It&#x27;s no mystery that the kinds of systems with massive reach--Google search, Facebook, Twitter--are really <i>not</i> data-consistency-critical applications.<p>Who&#x27;ll ever know if a search result isn&#x27;t perfectly up to date or perfectly accurate?<p>Who&#x27;ll ever know if you missed a Facebook feed entry because it &quot;wasn&#x27;t relevant&quot; or simply wasn&#x27;t seen due to DB vagaries?<p>And who&#x27;ll ever know about a few tweets going astray here or there?<p>In all cases, they&#x27;re all likely &quot;eventually consistent&quot; (or close to it), but it&#x27;s no accident that it doesn&#x27;t ultimately matter in those massive scale examples.<p>And maybe that&#x27;s the secret to massive scale--it can&#x27;t ultimately matter.