Comment by arthurcolle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arthurcolle | Hacker News Reader

This is insane. I looked into this because I have a work (my own work) iPad and then my primary user account across like 5 computers. Because they all have like 1-2TB of storage each, I havent found a consistent backup solution that makes sense in terms of price/convenience and I just manually backup like 1-50GB of "very important" existentially critically pieces of info.

It should be very easy to merge accounts. Even a naive implementation could just modify references from account_you_dont_care_about (A1) to account_you_want_to_be_primary (A2) and then delete A2.

Such a burden on the everyday consumer. Extremely, extremely frustrating. I understand why my parents and others in their generation feel confused by some nuances, because this is just a non-transparent, de-prioritized product goal that will never be improved. I hope we legislate this as part of the Right to Repair plan, it's adjacent.

> It should be very easy to merge accounts.

This can not be further from the truth. It is extremely difficult to do this. Anyone who says this is easy does not understand how difficult it is to do this across a modern distributed information system. Most services do not do this, because it is so exceedingly difficult, not because they don't want to.

If you can't serve your users properly, then your information system is fundamentally broken and your architecture is inept. If your system is so distributed that you can't properly change linkages across the same user's multiple accounts, your system is poorly engineered.

>It should be very easy to merge accounts. Even a naive implementation could just modify references from account_you_dont_care_about (A1) to account_you_want_to_be_primary (A2) and then delete A2.

Logic bugs are a hell of a thing.

They've had more than a decade to figure out their schemas and their distributed systems - a failure at this level is inexcusable, and is indicative of architectural laziness and potentially a lack of excellence.

I meant in OP's comment; it's not A2 they want to delete.

then delete A1, surely.

there's a lot of content on A1 that was bought and purchased over the last 15 years or so!

I think the real answer is legislation to let purchased digital content get moved arbitrarily between accounts. This would also create a second hand market, which there should be.

Surely our elected officials will deliver.

I just noticed what you were saying - yes lol, delete the account that you've migrated stuff off of.

Good catch, too many numbers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCud8H7z7vU

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