Why Delete It?

I always get ter­ri­bly con­cerned when some­one deletes his jour­nal. It always caus­es some kind of dra­ma, too, from what I’ve seen.

I can cer­tain­ly under­stand the need to take a break from LJ, or the net in general. 

It’s very like­ly that you’ve said SOMETHING in the past that was mean­ing­ful enough to some­one out here that we put it in our mem­o­ries, or oth­er­wise want to refer to it again lat­er. I, per­son­al­ly, can only wish you’d just leave your words there. That’s a bit self­ish, though—and I know quite well that words on the web are ephemeral.

If you want to move all of your old entries so that they’re not pub­licly vis­i­ble, you can use a tool like Hide­Jour­nal. (I haven’t test­ed it.) There are oth­ers, too—take a gan­der at lj_nifty. If you make them all friends-only or use some cus­tom friends fil­ter with nobody on it, you’ll have accom­plished the same thing as delet­ing your jour­nal. With less dra­ma. And you’ll have more than 30 days to change your mind.