Maintaining A Facade

Description
The user is conscious about how other people see her, so she only post content that helps her keeping a special facade. This facade does not necessary correspond very well with how the user behaves in real life. The dynamic occurs because some users wants to control how other users view them. This is a social aspect that is present in both the virtual and real world.

Examples
The user may restrain herself from posting, because she might think other user might find her posts offensive. Moreover, the user may only post content on a certain subject, building a facade that the specific content is very important to the user, while in real life, she migh be more interested in other subjects.

Pros and Cons
Depending on the medium, this pattern can be both good and bad. For example, early social medias like LunarStorm and (insert international equivalent here), encouraged their users to use aliases instead of their real name, and thus already when picking a name, the users where building a facade for themselves. Dating sites like AshleyMadison, where the user is more or less anonymous, does little to hinder facade maintaining as it would ruin the meaning with the media.

Some social medias like G+ and flickr, try to solve the issue by introducing circles or groups that you can place your followers in. This way you can decide which group of users you want to be able to view what content.

To help a user control their facade it is need to give them total control over who can see the posts and comments that they do. Except from giving them this control it is also needed to clearly convey who will be able to see their content.

Relations
The mechanics of who is able to view a users posts is what can encourage a behavior like this. If it's unclear who will be able to view the posts from the user this behavior might become active.

The patterns is supported by Friend Surfing.

One might fear that one's facade might get ruined if one posts something unappropriate. This is realated to the pattern Fear Of Failing.

Showing Off can be seen as a subset of Maintaining A Facade when it is strictly positive and not over time.

This pattern might lead to the occurance of the Tamagotchi Syndrome.

Contributors
Created by Magnus Spånggård from the inspiration of Andreas Bjerkeholt. Revised by Christian Broniewicz.