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Comment by muststopmyths | Hacker News Reader

Call me crazy, but if I was running this service, I would delete all your past data if you reverted from a paid to a free plan.

Otherwise it's hard not to impute a malicious motive to suddenly making private data public.

Then just say If you don't want your content to be deleted, pay us (with a side of "entitled freeloaders can fuck right off")

Kinda what Flickr does now. Which I dislike (finally cancelled my Pro yesterday), but I respect that they can't keep providing the old service for free.

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>I would delete all your past data if you reverted from a paid to a free plan.

Then we'd be seeing posts about momentary subscription lapses (or glitches along those lines) resulting in tons of user data being irrevocably lost.

I think the safest option would be to force the user, when they unsubscribe, to select between "keep everything but on the public free plan" vs. "unsubscribe and then delete everything."

>Then we'd be seeing posts about momentary subscription lapses (or glitches along those lines) resulting in tons of user data being irrevocably lost.

Sure, and this is where, for example, the old Flickr policy was great. You could only see the 1000 newest pics, but all the rest of them were actually still there (and inaccessible to anyone), in case you decided to renew later.

But the way I see it, if you didn't stay on top of payments, my service wasn't important enough to you anyway. A grace period with notification seems perfectly reasonable to me before I delete all your data.

In my experience of working at startups, I disagree that they probably had a malicious motive when designing this feature. While I think they should allow you to delete the data, the genesis of this experience was probably (1) it took less work to build; and (2) no strong advocacy for user privacy on the product/engineering teams responsible.

As others have mentioned, I think "keep the content and make it read-only" would be the best possible experience, but I also understand (1) that would probably require even more work; and (2) sometimes you need to make business decisions to keep people from unsubscribing.

I think it’s just a strategy to take advantage of unique content to drive traffic to the site. I’ve seen this before.

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