more social network random whinage

[waider]

I signed on to Advogato ages back, and I can't recall why, or how I came across it for that matter. Possibly someone else I know was on it. Anyway, more out of being a difficult child than anything else, I decided to change my self-certification from "Apprentice" to "Journeyer" (these archaic terms are apparently based on something the Debian folk do, which to me is as good a reason as any to make fun of it). I posted a note to my advogato journal - the second one ever - saying I'd done this, ostensibly because various IETF people have mailed me to thank me for a useful hack I've written, and immediately a couple of people that I don't know from Adam come along and rate me as "Apprentice", which I presume drags whatever boost I'd given myself back down into the mud again. Which, I think, illustrates the uselessness of that system in both directions: I can mark myself up, and a bunch of clods with no gauge of my skills can mark me back down again.

Not that I'm bitter, you understand.

I deleted my tribe.net account, since that failed to get beyond a two-person network and they have no concept of where anything outside the US is as far as location-based searches go, which makes it almost completely useless to me in any realm in which it might have been helpful. Deleting the account took, as I'd noted previously an email to their support address, which told me I needed to send an unsubscribe mail to <register@tribe.net>, which in turn took several days to process and garnered me two responses from the admins asking me to explain, if I felt comfortable about it (their words, not mine), why I wanted out.

Tonight, Orkut greeted me with two messages from an individual named Patrick, mailed to "community", which I guess is the SPAM AS YOU WISH thing that Warren Ellis and others pointed out. Patrick wants us all to know that he's quitting Orkut (first message) and that he's quitting because of the ToS (second message). Thanks, Patrick, but WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU AND WHY SHOULD I CARE? Also, since you thoughtfully told us all you're leaving, I clicked over to your profile and briefly pondered cutting and pasting the details here as some sort of arbitrary punishment for spamming me, but I realised that my give-a-shit-o-meter was tapping the needle-rest.

So, ah, if this is the future of social life, I'm going back to bad movies and popcorn.

Comments

[jwgh]

Yeah, I got friend-of-friend spam suggesting that everyone should come up with ways to make Orkut better. Not allowing friend-of-friend spam would probably be near the top of my list.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

You can block it... but that it exists at all is muy estúpido.

[kodi]

What would make it entertaining, if not any more user-friendly, is if only the friend in the middle could block it. So if you have three friends in common with a jackass, and two of them have blocked FOAFspam, but the third hasn't, then you still get everything that crosses the jackass's mind until you hunt down and slaughter that friend.

[waider.livejournal.com]

I would point out that this was "community" spam, not FOAF spam. And yes, you can disable it, I know.

[boutell.livejournal.com]

I received a job offer of great interest as Orkut FOAF spam. Perhaps we should just choose better friends (with good judgement in picking their own...).

[waider.livejournal.com]

That doesn't help the community-broadcast issue (yes, yes, I can switch off community messages, not the point). Why is there a broadcast-to-community option in the first place? What does it give me that reading the community itself doesn't give me?

In terms of picking my friends: say I was using this as a means of finding employment. I put a smart friend on my list, because I feel friends of his are smart too and will have opportunities for me. Then one of them spams the FOAF list. My choices are

• block the user, and hope none of the rest of his friends are similar idiots
• cut the friend and his whole network off
• accept spam into my heart (and mailbox)

It's nice you're getting some good out of it, because I've had a fairly uniformly negative experience with the thing so far - but that may simply be because I don't have any clear use for it.

I am currently kicking around a description of what I'd like to see from things like Orkut, but I've not yet written it up properly. I'll slap it up on my site and link it here when I'm done cogitating. See, I'm not all whiny...