sets of people I want to be able to have in custom security groups, which is incredibly confusing when you look at it from that perspective.