Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mordisquitos | Hacker News Reader

Much as I despise Meta, I have to say that the article doesn't really say the same thing as the headline and it appears to be pure clickbait to me. Compare:

> Meta will nuke your Instagram account if you delete Threads profile

with

> Meta explains: “You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account.”

The title seems to imply that a user deleting their Threads profile may more-or-less inadvertently delete their Instagram account. This is not supported by the quote from Meta, and there is no indication that there's any procedure to initiate deletion of the Threads profile which would then trigger the Instagram deletion. An accurate headline would be, for example, «Meta will delete your Threads profile only if you nuke your Instagram account». Is that shitty user-hostile behaviour from Meta? Absolutely yes — but not that shitty.

View on HN

How the IG profile gets "nuked" is really a side point.

The relevant bit is the completely non-intuitive (and one could assume unnecessary) marriage of the two profiles.

If the point of the article is that the two profiles are linked in a way the author doesn't like, then the headline should just say that.

As written, it seems to be completely wrong.

threads has always been heavily advertised with its Instagram integration. the app is called "threads, an Instagram app" and the onboarding flow itself is based on your existing insta follows. you can disagree with this strategy but it's definitely not unintuitive or unnecessary, they make it extremely clear

When I read "Instagram app" I immediately think fine, so I could delete an ig app, right? Without deleting instagram?

There is no threads account. There is no way to make a threads account. You sign in with ig. Threads really appears to be a subset of barebones and stripped down ig. Calling it a marriage of accounts seems misleading, it’s really just another Instagram client with rebooted follow list, that only lets you see posts from the new client.

The article title is absolutely written in a misleading and inflammatory way to sort of imply, without outright lying, that someone might run into a screen that causes them to accidentally delete their Instagram account. (I get a different title in yc and tc, not sure if tc is showing multiple headlines to different people depending on factors.)

The “The discovery of this stipulation has surprised many users” line in the article is one of those staples of modern journalism where they take a couple tweets or threads now, and make them out to be prevailing sentiment. Cite your sources on who is surprised TechCrunch.

This is a nice explanation, thanks.

For the user though threads is a separate app.

And the login is a form of single sign on.

Since Threads is a separate app and logging in with Instagram was effectively a form of single sign on, it will be interesting to see how long this lasts.

It is unacceptable because it’s entirely intentional and avoidable, and in no way a best practice that benefits the users but instead the platform.

For the non technical - It’s interesting that a new profile can be generated from an Instagram account but all those fields are intentionally not being made to be removed.

> Is that shitty user-hostile behaviour from Meta? Absolutely yes — but not that shitty.

I think you're reading too much into it. "Shitty user-hostile behaviour" would be "Muahahahaha, if anyone ever wants to get rid of their Threads account they must also *delete their Instagram account*, hahahaha, the world is MINE! MINE, I TELL YOU!" <fx: thunder crash, up grams dramatic music>

Is that scenario more or less likely than "fuck it, just use the Insta signup server for auth, we need to ship something *today*" "yeah okay, that'll take me ten minutes"?

I don't know. I think that users being able to harmlessly deactivate their Threads account but not delete their profile is evidence against that hypothesis. Surely the ability to delete something is one of the most basic features? All the more so if Threads just depends on Instagram for auth.

My bet is that the decision to not allow the user to delete only their Threads profile has been fully intentional. The last thing Meta wants is for the fleeting users who quickly jumped on the latest Threads fad to eventually delete their profile once they become bored. That would be embarrassing to Threads and reduce its sticking power if it were a common enough phenomenon. Much better for them to keep the users' content hostage under their desire to keep their Instagram account.

Its absolutely this and I am shocked at the amount of people coming to the defense of Meta here, like, its not users' jobs to figure that a new app is actually the old app but in a different skin, and merely saying "an Instagram app" wasn't clear enough in obviating it was the same social media account. That's on Meta, not on users.

They have enough highly paid engineers they should be able to write an entirely new authorization system in binary in ten minutes.

> have enough highly paid engineers

Throw enough highly paid engineers at it and it will take 10 months.

Yes because of all the red tape and scalability issues

Oh I could tell you a "throw enough engineers" at it story...

Have ten of them do it independently and then they rank everyone else’s work.

Also, note the word “should”.

Behavior can be user-hostile for non-malicious reasons.

I don't see it

Meta will delete Threads profile only if you nuke your Instagram account

and

Meta will nuke your Instagram account if you delete Threads profile

mean exactly the same. In fact they are logically the same. It's like A iff B, means the same as B iff A.

The distinction is around intent. The parent's phrasing makes it seem as if its done for technical reasons (e.g. your threads profile and Instagram profile are actually the same thing) while the headline makes it seem like a business choice.

Obviously if there was a business choice that you should be able to do this the supposed technical obstacles could be worked around.

> you nuke your Instagram account

> Meta will nuke your Instagram account

> exactly the same

One says that if your intent is to delete your Threads profile the only way to do so is to delete your Instagram account. The second implies (unsupported) that there's a way to delete your Threads profile that a user might not understand will also delete your Instagram account.

Those aren't the same propositions (I'm not sure they even are propositions?) so there is no such logical relationship.

"Meta will nuke your account" and "you nuke your account" is different. It might not even be possible to perform one of these (nuking your thread profile).

Your Instagram account is deleted (the state not the action) iff your thread profile is deleted.

Your thread profile is deleted iff your Instagram is deleted.

Those are the propositions that are logically equivalent.

Read them back carefully - they're two different sides of a coin. One is talking about deleting your Threads account, the other is about deleting your Instagram account.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com