Policy on friending
Some people read a lot into whether someone friends them on livejournal. In the interests of not having people feel bad, here's a vague description of what I do.
I friend people who:
That last bit is almost always only achievable by meeting me and talking at least once, because I find that a real conversation in person is worth months or years of livejournal posts (I have made at least two three exceptions). In order to feel like I know enough about someone to feel comfortable friending them, I look for some combination of these:
This is why you might have known me in person for years and never gotten friended back, despite the fact that I sometimes meet people at parties and then friend them after talking to them for an hour.
A good way to make me like you is to take an idea that I am toying with, and toy with it yourself in the same spirit with which I started. A few things will give you some automatic bonus points (e.g. association with CTY or The University of Chicago, or playing the french horn), but they will never be enough by themselves.
I might not get around to reading your journal often if you friend me, but I will look at it at least once in a rare while, depending on what is in it. Commenting in my journal is a great way to get my attention, and you absolutely have permission to do that if you have anything you want to say. It also encourages me to avoid friends-locking marginally private entries. Everyone also has permission to friend me, to link to public entries or comments I make, and to comment anonymously if they like (I do not log IPs and do not expect to in the future). If you go through the entire archive of my journal since 2001, or if you comment on those entries or answer old polls, I will be cool with it and feel flattered, not stalked. Some people are unbelievably high-strung about these things, so I thought maybe I should be explicit.
Commenting is especially helpful if I already know you in real life and would friend you back, except that I either don't know you just friended me, or can't figure out who you are! I also like it when people explain how they got to my journal. I have had people friend me and unfriend me without ever identifying themselves or telling me why they friended me -- presumably they were offended.
[1] Someone once said that anyone who thinks telepathy sounds like a good idea should be forced to read the livejournals of a thousand teenage girls.
I friend people who:
- I like.
- I want to at least occasionally read the journals of (if you post only memes and quizzes[1], I might not friend you back even if I love spending time with you in real life). I do, in fact, use filters for reading my friends page -- I have a handful of people who I friended but don't read often.
- I feel like I know something about.
That last bit is almost always only achievable by meeting me and talking at least once, because I find that a real conversation in person is worth months or years of livejournal posts (I have made at least two three exceptions). In order to feel like I know enough about someone to feel comfortable friending them, I look for some combination of these:
- Desires or hopes
- Demonstrations of how you connect to other people (e.g. showing that you genuinely like another person, and why)
- Creativity, on a large or small scale (anything from deliberate art to a clever little idea or choice of words)
- Demonstrations of how you think
This is why you might have known me in person for years and never gotten friended back, despite the fact that I sometimes meet people at parties and then friend them after talking to them for an hour.
A good way to make me like you is to take an idea that I am toying with, and toy with it yourself in the same spirit with which I started. A few things will give you some automatic bonus points (e.g. association with CTY or The University of Chicago, or playing the french horn), but they will never be enough by themselves.
I might not get around to reading your journal often if you friend me, but I will look at it at least once in a rare while, depending on what is in it. Commenting in my journal is a great way to get my attention, and you absolutely have permission to do that if you have anything you want to say. It also encourages me to avoid friends-locking marginally private entries. Everyone also has permission to friend me, to link to public entries or comments I make, and to comment anonymously if they like (I do not log IPs and do not expect to in the future). If you go through the entire archive of my journal since 2001, or if you comment on those entries or answer old polls, I will be cool with it and feel flattered, not stalked. Some people are unbelievably high-strung about these things, so I thought maybe I should be explicit.
Commenting is especially helpful if I already know you in real life and would friend you back, except that I either don't know you just friended me, or can't figure out who you are! I also like it when people explain how they got to my journal. I have had people friend me and unfriend me without ever identifying themselves or telling me why they friended me -- presumably they were offended.
[1] Someone once said that anyone who thinks telepathy sounds like a good idea should be forced to read the livejournals of a thousand teenage girls.