Another 'Great' LiveJournal 'Improvement' (sigh)

WARNING: I think this will be a rant, so if you're not up for it, please don't read. (Believe me, as bad as I've felt today, I didn't plan to go here...)

This ENTRY is a HUGE disappointment to me. People who delete their LiveJournal accounts will now have the option to DELETE all their community entries (!!!) and comments (!!!) at the same time.

Frankly, I don't care if you DO delete your account (though I won't pretend I don't think it's a stupid thing to do, because I DO). But WHY should you get to delete chunks of MINE, where your comments have previously appeared???

And with communities, it takes away huge pieces of activity. For example, I help moderate communities where members post tutorials -- and where I've gone to the trouble to tag these and put them into the community memories for reference purposes. These are IMPORTANT parts of a given community, that can now simply DISAPPEAR. (Tutorials, advice, icons, help with layouts and CSS and on and on...)

The same thing is true for comments in such communities. (And I won't even start on the whole deletion of feedback via comments...)

I'm so upset and ANGRY about this!

Yes, I do get that people have always had the option to delete things -- but why make it this easy?

I have NEVER understood why people delete accounts anyway. Recently I was talking to a young relative about not deleting her Facebook account, trying (vainly, I admit) to REASON with her about it. She couldn't explain why in any logical way, and I couldn't get her to see why I feel it's so awful... (sigh)

Thankfully history managed to preserve many books that might easily have been totally destroyed. I won't pretend I'm not bothered by how easy it is to remove documents from the internet. I often wonder if anyone else thinks this way, or I'm the only one (especially when I see so many blogs being deleted)...

</rant>