All the little moments that make up your life. Some are lost, some flare up and leave an impression, and are filed away in your mind equally at the mercy of time. You forget about them. One day you pack your life into tiny boxes that never quite manage to hold it, and a piece of scribbles or a photograph falls to the ground and you're reminded-- or maybe you're on the streets and you hear a laugh or a flash of colour, and you (get the idea) turn-- into a little moment trapped in your fallible memory. It's yellowed a bit, tattered a tad, holed.
You can never quite relive it, never quite the same. You can never share it.
But every moment in here, every protracted love/hurt affair, every drawn out sigh, every drop of word and tear and blood, is waiting to be discovered anew, to be nudged and bumped, to be relived by the intrepid explorer of these emotionally-mined, literary landscapes. That's what makes it so special, that's why nobody ever moans about a thread being bumped.
So no, I don't agree with the pruning/archiving. But you guys will do what you have to do and unfortunately it's always for the greater good.