Deleting your life
I have to admit, I haven't looked at my profile page in quite awhile, but I did just now, and I must say I was surprised and pretty disappointed to see how many familiar usernames showed up in strikethrough type: meaning of course that the account had been deleted and purged.
I can totally understand someone being fed up with LJ as a blogging platform and abandoning it, but why, oh why, would they think that deleting YEARS of journal entries is in any way a good idea? I mean, unless they have some sort of backup-like a local archive or a mirrored account on DW-they've just basically thrown a big chunk of their life history away, never to be recovered. Seems to me to be a pretty shortsighted and even stupid thing to do. Even if they never use LJ again, at least those hundreds, maybe even thousands of journal entries would still exist and could be referred to at some point in the future if desired.
In a lesser but related sense, deleting an account also means they can no longer read anyone else's friend-locked posts, and since I and most others I know here use privacy settings to some degree for our writings, someone deleting their account basically conveys to me a subtext that, "I don't give a shit about what other people write, I only care about me." Which I may or may not have already guessed about some of the people whose accounts were deleted, but I can't help but assume that about them now.
So really think twice before you press that 'delete' button. I mean, unless you're hiding something criminal, or you are so ashamed of what you are/were and what you did/wrote in the past that you feel you must eradicate your personal history once and for all, don't do it. Whatever short burst of satisfaction you may feel in the present for permanently cutting the cord with LJ may be superseded years later by truly gut-wrenching regret.
I can totally understand someone being fed up with LJ as a blogging platform and abandoning it, but why, oh why, would they think that deleting YEARS of journal entries is in any way a good idea? I mean, unless they have some sort of backup-like a local archive or a mirrored account on DW-they've just basically thrown a big chunk of their life history away, never to be recovered. Seems to me to be a pretty shortsighted and even stupid thing to do. Even if they never use LJ again, at least those hundreds, maybe even thousands of journal entries would still exist and could be referred to at some point in the future if desired.
In a lesser but related sense, deleting an account also means they can no longer read anyone else's friend-locked posts, and since I and most others I know here use privacy settings to some degree for our writings, someone deleting their account basically conveys to me a subtext that, "I don't give a shit about what other people write, I only care about me." Which I may or may not have already guessed about some of the people whose accounts were deleted, but I can't help but assume that about them now.
So really think twice before you press that 'delete' button. I mean, unless you're hiding something criminal, or you are so ashamed of what you are/were and what you did/wrote in the past that you feel you must eradicate your personal history once and for all, don't do it. Whatever short burst of satisfaction you may feel in the present for permanently cutting the cord with LJ may be superseded years later by truly gut-wrenching regret.