8 Comments

  1. I completely agree Craig – and if you see the next article up in my blog, you’ll see that I really do. It’s about a woman who sues an ex-boyfriend for offering friendship to her on Facebook. Differing values cause most of the problems in the world today.

    And I think you agree with me. If there is a reporting mechanism- clear and defined – then lynch mobs aren’t needed to help regulate. See here for another example of unmoderated communities and what can happen.

    I’m not saying that oddfollow or stalkerwarning is right, just that it’s how the community is starting to wake up to the invisible audience. I’m here to see how this plays out 🙂

  2. creepy. Would you find it creepier if somebody was subscribing to your tweets via RSS and you didn’t know it?

  3. Interesting question and goes to the heart of control/non control and values of others.

    For me, the challenge of social networks is the online element.

    When we socialise offline, we tend to stick with the group we are comfortable with: our demographic. So I don’t have too many redneck ill-educated, homophobes at my dinner parties, for example 😛 If there’s any weirdos in my real life friends, I’m not aware of it.

    Online, we make basic assumption don’t we? About people sharing our values? Its a bit of a shock when the social walls come down.

    I’m pretty sure that there are people out there who Yahoo!Pipe or otherwise aggregate ALL my content (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, whatnot) for whatever purposes they wish. Competition, fantasy, *shrugs* beyond my control unless I go into paranoid lockdown mode.

    But when we trip over blatant examples of someone not acting with our shared values, we block them. If I find an RSS person subscribing to my tweets, I’ll unblock them. I regularly block and unblock RSS on Facebook. Again, we do what we can with limited tools.

    I ignore the invisible audience and stay focussed on those that become visible. Does that sort-of answer your question?

  4. Interesting post… I am shocked at both to be honest, but I guess it is up to the women or men who have been ‘followed’ to decide if they think it is acceptable.

  5. yep.I think women tend to think about these issues. Men are happy to put photos of their girlfriend, their home, their whereabouts etc all online. I can’t believe I even put photos of myself online. I know of women who had people rock up at their doorstep after meeting in secondlife, or Facebook “friends” asking them to run away with them. Spooky. Here’s another question – do you think your personal safety is compromised by having personal information online? (personally, I think not much more than having conversations with greengrocers, school teachers, people at work or any other person you meet – any interaction could be seen as a potential threat – or a potential connection)

  6. I’ve found numerous occurrences of these kinds of followers, and while I understand your concerns and believe this is a very important area that needs to be addressed in any community – personally I have trouble seeing this method as a good long-term solution outside of it’s immediate scope. What I see as shaming of others – potentially wrongfully without recrimination among the @oddfollow group on their part – and forming what could unnecessarily become a lynch mob – a pattern repeatedly seen when niche communities are formed without proper leadership to address these kinds of social ills – misses many bases.

    While I’m certainly no expert… from my perspective if you really want to get serious about these kinds of problems, asking the Twitter admin for tools like a plain and clean ‘report’ or ‘block’ user form with the option to include your reason for blocking and request for follow-up, would allow these kinds of issues to be filtered and addressed by a team of qualified (perhaps volunteer because of scale) community managers based upon priority. Managers who then take up these concerns with the problem users and mediate with the issuers. Managers with managers that liaise where needed with the authorities. Policing is only useful if it is enforced. It’s habits you want to change, not access controls; people find ways around those as wonderwebby partially highlights.

    I’d bet Twitter have a team already for monitoring blocks and in preventing spam they could expand upon for this.

    Ultimately though, identity becomes the real issue, something the authorities need to deal with every day, and Silky, you wrote a post about never handing control of your community to your community, so…

    Let the professionals do the managing of what the community reports to them, and make statistics of those reports public in order to keep the community in the loop… and on top of the qualified (volunteer) recruitment problem… and fund raising… and… community awareness…4333333333333333333333333333333333333333333

    lol. Puss just jumped on my keyboard for some attention and typed that! I think I need to police and retrain her bad habits… 🙂

  7. internet… a stalking platform! Stalking made simple…

    actually love, you just turn on “friends only” and Twitter puts a red padlock on it all 🙂 Just like I could turn this blog to “friends only”… Let’s make sure the dataportability guys don’t forget gated communities preferences hmmmm? 🙂

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