Private. No. Not really.

[gerbie]

I encounter more and more LJ's that are completely 'friends only' . It is a shame that it is necessary. It defeats the purpose in my opinion. How can you decide wether or not someone could be an LJ-friend, if you can't even get to know them.

Which is as absurd as the "add me and I will add you back" rule plenty of people seem to use. I decide who is on my friends list based on my interest in a particular LJ, not because someone adds me. This does not automatically say something about wether I like the person or not.

Comments

[tbone.livejournal.com]

I've never understood that either. I used to have a thing in my userinfo that said "If you add me, I might or might not add you back. Give me a chance to get to know you first." I don't know if it ever helped.

By the way, you might be interested in the community blog_sociology. It's full of things like that.

Re:

[gerbie.livejournal.com]

Thanx for pointing that community out for me.

[lorelei-aisling.livejournal.com]

I pretty much had no choice other than to make my LJ friends only because of a psycho exboyfriend from hell.

Re:

[gerbie.livejournal.com]

Which is a shame, what world do we live in?

Re:

[lorelei-aisling.livejournal.com]

He is very toxic and even though he can't comment becuase I banned him, he'll send his fucking friends in to befriend me. So now I will not even consider adding somebody on my friends list that comes from Buffalo New York. I did that with this one guy and he just totally attacked me and acted like a complete and total fuckwad.

Maybe I should go back to my "I refuse to date anybody with an American citizinship" mode.

Re:

[gerbie.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there are plenty of decent Americans. Probably even more than in most other countries. Now, percentagewise it might be bad, but in between all those millions, there might be a few good ones. Not all of them were born and bred there, are they?

personally

[harryroberts.livejournal.com]

Personally i use my journal as 99% friends only because i was stupid enough to update from work and a few of my work colleagues took an interest in my journal especially a few posts i made about a girl called Janice since they all knew her and wanted to know exactly i was writing about her. It could have got messy so i just decided on friends only, i agree with the "add me and i'll add you back" statement though i mean i've had 30 journals on my friends list for a while that i had no real interest in and only added them because they added me, they have since been removed though.

Re: personally

[gerbie.livejournal.com]

I was just surprised that so many people find it necessary to use that option. I write some things friends-only, some even restricted to a few of my friends, but if you ca't just write what's on your mind for the risk of others reading it, you might as well not bother with any of these blog-type sites.

comfortable

[harryroberts.livejournal.com]

I just let people read what i'm comfortable sharing, there is one person that still doesn't get the message that i don't want them reading on my life so for that reason alone friends only is essential for me.

The filter option is good to use because there are people i would nother not share everything with. I have a couple filters set up which get used when i need opinions from a few people.

Re: comfortable

[gerbie.livejournal.com]

I noticed that filters can be very useful in some situations.