title: Optimize Reads or Insert
body: <p>Our company has a mongodb collection of millions merchants and billions of products. </p>
  
  <p>A merchant can choose to go hidden after which their products shouldn't be visible to the public.</p>
  
  <p>I am wondering the best way to implement this:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>I could update all the products of the user to have a hidden status.</li>
  <li>I could update the merchant to have a hidden status and read the status of the merchant for every product request to know if to show or not.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>What has been your experiences if you have encountered this dilemma or what would you suggest is the best engineering approach.</p>