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Comment by Gordonjcp | Hacker News Reader

> Is that shitty user-hostile behaviour from Meta? Absolutely yes — but not that shitty.

I think you're reading too much into it. "Shitty user-hostile behaviour" would be "Muahahahaha, if anyone ever wants to get rid of their Threads account they must also *delete their Instagram account*, hahahaha, the world is MINE! MINE, I TELL YOU!" <fx: thunder crash, up grams dramatic music>

Is that scenario more or less likely than "fuck it, just use the Insta signup server for auth, we need to ship something *today*" "yeah okay, that'll take me ten minutes"?

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I don't know. I think that users being able to harmlessly deactivate their Threads account but not delete their profile is evidence against that hypothesis. Surely the ability to delete something is one of the most basic features? All the more so if Threads just depends on Instagram for auth.

My bet is that the decision to not allow the user to delete only their Threads profile has been fully intentional. The last thing Meta wants is for the fleeting users who quickly jumped on the latest Threads fad to eventually delete their profile once they become bored. That would be embarrassing to Threads and reduce its sticking power if it were a common enough phenomenon. Much better for them to keep the users' content hostage under their desire to keep their Instagram account.

Its absolutely this and I am shocked at the amount of people coming to the defense of Meta here, like, its not users' jobs to figure that a new app is actually the old app but in a different skin, and merely saying "an Instagram app" wasn't clear enough in obviating it was the same social media account. That's on Meta, not on users.

Behavior can be user-hostile for non-malicious reasons.

They have enough highly paid engineers they should be able to write an entirely new authorization system in binary in ten minutes.

> have enough highly paid engineers

Throw enough highly paid engineers at it and it will take 10 months.

Yes because of all the red tape and scalability issues

Oh I could tell you a "throw enough engineers" at it story...

Have ten of them do it independently and then they rank everyone else’s work.

Also, note the word “should”.

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