The Cute Cat Theory, Activism and CommYou

[jducoeur]

Thanks to jikharra for the pointer to this very interesting article, adapted from a conference speech. It starts out making some fairly conventional observations, but the main thrust of the article is about the fact that the test of any good social tool is whether it gets used for political activism. (And that a useful tool needs to be useful for both banal *and* political purposes -- the banal ones provide cover for the political ones.)

It's fascinating food for thought, and I'm going to have to chew on its ramifications for CommYou. It may well push in some stories that had been relegated to the backlog. For example, viral invitation: conversations that are nominally hidden and private, but where invitees can invite others into the discussion. That one's been sitting in the list from the beginning, but I hadn't been paying much attention to it because I didn't see an important use case. But it's nicely suited to some activist scenarios, where you want to be able to get the word out without something actually being *public*.

It's things like this that make this project so much fun. I confess, I have no bloody idea how CommYou is actually going to get used, but I'm increasingly sure that, if I don't screw up, people are going to come up with all sorts of uses that I haven't yet imagined...

Comments

Reading vs. friendship

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Yes, there should definitely be a "I want to read X" concept, distinct from "I consider X a friend". I'm not sure why LJ doesn't do it.

Re: Reading vs. friendship

[jducoeur]

I suspect they baked it into their schema and UI too early, and things got to the point where it was too traumatic to change it later. Inertia becomes ever-more-powerful in any system.

And to be fair, it's a convenient simplification. The tension between "easy" and "powerful" is omnipresent, and it's not unreasonable to forsake the power users to make things easier for the masses. I may disagree with the decision, but I can certainly argue that it's a decent compromise. I'm going to have to work pretty hard to make things more sophisticated without it being over-complex.

But this is why I want suggestions like that now: to have as much idea as possible now about where we might want things to go, so I have some idea of how it ought to fit into the overall plan and try to avoid cutting off desireable pathways...

Re: Reading vs. friendship

[mindways]

You've given me the image of a checkbox buried deep in the preferences, labelled "Drama-Free Nomenclature". ;)

Re: Reading vs. friendship

[metageek.livejournal.com]

The tension between "easy" and "powerful" is omnipresent,

True. You can probably come up with a decent UI that'll support the separation, but make it easy to mark someone as both.

Re: Reading vs. friendship

[jducoeur]

In fact, they're probably going to be fairly separated UIs. On the one hand, there is the question of "who can read me", which has much to do with the social network, so my only *initial* plan is to support all of the subgraphs that the social network provides. (Facebook now provides sufficiently fine-grained tools for this to be practical.) That may not suffice for the long run, and I may find that I need better integration for it, but I suspect it'll be a good start.

OTOH, there is the question of "who I am reading", which is all about CommYou, so that's a CommYou UI. It defaults to all of your social network, but anything in that (both friends and communities) can be trivially disabled. And the upshot of the above discussion is that I've added a story (probably a little ways down the line) that you can add any arbitrary person or community as well...