Hacker News Reader

I've found that there are old messages of mine that Facebook will not let me delete. I took the manual approach of scrolling through my history and deleting every post I no longer wanted, and I found that some of my early posts produce an error when I try to delete them. I believe it has something to do with them being on a friend's wall, but I really am not sure. It's frustrating to not be able to remove my own content.

View on HN

It's definitely on purpose. They've done the same with "Likes". I've been trying to unlike all the dumb pages I liked when in high school ("When you flip your pillow to get to the cold side ;]", "Brock Obama", "texting late at night", "peeling plastic off of new electronics", etc...) and once I got my 2k likes down to about 300ish, they stopped showing me my likes when I look at my profile. It literally says "326 likes" on the tab itself but it's just not populated with anything. Every once in a while, a defunct page will post again and I'll have the opportunity to unlike "Tiger Blood", but the infrequency kills me.

Just wish I could firewall <22 year old roninb from >22 year old roninb.

I remember the "likes" counts always being incorrect. Specifically for categories of things such as how many movies, bands, TV series, etc I had liked. Back around 2010 I cleaned up my list of liked movies and experienced the same thing: the count displayed was not synchronized with the number of movies appearing on my page.

I wonder if this isn't something akin to the YouTube "subscribers" bug. Users could repeatedly subscribe then unsubscribe to a channel. Only the unsubscribe actions were counted, and the channel's subscription count could be driven down to 0. That bug was around for over a year before being addressed.

Wouldn't surprise me if there are bugs.

There are some weird issues with facebook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com