Andrew Ducker ([info]andrewducker) wrote in [info]lj_dev,
@ 2006-12-06 23:19:00
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Security through obscurity?
The new notification system will tell you when you've been friended, but not when you've been unfriended.

Which means I'm currently subscribing to an external source which grabs a copy of my friends list, compares it with a cached copy, and tells me if someone unfriends me. (You can subscribe to it here if you really care, or subscribe to your own by looking at the RSS url and replacing my username with yours).

Anyway - this is _hideously_ inefficient. The data goes from the LJ database, out to a third party, and then back again, so I can see information LJ could just supply to me. Why is this, exactly? Some kind of security by obscurity?

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[info]burr86
2006-12-06 11:47 pm UTC (link)
It just hasn't been done! Nothing more, nothing less. :P

I don't see what security gains there would be from hiding this information, anyway.

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[info]ruakh
2006-12-06 11:58 pm UTC (link)
I think "security by obscurity" is a semi-generic anti-buzzword.

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i <3 semi-generic anti-buzzwords
[info]qryztufre
2006-12-07 12:05 am UTC (link)
I think it's catchy so I'll use it.

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[info]tgies
2006-12-07 04:17 am UTC (link)
my thoughts exactly

i kinda figured the OP had just learned that phrase and wanted to take it for a test drive, not expecting the subsequent horrible accident and dozens of deaths

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[info]ruakh
2006-12-07 04:22 am UTC (link)
I suspect [info]andrewducker actually knows exactly what the phrase means, and applied it here under the "eh, close enough" principle, forgetting to take into account that due to the high proportion of geeks that are pedants, there is no "eh, close enough" principle in the geek community. :-P

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[info]tgies
2006-12-07 04:37 am UTC (link)
BUT IT'S NOT EVEN CLOSE ENOUGH D:

wait

oh, you're good.

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[info]pw201
2006-12-07 12:17 am UTC (link)
I thought there was something in the original announcements for notification which said that not getting notification of de-friending was a policy decision to avoid drama?

But I'm not going trawling through all those comments to find it, of course :-)

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[info]ydna
2006-12-07 12:44 am UTC (link)
I don't remember it being a stated policy when the feature rolled out. But when I noticed de-friend notification wasn't included, I assumed, "Good. Less drama!"

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[info]bride
2006-12-07 06:11 am UTC (link)
That's exactly what I thought.

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[info]thebiblioholic
2006-12-07 08:26 am UTC (link)
Probably the same amount of drama. THose who obsess over defriendings don't need email to trigger the drama. :-)

I like the notification feature. I just wish that people wouldn't use robots to repeatedly friend/unfriend thousands of people as a form of spam to call attention to their journal.

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[info]andrewducker
2006-12-07 08:23 am UTC (link)
See Brad's comment below. I had a feeling I'd seen the same thing...

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[info]andrewducker
2006-12-07 08:24 am UTC (link)
Brad would seem to disagree with you (see below).

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[info]midnightmadness
2006-12-07 03:58 am UTC (link)
I thought everyone that cared about this sort of thing just knew about and used Marnanel's Joule anyway. Why not go directly to it? (I actually don't understand the advantage of feeding it back to yourself as a syndicated feed anyway - I just have a hot link to it on the sidebar of my journal/friends page, which seems much more efficient then the very roundabout way you have). It works off the fdata, which while not always 100% current should be good enough - is there some reason you need an immediate up to the minute notification of being dropped. Is the next day not good enough?

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[info]kunzite1
2006-12-07 04:25 am UTC (link)
the joule rss feed is handy because LJ will ping it multiple times a day. that way, you don't miss a day of changes.

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[info]midnightmadness
2006-12-07 04:46 am UTC (link)
Isn't the LJ fdata it works from only updated once a day (or thereabouts) though anyway? I do believe though that the Joule, at the very least, will only ping the fdata once a day for its cache anyway. Maybe I'm behind the times here (maybe it's different on the Joule RSS or fdata now updates much more often than it used to), but I believe this was all LJ standard / data pulling courtesy policy so as not to overload the servers/database.

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[info]andrewducker
2006-12-07 08:28 am UTC (link)
The advantage of feeding it back to myself is it just appears as information inside LJ, rather than having to open yet another window. As I read most of my subscriptions through LJ's RSS reading feature, I find that dead handy. Also, I only get notified when there's a change, rather than going there and then trying to remember if I've already been told about the latest one.

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[info]midnightmadness
2006-12-07 03:46 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, but as far as I can tell, when you actually go to the actual Joule page it pulls the fdata at that very moment for its daily cache (AFAIK, it doesn't update its comparison cache more than once a day even if the fdata updates), where if you have it auto pulling info for it's cache for the day right at 12GMT to feed the RSS, you may be cheating yourself out of a more current fdata update that happens after that since it won't update it's cache comparison file for another day. I honestly think that your way may actually, ironically, be less current with info it feeds you.

Regardless though, I still have the same ultimate question, is there some reason you need an immediate update of a friends drop? There may be a valid reason, even if I can't think of one. I'm just mostly curious about that.

*shrug* different strokes I guess. Whatever way, I still prefer to get things like this with constantly updating data more from the source than to pull them or have them pushed at me automatically. I just think RSS is more practical for non evolving / changing data (which kind of brings us full circle to your original post/point :-).

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[info]andrewducker
2006-12-07 04:04 pm UTC (link)
Oh, I don't need an immediate update. I'd be happy to get a daily update from LJ of friends added/lost.

It just seems insane to me that in order to get a notification from LJ of an event that they could inform me about using their own notification system, a whole load of data has to be siphoned off to a separate site and then fed back again.

And surely the whole point of RSS is to give you access to changing data in one place - hence blog feeds from multiple sites being readable on LJ (or bloglines, or wherever).

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[info]midnightmadness
2006-12-07 04:12 pm UTC (link)
And surely the whole point of RSS is to give you access to changing data in one place - hence blog feeds from multiple sites being readable on LJ (or bloglines, or wherever).

Yeah, but those are essentially "fixed" data. A blog post or picture or news article is posted and it is what it is - it's not changeable data. It's not going to be followed up every hour with a 99.8% similar push with one word corrected or new +2 total for number of people killed, etc. The posted and pushed item itself isn't going to evolve. There may be follow ups in new posts, but in the situation we're talking here we're talking about a feed of a singe fixed data file that changes. Personal preference, I just don't like that type of RSS as I think there are more practical and better ways for getting that type of info.

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[info]andrewducker
2006-12-07 04:42 pm UTC (link)
But it's not feeding back an ever-changing blob of data - the feed only contains a list of changes.

For instance, see:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/andydfriends/4338.html

I certainly wouldn't want to get the whole marnanel page in each update, you're right.

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[info]brad
2006-12-07 07:37 am UTC (link)
What "security" do you speak of? I think you're just throwing out terms here.

No, we don't send out emails/notifications on unfriending because that's a creepy negative thing and we didn't want to change the social dynamics when we introduced ESN. We might add it as a power-user option in the future, but never promote it in the main UI.

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[info]andrewducker
2006-12-07 08:23 am UTC (link)
Emotional security, of course. :->

And I had a feeling that it was something to do with reducing drama - hence trying to point out that it wasn't actually at all effective at this. I can get subscriptions to the marnanel updates, or the semagic client will tell me changes, and I'm sure that there are other ways as well.

So you wouldn't be changing the dynamics, any more than adding a notification when someone adds me changes the dynamics - I know when my friends-of changes, and I suspect that most people who care about these things do too.

Being able to subscribe to know when _other_ people get friended/unfriended would seem slightly creepy to me (although not hugely) - being able to do it for myself seems like useful management. But possibly that's just because I have a lot of people reading me, and anything that makes it easier to keep track is welcome.

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[info]brad
2006-12-07 08:57 am UTC (link)
Yes, but all those ways require extra effort, and you need to go out of your way to get emotionally distressed.

Making users jump through hoops to cry versus giving them a checkbox:

[ ] Email you when people no longer like you?

Is quite a bit different.

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[info]andrewducker
2006-12-07 09:02 am UTC (link)
I suppose it comes down to whether you feel that one's friends-of list 'belongs' to you. If it's information you're allowed to know, then I think we should be told when it changes. If not, then not.

I'd actually be fine with an LJ that didn't tell anyone who was reading them - because it was none of their darn business. But we don't seem to have gone in that direction, so saying "Here is a list, but we won't tell you when it changes, because we don't trust you not to cry." just seems patronising to me. But maybe I'm slightly more able to cope than most of LJ.

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re: But maybe I'm slightly more able to cope than most of LJ.
[info]triadruid
2006-12-07 05:01 pm UTC (link)
Given your birthday, I'd say that's probably true. I like the idea of a notification, but I'm not sure the drama is worth it.

Also, penguins.

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Re: But maybe I'm slightly more able to cope than most of LJ.
[info]adudeabides
2006-12-07 07:07 pm UTC (link)
Those who're prone to this sort of drama don't need a notification to incite drama. They already pay enough attention to these changes...

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[info]pat_barron
2006-12-07 05:17 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, I agree - it always rubs me the wrong way to see some bit of technology withholding functionality for some sort of non-technical reasons, especially if the functionality is already available anyway (though perhaps in an inefficient way). Just don't like the idea of deliberately making something hard to do, or making a user "jump through hoops" to do something. If there are notifications for being friended, then there should be a way to get notifications upon being un-friended too - and it shouldn't be made purposely difficult or obscure, regardless of the effect on the general level of drama... My opinion would be different if the friending notification wasn't there - I could easily accept "We don't think that's an important function, so we're not going to spend limited time and resources on it." But given that notification for friending is there, the incremental cost of adding the unfriending notification can't be very much, so that argument is no longer convincing.

Sort of reminds me of the error messages that I used to get from Pascal compilers, that effectively said, "I understand what you are trying to do, but we have decided that you should not be allowed to do that". I don't program in Pascal anymore... :-)

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[info]siderea
2006-12-08 02:47 am UTC (link)
Why is it LJ's job to reduce mere drama? That is, if users get upset at one another over friending (as opposed to, say, stalking and spamming which are a different order of problem), why is that LJ's problem? How does it diminish LJ or consume resources to expose users to this psychological risk?

I confess it really rubs me the wrong way, for the same reasons. I completely understand wanting to optimize LJ as a social system, but I don't feel this is a good optimization. I may be convinceable, but I've not yet been convinced.

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[info]blackbird_song
2006-12-08 04:33 am UTC (link)
As often as I've been unfriended by those whom I've been sad (and downright sniffly) to lose, I've also been friended by people who make me cry, and have done the dance of joy when some have unfriended me. I can understand your uneasiness about this, but to be honest, I'm not sure that it's best to withhold functionality that's easy to implement because some in the corporate offices worry about people having an uncomfortable but localized emotional response.

I know some people (many of whom don't subscribe to [info]lj_dev) who might like to be notified when someone unfriends them. The friending notifications are optional, so it seems as though it shouldn't be too hard to do the same with unfriending. As long as it's opt-in, it puts the onus on the individual user to seek out their own possible gloom. As others have said, the ones who are most likely to cause drama over this are the ones who are already doing it. I'd vote for letting each of us decide whether we'd like to cry all over our computer screens. :)

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[info]pbristow
2006-12-09 12:02 am UTC (link)
Hear, hear! =:o}

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[info]obvious
2006-12-14 02:04 pm UTC (link)
I'd like to see the feature because I like to keep my friends list neat and tidy. It's a pain in the butt to dig through 140 names to see who dropped me. For me it's not drama, it's ... I don't know, paperwork.

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[info]andrewducker
2006-12-14 10:10 pm UTC (link)
Whilst waiting for LJ to come to its senses, might I suggest the Semagic client (under windows) or http://marnanel.org/joule?user=obvious

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[info]adudeabides
2006-12-07 07:05 pm UTC (link)
I'm not sure that I understand why its that much different to be notified when someone unfriends you than when they friend you. I can understand that might feed drama in some cases, but the type of people who create drama don't particularly need notification -- they already monitor their friends-lists for changes -- whether through joule, watching for changes to their counts, or other means.

The advantage to adding the unfriending notificaton is that it allows people to monitor changes to their friends-list internally. Without having to rely on a third-party script (joule or any of the others)...third-party scripts who often have problems with their script being up and/or functioning. I rely on LJ's ESN to let me know when someone friends me. But I have to rely on the RSS method to monitor unfriendings (and I use the RSS method instead of just visiting the third-party site because that's as close as I can get to it (seeming) internal. And I dislike having to use (often less reliable) external resources.

In my case, I don't particularly care if someone friends or unfriends me. But I do like to stay informed (and aware of people who repeatedly add then un-add...I'm trying to figure that one out, myself). This would make it easier to stay aware of changes involving your journal. And I'm sure others could come-up with other justifications, based off their reasons for wanting this. I don't care if it's advertised; I can appreciate the reasons for not wanting to advertise it. But I know that many people would like this feature, self included.

(Also, as I was typing this, another notification idea occured to me that people might like...but I'll work on a [info]suggestions post for that sometime today.)

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