More on walled gardens

My previous entry on walled gardens appears to have created quite a bit of

interest. So far I've seen two phlog entries written in response and have

received two or three emails. Thanks to everybody who shared their thoughts and

sorry it's taken me so long to continue the conversation.

First of all, I just wanted to clarify that in no way was I proposing any kind

of overall moral equivalence between SDF and Facebook. The scope of the entry

was supposed to be entirely limited to the "walled garden" aspect of SDF. Even

if we were to take it as a given that being a walled garden is fundamentally and

invariably evil, this is of course just one of many dimensions on which the

morality of on online service can be judged. Facebook do plenty of other evil

things which I am supremely confident SDF does not do (such as closely

tracking the online activity of people who are not even users of Facebook), so

there is no question in my mind as to which is the more respectable and

trustworthy system.

Jandal responded to my post remarkably quickly with one of his own, which I

highly recommend you read if you haven't already:

gopher://grex.org/0/%7ejandal/phlog/communication-expectation-violations

Jandal's entry actually has applicability well beyond the discussion I started

and I would say it presents a very solid conceptual framework for thinking about

internet communication systems in general. The entry taxonomises communications

as being public, aimed at an in-group or private (and SDF presents services

facilitating all three kinds of comms) and argues that sevices become evil

whenever they violate some specific user expectations about how each kind of

communication works.

I think I essentially agree with everything Jandal has to say. Implicit in this

is that a walled garden (i.e. a system for communicating with an in group) which

does a good job of being a walled garden (i.e. restricts access to the intended

in group and maintains a relatively fixed definition of said in group) is a

perfectly respectable system.

I am having a strangely difficult time digesting this. When I ask myself "is it

reasonable to want to communicate exclusively with some in group?" the answer I

get immediately is "yes, of course, why is this question interesting?". But in

the original formulation of "Are walled gardens ever okay?" the situation seemed

far less clear. I suspect I have to some extent fallen victim to the fact that

the term "walled garden" is exclusively in a pejorative sense and so has become

a kind of thought terminating cliche - if something can be accurately described

as a walled garden, it is automatically bad. Slugmax is bang on the money when

he calls this "lazy thinking":

gopher://sdf.org/0/users/slugmax/phlog/walled_gardens

But "walled garden" would presumably not have become a slur amongst nerds if

there wasn't a history of walled gardens having other undesirable properties.

So the real matter of importance here is to identify those properties and

thereby distinguish harmful from harmless walled gardens.

Slugmax suggests that one important dimension on which walled gardens vary is

the amount of anonymity they afford their users, and notes, correctly, that SDF

performs exceptionally well in this regard. I agree with this entirely, but I

suspect it is just one of many factors important to the acceptability of walled

gardens.

Another might be the cost of becoming an in group member - cost in a general

sense, not just financial. The service might send you an email once a month

asking for a donation to keep things running. That's not so bad. Or, as a

result of signing up, you might have every single thing you do online closely

scrutinised and sold to third parties. That's awful.

However, both of these issues are nothing unique to walled gardens. A

communication system designed to facilitate purely public communication may not

permit anonymous sign ups or may engage in tracking, intrusive advertising or

all sorts of other unpleasant things.

At this point, I am starting to consider the possibility that while there is no

logical connection between being a walled garden and featuring various other

undesirable properties, there has historically often been a strong correlation

between the two. Restricting access to content to an in group is a more

difficult problem that permitting public publication, and solving the problem

may often lead implementers to solutions which tend to make it easier to

implement other unpleasant features as well. I'm not really convinced that this

is the core of the issue(s), though...