No, I know you're not talking about automatic sharing! But a lot of people feel like showing people an option to share links to their content on Facebook (or on other sites) is a privacy violation, period, whether they personally ever use the option or not. Or, since the pronoun antecedents in that sentence were a little iffy and that might be making my point less clear: let's take a hypothetical user Alice. Alice is one of those people who feels this way: Alice feels that if hypothetical user Bob looks at an entry in Alice's journal, Bob should absolutely not see a "share this entry to Facebook" widget on Alice's entry, because putting that share-to-Facebook widget in front of Bob would be us (Dreamwidth) encouraging Bob to give Alice's entry a wider audience than Alice intended for it to have. (Bob, meanwhile, might feel that anything Alice posts publicly is fair game to link publicly, and if Alice doesn't want random people reading Alice's entries, Alice should use the site's priv
acy controls. Alice and Bob, in this case, represent the two sides of this debate that I was talking about in my previous comment.)
So we can't just say "we'll put a share-to-Facebook widget on every entry and if people don't want to share their stuff on Facebook, they just won't use it" -- "put a share-to-Facebook widget on every entry" means every entry, even if Bob is looking at an entry of Alice's, and that makes Alice upset because she feels like we're encouraging people to spread her entries beyond where she wants them to appear. So we have to think through all the possibilities really carefully before we implement something like this.
(Also, when I said "we're a very small company" I didn't mean "we don't have as many users as LJ"! I mean "Dreamwidth Studios LLC, the company that runs dreamwidth.org, doesn't have many people working for it, so we're really limited in how much we can do at any one time". It's great to see more people joining the site, absolutely, but that doesn't mean we'll be able to do development more quickly -- we're limited by factors like time and stuff. Since sharing to Facebook isn't a very frequently requested feature, figuring out the best way to implement it without violating people's expectations isn't going to be as high on the priority list as other things that are requested more often.)
Re: Facebook
No, I know you're not talking about automatic sharing! But a lot of people feel like showing people an option to share links to their content on Facebook (or on other sites) is a privacy violation, period, whether they personally ever use the option or not. Or, since the pronoun antecedents in that sentence were a little iffy and that might be making my point less clear: let's take a hypothetical user Alice. Alice is one of those people who feels this way: Alice feels that if hypothetical user Bob looks at an entry in Alice's journal, Bob should absolutely not see a "share this entry to Facebook" widget on Alice's entry, because putting that share-to-Facebook widget in front of Bob would be us (Dreamwidth) encouraging Bob to give Alice's entry a wider audience than Alice intended for it to have. (Bob, meanwhile, might feel that anything Alice posts publicly is fair game to link publicly, and if Alice doesn't want random people reading Alice's entries, Alice should use the site's priv acy controls. Alice and Bob, in this case, represent the two sides of this debate that I was talking about in my previous comment.)
So we can't just say "we'll put a share-to-Facebook widget on every entry and if people don't want to share their stuff on Facebook, they just won't use it" -- "put a share-to-Facebook widget on every entry" means every entry, even if Bob is looking at an entry of Alice's, and that makes Alice upset because she feels like we're encouraging people to spread her entries beyond where she wants them to appear. So we have to think through all the possibilities really carefully before we implement something like this.
(Also, when I said "we're a very small company" I didn't mean "we don't have as many users as LJ"! I mean "Dreamwidth Studios LLC, the company that runs dreamwidth.org, doesn't have many people working for it, so we're really limited in how much we can do at any one time". It's great to see more people joining the site, absolutely, but that doesn't mean we'll be able to do development more quickly -- we're limited by factors like time and stuff. Since sharing to Facebook isn't a very frequently requested feature, figuring out the best way to implement it without violating people's expectations isn't going to be as high on the priority list as other things that are requested more often.)