Dreamwidth: Bad Management Decisions

[owenthurman]

I don't understand the whole subscription/access thing. What was wrong with friending?

If we're really building relationships between journals around here, shouldn't friending be a reciprocal arrangement. There are filters for more complicated clique discrimination, but the main kind of relationship we keep should really bring us together and not divide us into subgroups. To that end, traditional friending would be an excellent feature to add back for those used to more full-featured systems (like LJ or IJ) who will miss it.

Comments

[diachrony]

Well, I'm not going to bother with all the splitting up who gets access and who doesn't. If I subscribe to someone, I'm granting them access, and I hope they'll reciprocate - I like building relationships. DW still has the ability to filter beyond that, as does LJ.

I'm underwhelmed by this system, but I think it was an extremely popular feature when DW was in the discussion phase - I remember reading threads where people were very, very much for it. It seems to be attractive mainly to (some) people who post a lot of fic or meta and want to keep that audience separate from their personal posts without bothering with filters. Etc. (I could go on about how one could already do this on LJ, and DW's system is not necessarily an improvement, just different, and different in a way that will likely cause unnecessary confusion and hurt feelings, but whatever, yadda yadda ... different strokes.)

Also, the term "friend" and "friending" is very bothersome to certain people who like DW's more neutral terminology. I don't really have a preference personally - either LJ or DW's terminology is fine with me.

[speaker_to_customers]

I agree absolutely.