written on Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Most software that exists today does not forget. Creating software that remembers is easy, but designing software that deliberately “forgets” is a bit more complex. By “forgetting,” I don't mean losing data because it wasn’t saved or losing it randomly due to bugs. I'm referring to making a deliberate design decision to discard data at a later time. This ability to forget can be an incredibly benefitial property for many applications. Most importantly software that forgets enables different user experiences.

I'm willing to bet that your cloud storage or SaaS applications likely serve as dumping grounds for outdated, forgotten files and artifacts. This doesn’t have to be the case.

Older computer software often aimed to replicate physical objects and experiences. This approach (skeuomorphism) was about making digital interfaces feel familiar to older physical objects. They resembled the appearance and behavior even though they didn't need to. Ironically though skeuomorphism despite focusing on look and feel, rarely considers some of the hidden affordances of the physical world. Critically, rarely does digial software feature degradation. Yes, the trash bin was created as an appoximation of this, but the bin seemingly did not make it farther than file or email management software. It also does not go far enough.

In the physical world, much of what we create has a natural tendency to decay and that is really useful information. A sticky note on a monitor gathers dust and fades. A notebook fills with notes and random scribbles, becomes worn, and eventually ends up in a cabinet to finally end its life discarded in a bin. We probably all clear out our desk every couple of months, tossing outdated items to keep the space manageable. When I do that, a key part of this is quickly judging how “old” some paper looks. But even without regular cleaning, things are naturally lost or discarded over time on my desk. Yet software rarely behaves this way. I think that’s a problem.

When data is kept indefinitely by default, it changes our relationship with that software. People sometimes may hesitate to create anything in shared spaces for fear of cluttering them, while others might indiscriminately litter them. In file-based systems, this may be manageable, but in shared SaaS applications, everything created (dashboards, notebooks, diagrams) lingers indefinitely and remains searchable and discoverable. This persistence seems advantageous but can quickly lead to more and more clutter.

Adding new data to software is easy. Scheduling it for automatic deletion is a bit harder. Simulating any kind of “visual decay” to hint at age or relevance is rarely seen in today's software though it wouldn't be all that hard to add. I'm not convinced that the work required to implement any of those things is why it does not exist, I think it's more likely that there is a belief that keeping stuff around forever is a benefit over the limitations of the real world.

The reality is that even though the entities we create are sticking around forever, the information contained within them ages badly. Of the 30 odd "test" dashboards that are in our Datadog installation, most of them don't show data any more. The same is true for hundreds of notebooks. We have a few thousand notebooks and quite a few of them at this point are anchored to data that is past the retention period or are referencing metrics that are gone.

In shared spaces with lots of users, few things are intended to last forever. I hope that it will become more popular for software to take age more intentional into account. For instance one can start fading out old documents that are rarely maintained or refreshed. I want software to hide old documents, dashboards etc. and that includes most critically not showing up in search. I don't want to accidentally navigate to old and unused dashboards in the mids of an incident.

Sorting by frequency of use is insufficient to me. Ideally software embraced an “ephemeral by default” approach. While there’s some risk of data loss, you can make the deletion purely virtual (at least for a while). Imagine dashboard software with built-in “garbage collection”: everything created starts with a short time-to-live (say, 30 days), after which it moves to a “to sort” folder. If it’s not actively sorted and saved within six months, it's moved to a trash and eventually deleted.

This idea extends far beyond dashboards! Wiki and innformation management software like Notion could benefit from decaying notes, as the information they hold often becomes outdated quickly. I routinely encounter more outdated pages than current ones. While outright deletion may not be the solution, irrelevant notes and documents showing up in searches add to the clutter and make finding useful information harder. “But I need my data sometimes years later” I hear you say. What about making it intentional? Archive them in year books. Make me intentionally “dig into the archives” if I really have to. There are many very intentional ways of dealing with this problem.

And even if software does not want to go down that path I would at least wish for scheduled deletion. I will forget to delete, and I'm lazy and given the tools available I rarely clean up. Yet many of the things I create I already know I really only need for a week or to. So give me a button I can press to schedule deletion. Then I don't have to remember to clean up after myself a few months later, but I can make that call already today when I create my thing.

This entry was tagged thoughts