Lurking, Twitter, The Commons, and Private Posts
Lurking
Yesterday I was catching up on chat logs and ran across a stub for lurking on the IndieWeb wiki. I cleaned up the formatting a bit and added some additional material. Later Ton Zijlstra dropped a link to his excellent article from 2004 on the topic: Lurking and Social NetworksĀ (though honestly, I first came by the link courtesy of our good friend Jeremy Cherfas who added it to the wiki page).
LurkingĀ is the quiet watching/listening that what many people of the web do in chat rooms in order to begin gauging culture, learningĀ jargon or lingo, and other community norms or unspokenĀ principlesĀ before diving in to interact on a more direct level with other participants.
While the word lurking can have a very negative connotation, online it often has a much more positive one, especially in regard to the health and civility of the commons. Rather than rehash what Ton has done an excellent job of doing, I wonāt go into the heavy details and history of online lurking, but instead, letās take a look at where it isnāt in todayās social media landscape.
Since 2004, Twitter and a slew of other social media has popped up on the scene and changed many of our prior behaviors concerning lurking. In particular, Twitterās interface has made it far easier to either like/favorite a post or retweet it.
In comparison the the preceding era of the blogosphere represented by Tonsā post, Twitter has allowed people to send simple notifications back and forth about each othersā posts indicating a lower bar of interaction than writing a thoughtful and measured comment. Now instead of not knowing about dozens, hundreds, or thousands of lurkers, a (micro)blogger would more quickly know who many more of their readers were because they were liking or resharing their content. Naturally there are still many more potential lurkers who donāt interact with oneās posts this way, but these interactions in some way are like adding fuel to the fire and prompt the writer to continue posting because theyāre getting some feedback that indicates theyāve got an audience.Ā Twitter has dramatically lowered the bar for lurkers and made it more socially acceptable for them to make themselves known.
Twitter image from the collection Social Decay by Andrei Lacatsu
Of course, not all is rosy and happy in Twitterland as a result of this lowering the social bar. Because itās so easy to follow almost anyone and interact with them, naturally everyone does. This means that while before one may have lurked a blog for weeks or months before posting a response of any sort, people are now regularly replying to complete strangers without an resistance whatsoever. While this can be valuable and helpful in many instances, oftentimes it comes off as rudely as if one butted into the private conversation of strangers at a public gathering. At the farther end of the spectrum, itās also much easier for trolls to tag and target unsuspecting victims. As a result, we have the dumpster fire that Twitter has become in the past several years for many of its users.
The problem for the continued health of the commons is how can we maintain a bar for online lurking, but still provide some feedback? How can we keep people from shouting and yelling at passer-by from their proverbial front porches or vice-versa? How might we encourage more positive lurking online before directly jumping into a conversation?Ā
Read Posts and Private Posts
For several years now, as a part of the IndieWeb movement, Iāve been more directly controlling my online identity and owning my content by using my own domain name and my own website (boffosocko.com). While I still use Twitter, Iām generally only reading content from it via a feed reader. When I post to or interact with it, Iām always publishing my content on my own website first and syndicating a copy to Twitter for those who donāt own their online identities or content and (sadly) rely on Twitter to do that for them.Ā
Within this setting, since roughly late 2016, Iāve been posting almost all of what I read online or in books, magazines, or newspapers on my own website. These read posts include some context and are often simply composed of the title of the article, the author, the outlet, a summary/synopsis/or first paragraph or two to remind me what the piece was about, and occasionally a comment or two or ten I had on the piece.
An example read post with context from my website at https://boffosocko.com/2019/06/02/lurking-and-social-networks-ton-zijlstra/
In tandem with these posts, Iām also sending webmentions to the websites of those pieces. These (experimental) read webmentions are simply notifications to the originating site that Iāve read their piece. In our prior framing of lurking or Twitter, Iām sending them the simplest notification I can think of to say, āIām here lurking. Iām reading or looking at your work.ā
Iām not saying that I liked it, favorited it, disliked it, bookmarked it, commented on it,Ā or anything else, but simply that I read it, I consumed it, I spent the time to interact with it. But in contrast with Tonās older method of looking at server logs to see what kind of traffic his posts are getting, he can see exactly who I am and visit my website in return if he chooses. (Tonās old method of sifting through those logs was certainly not a fun experience and the data was usually relatively anonymous and useless.) These newer read notifications could potentially give him a much richer idea of who his (lurking) audience actually is. Then when someone shows up with a comment or reply, itās not completely from out of the dark: theyāve previously indicated that theyāre at least somewhat aware of the context of a potentially broader conversation on his site.
These read notifications are semantically different from likes, favorites, or even bookmarks on other platforms. In fact many platforms like Twitter, which has moved from āstarsā (with the semantic idea of a favorite) to āheartsā (with the semantic idea of a like), have so few indicators of reaction to a post that the actual meaning of them has been desperately blurred. Personally Iāll use Twitterās like functionality variously to mean: āIām bookmarking this (or the linked article within it) for reading laterā, āI like this postā, āIāve read this postā, or even āIām acknowledging receipt of your reply to meā. Thatās just too much meaning to pack into a silly little heart icon.
Because Iām using my own website over which I have complete control, I can make it do a better job of unpacking some of this semantic tom-foolery. Iāve written about it a bit in the past if you care to see some of the details: Thoughts on linkblogs, bookmarks, reads, likes, favorites, follows, and related links. See also: the read-posts tag on this site.
If they choose, some website owners display these read post notifications in one or more ways. Some sites like Aaron Pareckiās or Jeremy Keithās will show my interactions as bookmarks. Others, primarily WordPress-based websites that support Webmention (via plugin), will actually show these interactions in their comment sections under the heading āReadā and display my photo/avatar as an indicator that Iāve interacted with that post. In the case of read posts on which Iāve written one or more comments, the receiving site also has the option of showing my interaction not as a read/bookmark intent, but could also show my comments as a reply to their post. Iāve written a bit about this and its potential for large news outlets before in Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the InternetĀ for A List Apart. There are also some older legacy sites that might show my interactions as a trackback or pingback, but these seem few and far between these days, particularly as those systems are major targets for spam and the Webmention protocol has a richer interaction/display model.
How Jeremy Keith displays shares, likes, and bookmarks (including my read post) in the comment section of his website.
The display of a read post on ColoradoBoulevard.net
A new itch
But as I think about these read posts, lurking, and being more civil on the internet, I have a new itch for some functionality Iād like to add to my website. I very frequently use my website as a digital commonplace book to collect links of things Iāve read, watched, and listened to. Iāll collect quotes, highlights, and even my own marginalia. As I mentioned above, my read posts sometimes have comments, and quite often those comments are really meant just for me and not for the author of the original post. In many cases, when my comments may be too egregious, sensitive, or perhaps even insulting to the original author, Iāll make these posts private so that only I can see them on my site.Ā Of course when theyāre private, no notifications are sent to the site at the other end of the line.
Sometimes I would like to be able to send a read notification to the site, but also keep my commentary privately to myself. This allows me to have my notes on the piece and be highly critical without dragging down the original author or piece who I may not know well or the audience of that same piece which I havenāt properly lurked (in the positive community-based sense indicated above) to be as intelligently and sensitively commenting as I would otherwise like. Thus Iād like to build in some functionality so that I can publicly indicate Iāve read a piece (and send a notification), but also so that I can keep the commentary on my read private to either myself or a smaller audience.
I suspect that I can do this in a variety of meta-fields on my website which arenāt shown to the public, but which might be shown to either myself or logged in users. In some sense, this is a subset of functionality which many in the IndieWeb have been exploring recently around the ideas of private posts or by limiting the audience of a post. In my case, Iām actually looking at making a post public, but making smaller sub-portions of it private.
To begin with, Iāll most likely be looking at doing this at a small scale just for myself and my commonplace book, as I can definitely see second and third-order effects and a variety of context collapse issues when portions of posts are private, but others who may be privy to them are commenting on those pieces from the perspective of their public spheres which may not be as private or closed off as mine. i.e.: While I may have something marked as private, privy readers will always have the option of copy/pasting it and dragging it out into the public.
For those interested, Iāll briefly note that Sebastiaan Andeweg just wrote Private posts: the move of the checkins which has some useful and related background to private posts. (Of course I remember exactly when I read it.) I also highly suspect there will be a private posts related session(s) at the upcoming IndieWeb Summit in Portland in June (tickets are still available). Iām interested to see what others come up with on this front.
