Then clients and relays SHOULD act as if the referenced event is deleted. This is different than MUST, probably because there’s no way to guarantee it happens. It’s also possible the delete event doesn’t make it to everywhere that received the initial event.
Social media sites are being siphoned up by various intelligence services, data brokers, quant trading firms. Everything you delete always has a window where it can be permanently recorded by someone. Even on HN. Anything you delete/edit isn't necessarily gone forever, even if it is no longer on the server you posted to.
It's a key reason why I don't attempt to delete social media posts. I've said a lot of stupid shit over the years, and whether I like it or not, that stupid shit is permanent; any attempt to take it down would only serve to make it more interesting and more worthy of preservation. Better to let that stupid shit linger unnoticeably - or even better, embrace that I'm (hopefully) a better person than I was $N years ago.
> It's a key reason why I don't attempt to delete social media posts. I've said a lot of stupid shit over the years...any attempt to take it down would only serve to make it more interesting and more worthy of preservation.
Only if someone cares enough about your social media to be watching for deletions, which I'd imagine is pretty rare. If no one's watching now, now is the right time to delete something.
> See also: the Streisand effect
I think it's important not to overstate that effect, as there are lots of scenarios where deletion will not draw more attention to something. For instance: you're a rando deleting something that's not interesting, not currently being observed, or something no one will notice when it's gone.
The trope namer got hit by it because 1) she's a celebrity, and 2) removal would result in a noticeable gap.
It would, if someone were looking in detail, but that isn't what the Streisand Effect is. That effect is the demand to stop/remove something that draws attention to it, not the actual removal (if it is indeed removed at all).
If the photo of her property had been quietly removed by the photographer I and most others would likely never know anything about it, much like you and most of the rest of the world wouldn't know I deleted a post on my blog that was so full of embarrassing typos that I couldn't be bothered to correct it. I know about it because of the heavy-handed demand that it be removed from that collection.
Right, but how do I know that nobody's watching? Indeed, the idea that nobody's watching seems far-fetched; even if that somebody is some Internet archival robot or NSA monitoring tool or advertising algorithm, it seems more likely than not that all but the most recent posts would draw more attention if deleted than if left alone, whether I'm a nobody or a celebrity or somewhere in between.
> Right, but how do I know that nobody's watching?
A better way to think about it is: do you have good reason to think someone is actively watching you or will go through the effort to collate your social media posts against some archive (that will be incomplete unless you're an active target)? If you don't, delete away.
If you're still concerned, delete some old stuff randomly to distract from the stuff you really want to delete.
> even if that somebody is some Internet archival robot
Those can't even scrape everything people actually want to keep, let alone comprehensively scrape every social media post from everyone. There are huge gaps.
I actually was peripherally involved in some volunteer efforts to archive a bunch of stuff around the Hong Kong protests and the Afghanistan withdrawal. IIRC, they didn't even try to scrape Facebook posts (because FB was doing so much to thwart scraping, and there may have even been problems with Twitter). There are well-developed tools for YouTube, through.
