Yes, I read your journal

[andrewducker]

No, I am not going to start sprinkling the alphabet over half of my friends list.

I don't mind my friends posting memes, I'm perfectly happy to hit page down whenever people post things like that. And if you're on my flist then I read you every day. But the whole "I'm checking to see who reads me" thing currently making the rounds irks me, because it feels like emotional blackmail.

If you want people to comment then post either things that you think are awesome and worth sharing, things about yourself that you're happy to share, or your opinions.

Not everyone will comment on your journal, because some people just aren't comfortable stepping out in public like that. But that's _fine_. I get occasional surprise comments that make it clear that more people are reading my journal than I might think - they just aren't posting comments here.

Comments

[miss_s_b]

"the whole "I'm checking to see who reads me" thing currently making the rounds irks me, because it feels like emotional blackmail."

+1

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Yeah. And people suddenly friend you out of the blue (and not because they've suddenly discovered you are someone they've been friends with in RL for years...

[supergee.livejournal.com]

It seems to be a memetic infection from Facebook, where there's a lot of that stuff.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

I agree about the emotional blackmail angle. It makes me want to deliberately not comment, even if I might have done otherwise. But I should add that I am proud of my friendslist for generally posting this particular meme with the first sentence about checking to see who's reading edited out.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I am not at all bothered by the checking element: I did that meme solely for the words. I am fascinated by words and I was intrigued to see what people came up with.

[andrewducker]

This was purely complaining about the checking - if people want to play word games on their journals then I'm all in favour of that!

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I agree about the emotional blackmail angle, I never do that sort of stuff on FB and I'm not going to start doing here either. I too read my entire flist whenever I'm about on here, even if i don't comment.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

But you use bit.ly or whatever specifically to track who looks at your links....

[andrewducker]

That gives me numbers, doesn't tell me who clicks on them. And that only tracks the shortened ones on Twitter, doesn't tell me anything about LJ.

I have, occasionally, thought that it would be great to track the LJ ones too, but I disapprove of link shorteners as a concept, and only use them on Twitter because otherwise links don't fit in 140 characters, so I don't.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I don't like link shorteners because even when I got round to ending up online in a big way, goatse still happened.

Also because I think it's ostentatious and rude unless you're on twitter.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - they make it impossible to see where you're going, and mean everything is going through a third party. Not good.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

If you're on my flist, it definitely doesn't mean I read you every day - as it happens, I do read you almost every day, but you couldn't know that either from the fact you're on my list, nor from the fact that I comment every now and then.

I don't mind the checking at all, for what it's worth. If that's all it is, it seems awfully harsh to call it emotional blackmail, in fact - although I have seen forms of this (on facebook) that are. The thing that really annoys me is when these things start by saying they want to check who reads them, and then make demands of me like fairly involved comments and re-posting to my own status. That's just stupid. I would never hire anyone who has ever posted something in that form to do science for me.