I am against FriendFeed etiquette. Over the past few months I have seen several suggestions and discussions about “FriendFeed Etiquette.” I would characterize all incidents as innocent suggestions by users trying to solve small problems they were having with FriendFeed.
Incidents
The first example I saw of this was Duncan Riley mentioning FriendFeed etiquette. He posted,
“Thinking FriendFeed Etiquette. Obviously duplication is an ongoing issue, but I think people purposely reposting links to content directly on FriendFeed moments after the original person has it up is poor form. Sharing is one thing, doing this intentionally for attention isn’t.”
Duncan Riley was seeing abuse was attempting to suggest a way to curb the abuse. He was seeing blatant duplication by a few “bad apples.”
Next, a post by David Risley titled “FriendFeed Etiquette” that I liked but totally disagreed with. Here is an excerpt,
“Proper etiquette on FriendFeed is making your feed valuable to subscribers. Part of this is not only sharing interesting links, but also making sure you’re not adding to the noise by subjecting them to the same post multiple times when you use aggregate posting services like Ping.FM.”
Like Duncan Riley, David Risley was simply seeing abuse of the system. He was seeing users posting duplicate content for personal gain.
Finally, a posting by Mark Krynsky. He posted,
“FriendFeed etiquette. Find the original blog post to “Like” when you see other users promote it.”
I am not the only dissenting opinion. The following was posted by David Knight in a response to Mark Krynsky,
“It’s a nice idea but that’s not a point of etiquette, you’re being nice to do that but it shouldn’t be a required code of conduct – it’s too much trouble and people won’t do it. Just enjoy the discussion that popped up wherever it is and bask in the attention and extra traffic that otherwise wouldn’t have existed.”
FriendFeed is a great service but is certainly not perfect. I want to mention the level of development by the FriendFeed development team has been outstanding.
Noisiness is probably the main issue for the young application. Hope is evident as that this will change soon.
FriendFeed user Michael asked today, “Does friendfeed do post duplicate detection yet?” A comment by Bret Taylor indicates exactly their intentions as he stated,
“No, we don’t yet. But the engineer next to me is working on it”
Noise in the stream has been a topic of conversation for months. I first saw Hutch Carpenter mention it back in April when he wrote a post titled “Proposal to Clean Up the FriendFeed Clutter.”
But an informal Etiquette is not the answer even for the short term.
The FriendFeed Herd
A herd mentality can become a terrible thing. I am worried about the slippery slope of the herd judging user behavior. Self policing can be great. A good community though can go bad in a hurry. I was a active Digg user in the early going. The community did change.
I asked users on FriendFeed this question recently;
Former Digg users: What about Digg made you leave?
One user responded mentioning “Problem 1 – The cliques Problem.” As a casual Digg user I could easily see the power of the cliques. The top users on Digg still are the leaders of the herd. The system is controlled by the herd and more specifically the small herds in the form of powerful cliques.
FriendFeed has had a much different feel. FriendFeed has been well pretty friendly.
There will always be bad apples in every bunch. Although sad and a shame the inevitability of people abusing a service and ruining things for everyone seems to be a social networking fact.
Wikipedia describes herd mentality as;
“…how people are influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviors, follow trends, and/or purchase items.”
The point is that etiquette although well intentioned risks moving further. It would certainly be easy for cliques to grow strong like Digg. Then what is stopping the cliques from making their own rules.
I do not want the FriendFeed herd to become an angry “unfriendly” mob.
Down with the Etiquette
FriendFeed is social networking. FriendFeed is sharing, learning, exploring, and experiencing new things. FriendFeed is about community but ultimately letting each user have there own experience. Each user can and should have the freedom to choose their own experience.
FriendFeed is also about community. The developers have given users great tools for self policing.
The Hide and Block functions are the appropriate means for eliminating noise and removing the bad apples from your stream. For more on the Hide function see this Louis Gray post.
Since FriendFeed is friendly let’s keep it that way.
Down with the etiquette and down with rules for each user. FriendFeed is in active development and the problems that etiquette seem to help with will not be around forever. Etiquette is not a noise solution. I fear it a rolling boulder that will snowball as it speeds down the FriendFeed mountain. The friendly place would be ruined.
User freedom should not be encroached upon. I am for user independence.
Down with FriendFeed etiquette! Long Live The User! Viva La FriendFeed!
I think we need to understand that our social circles aren't the same. Those who follow you don't necessarily follow me. And while I can rely on Friend of a Friend to bring somebody who follows me your story, there may at times be different reasons to post it directly. Also, much of the activity is done outside of FriendFeed, and imported in. You and I might both see the same post and share it in Google Reader. We might Digg the same item. That in itself will promise duplication. Even if you “solve for” duplication, that likely will only affect direct postings.
I don't really have a problem with folks letting people know about small preferences and suggestions — but how do you prevent them from becoming hard and fast rules? At which point does etiquette start to infringe on freedom to use the service however you want to.
In the end I would agree with you Franklin, etiquette sucks. I say use the service however you want to, but if you're a jerk about it, you'll suffer the social consequences one way or another.
I feel the same way about Twitter: http://www.sheysmith.com/2008/04/18/its-your-tw…
To help clarify, the intention from my post was mainly to help highlight and garner the largest visibility to the content originator on FF. That makes it easier for others to discover and subscribe to them as well as involve them in the conversation.
Etiquette was probably not the best word choice and I was by no means trying to force others to adopt this. I still stand by my method and reasoning and will continue to follow it as best I can.
i follow ideas, not people. i notice in doing so i skip from head to head on many blogs and internet writers. the ones that show up frequently i bookmark in my mind.
friendfeed is great for this, a lot of the minds i like are in one place. it will deteriorate, 2nd law of thermodynamics. enjoy it now.
I hope it does not deteriorate. We shall see.
Shey, thanks for the comment. You are exactly right on and that is my point put simply,
“use the service however you want to, but if you're a jerk about it, you'll
suffer the social consequences one way or another.” That is exactly what I
mean.
Mark, just wanted to reiterate that you were trying to solve the problem of the content originator getting credit for the content. Perhaps the FF devs will help with this in the future.
I suggest some way of linking to the original posting by the author. All the re-shares would point (link) at the original.
Hutch Carpenter suggested the Link centric versus Person centric approaches way back in April. http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2008/04/24/proposal-t…
nice article! nice site. you're in my rss feed now 😉
keep it up