Deleting your life

[whitetail]

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

Comments

[whitetail]

I don't do it anymore, but I used to purge accounts that hadn't updated in over two years, not out of pique, but mostly because I view a friends list as a subscription list of journals that I wish to read, and what's the point of subscribing to something that no longer publishes? The downside, of course, was that removing an account also removed that person's access to mine, which I didn't necessarily want to do, especially friends I know IRL. (Many of the latter I didn't delete precisely because of that, even though their LJs were dead dead dead.) That's one reason I like how DW splits the process in two: it allows one to decide which journals one wants to read, and to have a separate list which allows specific people access to what one writes.

Thing is, I think the vast majority people who have left LJ really do never return: not just not posting anymore, but not reading anymore, either. They're gone from the site for good. These tend to be those I mentioned who post on social media almost exclusively for attention's sake, and not because they are interested at all in what others write. (Note how many Twitter 'popufurs' list thousands of followers, yet they follow only a few dozen back.)

Myself, I simply cannot adapt my writing style to a micro-blogging format. Those times I tried to get active on Twitter, it was very often the case that it would take me longer to compose a 140 character tweet that expresses my thoughts than it did for me to write three paragraphs of free-form text. Some people really are great at tweeting, though. I, however, am not. So, I stay on LJ and DW, which fits my style of expression optimally.