Friends List Cleaning Policy

[eredien]

So, I've done a little (very light) housekeeping:

- Set standard friends-page colors, so new people are no longer appearing in black and white.
- Deleted some people from my friends list. Mostly people who no longer keep that journal and have migrated to another.
- Added a few people.

If you've not been added in this most recent round, or have been deleted, it doesn't mean that I don't read your journal, and it doesn't mean that I don't care about you as a person. It means:

1. I might not know you even though I like what you write. Or you're a person I've only met three times for a span of two hours each, or you're someone who I know is neat but I we just haven't gotten to know each other better yet because of small things like, oh, say, an ocean or a continent or a ten-hour time difference. If you think you fall into this category, please take this as a cue to introduce yourself. Or, if I know you a bit, drop me an email (I'm becoming pretty scarce on IM these days, and if you are overseas we most likely won't be on at the same time anyway) and strike up a conversation: "Know me better, man!"
2. I might like you a lot, but your lack of grammar and punctuation and the cornucopia of internet acronyms that attempt to pass as an entry make what would otherwise be an interesting journal into something unendurable, impossible to read.
3. I might like you a lot, but I can get the kind of information you share on your journal through other channels--ongoing email conversations, mailing lists, etcetera, such that your journal doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know.
4. I might like you a lot, but it's a matter of Surgeon's Law: "90% of everything is crap." The other 10% of what you write on your journal is almost always brilliant; but I only have about five free hours per day and I am trying to spend only about 1 doing internet-related things. I want to spend my hour reading about people I care about and what they think is interesting and important. And if your journal is usually "here's another link about how the president is destroying our nation's free speech laws," or "I waxed my car today," or "This quiz says I'm a friendly and flirty bowl of cottage cheese!" I'm not going to stretch that hour into two sorting through the crap for the really good stuff--even if I agree with you about the laws, think that car maintainence is important, or am amazed at how a particular foodstuff perfectly conveys every aspect of your personality.
5. It's a character journal. I don't really read character journals unless I am actually participating in the writing of said game/world at the time. I've little enough time for actual people's journals.

Regarding the Friending of Communities:
I check all of my communities on a weekly basis so that I can follow conversations as threads rather than discrete chunks of threads taken slightly out-of-context and plopped on my friends page individually--chunks which I might then miss. I don't have all of them on my friends list, but the only one I don't read is paidmembers.

Please note that I do occasionally read the journal of everyone who has listed me as a friend. If you've improved your writing so that I can read your posts, or have managed to make your car-waxing, toast-eating life into something utterly beautiful or hilarious, or have got rid of most of the curds and whey and are actually posting about you, I will most likely add you.

Comments

[kaypendragon.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I'd be scared if my bowl of cottage cheese was friendly and/or flirty.
~Laurel