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Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

omarkassim.com

11–20 of 45 posts

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#12
post #7
post #2

>Why oh why have you guys built and application that I can’t leave easily? I feel your pain, but isn't it obvious though? Increase the pain of leaving and you increase the likelihood of staying. Annoying, but effective.

I'd imagine there's a more innocent reason: deleting things is HARD in systems designed to scale. There are likely to be denormalisations, multiple redundant copies, separate search indexes, caches... bulk deleting an account actually ends up involving a fairly large amount of code.

> deleting things is HARD in systems designed to scale.

That's an excuse, not a reason.

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#13
If your new solution ends up making you unhappy you're probably much more likely to switch back if you can just resubscribe and have all your old data back.

If you trusted them with your data while you were using it they probably weren't expecting you to not trust them anymore once you left. Even as you delete every user by hand surely all that data is backed up somewhere?

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#14
post #7
post #2

>Why oh why have you guys built and application that I can’t leave easily? I feel your pain, but isn't it obvious though? Increase the pain of leaving and you increase the likelihood of staying. Annoying, but effective.

I'd imagine there's a more innocent reason: deleting things is HARD in systems designed to scale. There are likely to be denormalisations, multiple redundant copies, separate search indexes, caches... bulk deleting an account actually ends up involving a fairly large amount of code.

Which is why "at scale" you design systems that let you mark records as deleted (without actually deleting them).

You then need to choose how you explain that to users (preferably before they sign up and start entering sensitive data) as well as the normal problems of deciding the policy about having backups of "deleted" data (if you don't actually delete it - either from the live data set or from archived backups - a court could require you to hand it over).

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#15
post #7
post #2

>Why oh why have you guys built and application that I can’t leave easily? I feel your pain, but isn't it obvious though? Increase the pain of leaving and you increase the likelihood of staying. Annoying, but effective.

I'd imagine there's a more innocent reason: deleting things is HARD in systems designed to scale. There are likely to be denormalisations, multiple redundant copies, separate search indexes, caches... bulk deleting an account actually ends up involving a fairly large amount of code.

case in point: i was working for twitter support when Miley Cyrus deleted her account. it took down all of twitter for the better part of a day while the system was trying to invalidate/delete millions and millions of records... that was not fun.

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#16
I had this EXACT same issue with Yammer about 8 months ago. The experience of canceling my account made me want to bolt off their system and killed any hesitation I had. I checked out Presently (http://present.ly) the next day and after a week of using it, it erased all of our data randomly. No go. Not a great first impression. The following week we discovered Socialcast. And we've been VERY happy with Socialcast (http://www.socialcast.com) since that time.

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#17
post #13

If your new solution ends up making you unhappy you're probably much more likely to switch back if you can just resubscribe and have all your old data back. If you trusted them with your data while you were using it they probably weren't expecting you to not trust them anymore once you left. Even as you delete every user by hand surely all that data is backed up somewhere?

I signed up for Yammer with the re-assurance that I would be in control of my company's data. And that the service could be cancelled at any time. Having to make TWO phone calls to cancel my account for a web-based system is absolutely inexcusable, unless it's 1995. The experience took me from mildly unsatisfied to livid in record time. I ran, not walked, away from Yammer after that.

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#18
post #8

I fail to see why people want to delete their accounts when they decide not to use a service any more. Why not simply stop logging in? With Yammer it at least makes a little sense because there's possibly sensitive business data on there. But I built and ran a moderately successful Facebook app and people bugged us about it constantly until we built the feature, but the motivations behind wanting to delete an account…

I think the whole delete your account and in this case your network was motivated by having a tremendous amount of private company information on there. Some of it was harmless, but if given the choice it would be better that it were removed from the servers of what is a third party at the end of the day.

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#19
post #2

>Why oh why have you guys built and application that I can’t leave easily? I feel your pain, but isn't it obvious though? Increase the pain of leaving and you increase the likelihood of staying. Annoying, but effective.

I would give a free non-commercial (or in better words, a non corporate) service this leeway - as a user I haven't paid for it.

But as a paid service - where you've been a paying customer for many months - and a service that is targeted towards corporate customers this should just be a given.

The run around about user data belonging to users and so on is just ridiculous. Yammer helped us to create a corporate network, where the data belongs to the company - so when we want to leave it should be as easy as signing up - hit delete and you're done.

It doesn't matter if their systems retain the data for a few weeks and batch delete it later.

I'm sure that if a larger customer expressed this, they would bend over backwards to accomodate. Just feels like they're screwing the little guy.

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#20
post #8

I fail to see why people want to delete their accounts when they decide not to use a service any more. Why not simply stop logging in? With Yammer it at least makes a little sense because there's possibly sensitive business data on there. But I built and ran a moderately successful Facebook app and people bugged us about it constantly until we built the feature, but the motivations behind wanting to delete an account…

I think the whole delete your account and in this case your network was motivated by having a tremendous amount of private company information on there. Some of it was harmless, but if given the choice it would be better that it were removed from the servers of what is a third party at the end of the day.

You are 100% correct - that was the exact situation with us. If we're leaving a service, and we were told we were in control of that data, any remotely diligent security process would involve exporting all data on the service in a secure manner, then removing the data from the control of the third party provider.
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