The Great Purges

Some of you may notice that I just performed a major purge of my LJ friends. I hope I haven’t personally offended any of you, but I’ll explain myself anyway.

Basically, my friends page has gotten too big. Many of you are prolific posters, and I’m always drawn to Internet-based procrastination. The end result is that I spend a lot of time reading LJ :oP.

The criteria I used for the sweep were, in no particular order:

  • I don’t really know you. It’s hard enough to follow the LJ facet of people’s lives when you know them in reality. On top of that, it seems sort of, I don’t know, voyeuristic or something. Like I’m being let into your little circle for no reason.
  • You’re angsty. More specifically, your journal is angsty. I think this is basically revealing the different ways in which people use LiveJournal; I tend to focus on interesting things, and the day-to-day details of my life, rather than on my emotional state. Reading about other people’s angst online is both sort of weird and somewhat depressing. I don’t really like doing it, both from an invasion-of-privacy standpoint and an emotional standpoint, so I’m not going to anymore.
  • You write about slash. I haven’t gotten around to writing my big rant on slash, but most of you who I know personally probably also know my reasons. The point is, I avoid slash like the plague, and if you write about it a lot, I’m not going to be very interested in reading your LJ.

Obviously, these conditions are fairly arbitrary, and really, I made individual decisions for everyone I deleted. Not everyone of my friends whose LJ fits one of these categories was deleted, but everyone who I defriended did fit at least one.

So yeah, just changing my reading habits a bit. If being defriended bothers you, we probably need to talk in person.


Comments

16 responses to “The Great Purges”

  1. You know, you can group friends into lists, and view each list as a seperate friends page. Thus you can still have all those slash-writers friended, but never read their LJ unless you want to. This way, if they happen to want to, and you let them, they can still read your friends-locked entries.

  2. Indeed, I second and highly recommend this approach. Until LJ divides “friends” into “people whose journals I read” and “people who I want to read the non-public parts of my journal”, as separate categories, the current “friends groups” mechanism works reasonably well to accomplish that end (letting people read stuff even if you don’t read their journal; or reading the journals of people who you don’t want to give access to your non-public entries).

    If it’s not obvious how to do any of this, btw, just ask.

  3. You can also set up a friends group, name it “Default View” and move people in and out of it as you feel like reading their journals. As one might expect, it’s the default view for your friends page.

  4. I’m actually going to have to say that it bothers me that I’ve been unfriended, though I can’t really say why. I suppose it sort of feels like a rejection, especially considering that I do put a lot of emotional content in my journal.

    On the other hand, having read your reasons for unfriending, I’m not entirely comfortable with you reading my journal any more, anyway, so maybe it’s better. Given this, I’d removed you from my friends list, since I friends-lock anything emotional anyway.

  5. I would suggest unfriending what you don’t want to read, and never using friends lock.

    Anyway who gives a **** about who is a “friend” online is pathetic, and anyone who feels they need to use friends lock is writing something that should never be put in a digital format.

  6. … email is in a digital format, right? Don’t you ever send emails that you’d rather not be read by everyone who knows your address?

  7. I have used friends lock once, to hide my cell phone number after I got my new phone in January. I don’t intend to friends lock anything, because people in my family without accounts read this journal.

  8. Hence GPG encryption :o).

  9. The latter is a non-existent group for me, since I don’t do locked posts. In my case, friends means people whose journals I read.

  10. You know, I was going to write an annoyed reply to this comment, but it’s clearly not worth it. If you had put any thought into this at all, you might have realized that people tell different friends different things, and the electronic medium is just a different method of communication with people.

  11. Oh bah, anon. posts are screened. Boo.

    Anyway, you can delete that one Nick.

    Sam – In general, I don’t put sensative stuff in e-mails either. Except for diplomacy of course…

  12. Erm, so all those businesses who keep their financial records in computer databases are idiots too, right?

  13. Not to be angsty, but what is “slash”?

  14. That’s a little more dicey, since better security exists. But I once heard a friend who (at the time) sold hardware to the military quote a computer specialist as saying something along the lines of “If you turn a system off, unplug it, encase it in metal, sink it to the bottom of the sea, and guard it 24/7, I might say it was secure. Maybe.”

    Basically, enough wierd shit has gone down lately to turn me into a complete luddite. And yes, I do have credit card information online. But my credit limit is fairly low and at some point there’s a convience trade off.

    The point is never to put something online where you don’t benefit enough for it to be worth the risk. And mean livejournal posts are a pretty good example of that.

  15. I have to pretend it doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as slash fan-fiction. Nope. Not at all. Everytime I try to fight its existence, it just gets worse. Just google two of your favorite fictional characters, with the word slash, and then prepare to claw your eyes out.

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