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Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

Those who are planning to delete all Facebook activity(posts) instead of deleting FB account itself, please note that FB seems to be hiding posts at random in the activity log when it detects unusual deleting spree and pops it up on a later date at a random interval.

I still find some 10 year old cringe post being the only post in my timeline occasionally, something which should have been deleted several years ago when I deleted all activity from my FB account. This has happened about 3-4 times now, it's no fun when the only post on your timeline is a 'liked' photo of a girl from your school whom you don't even remember now.

This dark pattern has been corroborated by others using an automated script[1], not that I'm agreeing to using any such script.

[1]https://github.com/weskerfoot/DeleteFB/issues/88

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That was my plan a while ago, just delete all my posts and undo everything I can.

Doing this manually is an unpleasant undertaking riddled from start to finish with dark patterns that can only be described as malicious and petty.

I did not use a tool and did not even have many posts or likes and I was still unable to remove everything after 3 (!) runs. And even then I had to ask others for help to confirm whether something was truly gone because what Facebook showed me and what it showed others differed. Because of those tactics employed by Facebook I'm still unsure whether I got everything...

God I wish I never created an account, I certainly do not miss its usage even a bit but it feels like such a stain on my digital life.

It took me on average about 3 hours a day for 1.5 weeks to manually use Facebook's "manage posts" bulk deletion tool and even then I didn't get everything deleted, as posts to my wall for my birthday were grouped up and in those groups I could only hide them, with ~1500 friends over 13 years, I opted to hide most of them. At least content I posted was gone.

I am glad to hear I am not the only one - these old posts would appear over a course of months sometimes. I used an automation tool to delete eveything and then I went and manually clicked through the Activity log and deleted everything I could. I did several of these rounds to clear everything.

I would still recommend checking frequently, my recent old post popped up a year after any such incident.

I deleted my FB account completely a month ago, so now I don't need to :-).

Great, that's indeed the best solution for this problem. I don't use any realtime communication platforms, so I'm still having FB for emergencies say for asking blood(have faced the need before) but I'm running out patience and having moral dilemma very so often.

Wonder if this is just an example of how their particular "distributed, eventually consistent" platform operates due to CAP tradeoffs?

This is more likely the case then some conspiracy against users.

Software bugs in practice are rarely caused by fundamental problems. Sloppiness, incompetence and, in this case, different priorities are much more likely. Removing data is not a priority for Facebook.

People like to invoke all those theorems from computer science. That gives them an air of being knowledgeable. But at the end of the day, it's much more common that the program malfunctions not because of the halting problem, but because the language it was written in doesn't do bounds-checking on arrays, someone made an off-by-one error, or someone copy-pasted some code and the objective of the system was data collection, not data deletion, so the task of reviewing and testing the code was deprioritized in favour of something more profitable.

But talking about how you struggle daily with the fundamental problems of the universe sounds so much cooler.

Did you mean to reply to the parent comment?

But also, going by your logic, whatever is going on here is because something was depirioritized in favour of profit. The issue with that though, is that improper deletion would be detrimental to metrics in my opinion, not positive.

I gave that benefit of doubt to FB but still doesn't explain why random posts turn up at random intervals. Even it was to with CAP, I'm convinced that there's some amount of dark pattern involved just from the fact that 'user is not allowed to perform intended action'.

I encountered this problem a number of times. I believe, in my case at least, that I noticed a pattern. I believe that facebook's activity log filters posts related to disabled accounts.

I think that when someone decides to re-enable their disabled account, your posts related to their account re-appear in your activity log. Therefore, one can never be sure if all activity is deleted, and one must iteratively return to the activity log every so often to delete re-appearing posts.

Hidden posts include my own posts as well, so what you stated could also add to the problem but doesn't seem to be the only factor.

Thinking about this from an implementation perspective, I don't see how it would help any metrics and there's probably better explanations for what's going on then a purposeful dark pattern.

That’s most likely a cache bug.

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