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Comment by varenc | Hacker News Reader

Really confused about what this story is about since I have no problem deleting years-old messages from Facebook messenger.

(Whether that really removes the bytes or flips a delete flag who can say)

Edit: as others have pointed out, this only deletes things locally for you which makes this a pretty deceptive feature... https://m.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/242107552657620

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If you delete those then the recipient can still see them (it just deletes them for you). Zuckerberg's messages (and the new "unsend" feature) delete the messages for everyone, which is different.

Wow thanks for clarifying. That is absolutely deceptive. The UI never mentions that, but I found some support docs that do. I imagine the majority of people deleting messages aren't aware of this...

I think it's a little funny but I wouldn't call it deceptive. If you delete your local copy of a text message, that doesn't remove it from the other person's phone. Same thing with messages on AIM and IRC. So un-sending seems to be the far less obvious feature.

Facebook owns the whole ecosystem, which makes it possible and expected for a deleted message to be deleted on all of Facebook.

Your SMS, IRC, etc. messages are stored locally. Your Facebook messages get loaded from Facebook.

Yes, that's true. I suppose for me, the deception starts at the very beginning from Messenger's UI, which makes it look like any other texting app which uses local storage.

I'm not aware of a messaging service that lets you delete the recipients copy of a message, so I'm fairly surprised about people's reaction to your comments. Am I just not aware?

Slack/Facebook comments/posts are all things I use that let me delete previously sent messages. This is possible because they control it all. (Of course, I'm relying on the other users' clients coming online and respecting the delete instructions)

and fair points about email... I had assumed this worked like other parts of Facebook, which doesn't seem unreasonable given they control the whole stack. (and they did shut down their old XMPP gateway awhile back)

WhatsApp lets you delete the recipients copy of a message

In what way is this deceptive? When you delete emails do you expect it to disappear from the other person's inbox as well?

Email is decentralized so that's obviously impossible to do. Facebook is not.

That only deletes it from your account. The person who received it still has their copy.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong: I believe that still leaves a copy of the message with the receiving party. That's the issue of contention here. The messages were also deleted for the receiver of Zuckerberg's messages.

Even if both parties delete it the message is probably not actually deleted, it's Facebook after all.

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