Friends lists

[hearthstone]

Old news, but I almost never check LJ's site news page; today, for some reason, I did. They are planning on changing the Friends system. Specifically,

One of our big goals for February is to split up the overloaded concept of "friends", turning it into separate categories relating to who you read on your friends page, who you trust to read your entries, who you know in real life, etc.

Isn't that kind of the same thing as filters? And I think (although I haven't used it so I'm not sure, have seen folks refer to it though) that you can also control who of your Friends list you actually see on your Friends page (some people don't include communities, for example). So I'm wondering if there is anything new here functionally, or is this just a different way to do the same things.

I can't imagine that I would do anything differently in any case--I figure that if I can read your journal, you can read mine :)--but I am curious to see what they come up with.

Comments

[bernmarx.livejournal.com]

I believe part of this conversation came out of a desire that many people have to suppress specific people from their "Friends Of" list. As it stands now, if racist_mofo friends you, you have two choices:

-- Hide your entire "Friends of" list
-- Show your entire "Friends of" list, showing everyone that racist_mofo considers you a friend (and seeing racist_mofo's name every time you looked at your own info and Edit Friends pages)

Some people wanted the ability to hide just racist_mofo.

I don't know if the other changes were already in the works and this accelerated their release, or if racist_mofo (not its real handle)'s trolling brought about the entire conversation (I imagine the former).

[bernmarx.livejournal.com]

(Edit: You see your Friends Of list whenever you look at your own info page, regardless.)

[hearthstone.livejournal.com]

Ah, that makes some sense then. It'll be interesting to see what ends up happening.

[hekatatia.livejournal.com]

I've been wondering if they'd really come up with anything different, too. I wasn't sure what they were suggesting. The previous comment makes sense but it seems they also have more in mind. I'm terribly curious.