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

[tiggerfox]

I try to keep things around like this. I may not use it as much as I use to but I still find it very useful for archiving things that happen in my life that I want to remember. I still enjoy browsing through the thoughts of my friends here.

I don't think there is really a good alternative either. I like twitter but it's real time, rarely does anyone travel very far back into anyone's timeline. Software limitations prevent you from even looking very far back if someone posts a lot. LJ is like that as well also, the friends page only lists a fixed number of posts. But at least I get a few weeks here where on twitter its a couple hours.

I think the future will bring better tools for interacting with others online and managing content. Privacy is still a big deal for a lot of people. It's important I think to maintain control over what we have online, there are many reasons to use third party sites as well.

I can think of a lot of reasons why people might delete content but I agree that it is sad to see things disappear. There are journals here of friends that have passed away, in some ways it's the last memory of them. I would be heart-broken to see them go away.

I also think these sites will be invaluable in the long term future for anthropological reasons. Imagine being able to browse through the thoughts of people from tens of thousands of years ago in the kind of detail we have available today.

[allaboutweather]

The great thing about LJ is being able to control who sees your posts. :)