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.

[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.

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.