We basically come from opposite viewpoints -- I think most devs will do the right thing, you think most will do the wrong thing.
Honestly, you're probably right and I'm probably wrong, but I like to hope that I will always work in a place where I'm right. :)
(It was Netflix BTW, not reddit. For the most part reddit used strongly consistent databases (Postgres), but we did use some eventual consistency in the caching layer).
If you use it in the wrong places, then that almost certainly means increases complexity where you don't necessarily have to. Whether or not that results other positive behaviours seems a bit beside the point to me.
If you managed a team of rock climbers, you could say "I prefer it when my rock climbers don't use safety ropes. It improves their climbing, because if they make a mistake, they'll fall to their death". It could be 100% true, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't simply be picking the right tools for the job.
This comes down to culture. I wish I knew how to create a culture where devs do the right thing, from a culture where they ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Maybe you need the very clearly Netflix model of "Fire every ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
Outside of AWS, Google and Azure I see few cloud services that define their consistency models. And support always says: we are high availability and always consistent.
Same goes for distributed software, few projects define their consistency model, and even fewer honor it.
That despite the fact that I changed my address when I moved (says so in the TxDPS record, running on a "legacy" system), which got sent to the toll agency when I changed it. Of course somewhere in there the toll agency lost this information and never bothered to check the TxDPS record until I pointed out they were repeatedly sending notices to the wrong address.
The point being that, this is only one of many problems they have had with their newfangled toll system because sometimes "eventually consistent" actually means "we threw the update away because a newer one came in, so we lost a critical piece of information.". Critical pieces of information like, people actually paying their tolls for example.
http://www.texasturf.org/2012-06-01-03-09-30/latest-news/484... http://story.kxan.com/txtag-troubles/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/78wp9y/txtag_paymen...