File systems eventually overwrite that data, though. FB's system specifically never reclaims it. Why on earth would you ever do that, unless you have absolutely no respect for your users wishes?
Not standing up for FB's other practices, but from a technical stand point there are several reasons, none of which are about not having respect.
- disk space is cheap
- deletes are expensive (time) and slow
- deletes are harder to scale
- can't revert a real delete
- delete's don't fit into an event sourcing architecture
- append only data is better, more durable
Placing technical convenience above user wishes is absolutely a lack of respect for those wishes. All of your reasons essentially come down to "it's not worth the effort".
I assume that there might be technical reasons to do it that way.
For example: a soft delete may be just a stronger version of public vs private settings. The whole software infrastructure still assumes a link exists and doesn’t need to cover cases where it really isn’t there. I could see how that makes maintaining indexes etc easier.
Flipping a flag and then filtering out results down the line based on the delete setting is probably much easier than actively removing them from an index.
And if deleting is rare (it probably is), then the performance and resource impact should be minimal.
Banning accounts using this add-on (breach of ToS) would be a formality for facebook, if this was to become an issue in the first place. (unlikely that a sufficient number of people will bother doing this)
File systems eventually overwrite that data, though. FB's system specifically never reclaims it. Why on earth would you ever do that, unless you have absolutely no respect for your users wishes?
Not standing up for FB's other practices, but from a technical stand point there are several reasons, none of which are about not having respect.
- disk space is cheap - deletes are expensive (time) and slow - deletes are harder to scale - can't revert a real delete - delete's don't fit into an event sourcing architecture - append only data is better, more durable
I could go on.
Placing technical convenience above user wishes is absolutely a lack of respect for those wishes. All of your reasons essentially come down to "it's not worth the effort".
3 replies →
I assume that there might be technical reasons to do it that way.
For example: a soft delete may be just a stronger version of public vs private settings. The whole software infrastructure still assumes a link exists and doesn’t need to cover cases where it really isn’t there. I could see how that makes maintaining indexes etc easier.
Flipping a flag and then filtering out results down the line based on the delete setting is probably much easier than actively removing them from an index.
And if deleting is rare (it probably is), then the performance and resource impact should be minimal.
> unless you have absolutely no respect for your users wishes?
Hehe, you mean, like... Facebook? They respect advertisers with money, not users.
What video would you upload? Just nonsense? Is this to become the modern equivalent of a "black fax"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_fax
A browser addin to help with this helping might help make the world a better place.
Banning accounts using this add-on (breach of ToS) would be a formality for facebook, if this was to become an issue in the first place. (unlikely that a sufficient number of people will bother doing this)
So, it's ok if people die for their growth, but not use a browser extension
At this time, what's the loss in being banned?