Comment by TeMPOraL
3 years ago
This is something I just can't feel. Maybe it's because I grew up with digital communications that did not have this "feature".
In more general sense, the way I see it, a message does not belong to the sender - the ownership is shared between the communicating parties, and neither one should get to unilaterally delete it for the other, much like when you send me a physical letter, I can't prevent you from making a copy of it prior to sending, but you also can't "unsend" it by taking it out of my mailbox or cupboard.
In more general sense still, I don't like things that can screw with people's sense of reality. At the very least, I hope "unsending" messages leaves a clear sign behind, because removing a message from someone's mailbox without leaving a trace is a stellar way to facilitate intentional or accidental gaslighting.
But I'm rambling again. The main thing that needs to be said:
> knowing that you can delete these messages if your relationship with them starts to deteriorate and they likely wouldn't have access to them
This is just a really bad case of a false sense of security. The other person can always make a screenshot. And if you're known to be a person that unsends their messages, or if this becomes a more common practice in general, then the other party will likely start making screenshots the moment they realize your relationship starts to deteriorate.
The messages still exist. For more serious cases, they can be dredged up from the backups by a court order, so you don't really get to unsend something and pretend it never happened.
> This is just a really bad case of a false sense of security. The other person can always make a screenshot.
Indeed, that's why I'm talking about people who you currently trust, and may not trust in the future. I will agree with you in part that there are situations even with currently trusted parties regarding certain information that it would be preferable that communication is permanent. There are modalities in communication where deletion is a feature and modalities where it isn't.
edit: The situations I'm thinking of where such communication is preferable are less like "divorce-worthy" stuff, and more like "I'm not vibing with person A well rn, I don't like that they like <trivial thing a> and <trivial thing b>", which is relatively low-stakes, but essential to friendship.
edit: here's a context I encountered yesterday; a friend (call them A) realized that some new people joined a Discord server that used to be close friends, and so A deleted their selfie pics. The reasoning (which happens intuitively and emotionally) is that if these people were slightly creepy, then they wouldn't be able to opportunistically abuse A's selfies if/when they started paying attention to A. If these people were massively and actively creepy there would be other avenues to handle that.
> There are modalities in communication where deletion is a feature and modalities where it isn't.
Fair. I think a good argument against my current position is the one made by the Black Mirror episode "The Entire History of You"[0]. In fact, I see at least two different strong points made by that episode:
- Everyone having an easily-accessible, high-fidelity, shareable record of the mundane things they saw, heard or said, stretching back years or decades, is something we might not handle well on an interpersonal level. Our cultures, habits and rules of behavior - hell, even default emotional programming - are all built on an implicit assumption that memories are ephemeral, internal, and not indexable. So e.g. any "he said, she said" argument suddenly becomes something else entirely, when either side can pull up a recording of what happened.
- Having such recordings creates a risk of someone wanting to force you to reveal them.
Thinking about that, I concede that having some conversations be ephemeral may be desirable, at least for as long as humans remain so immature that past behavior can be used as a weapon in future arguments.
EDIT to respond to your edits:
> "I'm not vibing with person A well rn, I don't like that they like <trivial thing a> and <trivial thing b>", which is relatively low-stakes, but essential to friendship.
Could you elaborate? I can't see how the ability to unsend messages would be helpful here. If anything, it feel like showing person A the door or giving them a slap in the face - a clear signal the relationship just dropped a few notches.
This reminds me of a case when I realized a certain person unfriended me on Facebook. I wasn't very close personally to that person, but we've spent years building a real-life community together, and we were (or I thought) at the very least good colleagues. I casually mentioned the Facebook thing to that person the next time I bumped into them, and they explained it away as "you know, I'm curating my Facebook friend list, every now and then I unfriend people I haven't talked to in a while; it's nothing personal". Well, it felt quite personal to me, and that explanation made me want to keep the relationship going even less.
> friend (call them A) realized that some new people joined a Discord server that used to be close friends, and so A deleted their selfie pics
Hm. That's a slightly different case though. The problem here is that the selfies weren't sent to people who joined afterwards; them having access to it is a decision made automatically by Discord. If the server was considered closer to a private conversation space, and not a public gallery, then I find it perfectly reasonable that person A wanted to remove those messages - they were trying to retroactively exercise control over who gets the message, something they should've been able to do before the fact.
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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You