Not standing up for FB's other practices, but from a technical stand point there are several reasons, none of which are about not having respect.

- disk space is cheap - deletes are expensive (time) and slow - deletes are harder to scale - can't revert a real delete - delete's don't fit into an event sourcing architecture - append only data is better, more durable

I could go on.

Placing technical convenience above user wishes is absolutely a lack of respect for those wishes. All of your reasons essentially come down to "it's not worth the effort".

Not at all. All my reasons were technical in that events are part of a stream, and delete is just one more event. When you reconstruct the stream, the end product is the item is deleted. But you could recreate the item from the stream so technically not deleted.

Companies that take daily backups. Say a user asked to delete something, do they now go through and comb through their backups (which might even be offsite or in cold storage) and delete it? It's essentially the same thing.

Choosing to adopt a technology that makes deletions impossible absolutely shows a lack of respect for user decisions. Not building in the ability to deep delete from backups is the same. There is no technical restriction on deleting data, just company decisions that make it difficult.

Isn't every business that has backups in the same boat? Event sourcing is just like having continuous backup.

So you're saying that every company that has a backup system, and who don't regularly go through the backups and remove individual files from the backups because users requested it is a lack of respect? So companies that have offsite backups should, according to you, have policies in place where user data is also removed from offsite backups?

I assume that there might be technical reasons to do it that way.

For example: a soft delete may be just a stronger version of public vs private settings. The whole software infrastructure still assumes a link exists and doesn’t need to cover cases where it really isn’t there. I could see how that makes maintaining indexes etc easier.

Flipping a flag and then filtering out results down the line based on the delete setting is probably much easier than actively removing them from an index.

And if deleting is rare (it probably is), then the performance and resource impact should be minimal.

> unless you have absolutely no respect for your users wishes?

Hehe, you mean, like... Facebook? They respect advertisers with money, not users.