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TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)

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Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I thought part of Facebook's instant success was because, with the exception of wilfully-obtuse student columnists, most students instantly "got" it because they'd had some sort of internet profile and compulsively-updated statuses since their parents had finally succumbed to the avalanche of AOL CDs in 1997. Even the university, moving at such glacial pace it still ran a nineties Windows NT, was trying to g…

The original Facebook didn't have a status to update; that didn't come until around late 2007 or early 2008. There was no chat until that time as well, just "poke." In 2004 it still managed to be "social" for its time though, especially with its focus on a campus. For a very long time Facebook was just mostly static pages with a list of friends and a "wall" your friends could write on, and maybe, IIRC, photo upload.…

I wasn't on it in March 2004, but things like the Wall on individual profiles came very early and even other long-gone features like the metadata on favourite bands anticipated the like graph they ultimately ended up with. The thing I remember most about the mini feed was how much people complained when it was introduced...

Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)

#52
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pure HTML y'all. No megabytes of css, no bootstrap, no webpack with plethora of dependencies to load, parse and execute. We went the other route.

which is odd since a lot of css "frameworks" are now back to promoting inline css. https://acss.io/ I like this idea, but I wonder how long it would take my brain to think like this.

That is crazy. Why make it an entirely new syntax with an entirely new lexicon? Bgc () instead of background-colour?

I feel like new people keep entering the web field and forgetting all the lessons learned from the (very very recent) past.

The inline approach might work for a small site. But in that case, why use a pre-processor at all and why would you need config objects?

CSS doesn't need to be rocket science. If you want atomic CSS then leverage CSS and style the base elements, it's actually pretty good at what it does.

Edit: I may have misinterpreted it's use case, I am all for compenent based styles. I still think there is no need for a pre-processor of inline styles with a completely new lexicon. If you are already in the context of a component you already have the beauty of a scoped and simplified CSS workspace, why make that so much more complicated with a new build pipeline and completely new syntax and lexicon?

Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)

#53
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? According to WHO, measles caused 2.6 million deaths a year before 1980, but only 134 200 in 2015. Polio dropped from 350 000 cases in 1988 to 74 in 2015.

I think he was making a passing joke at the anti-vax crowd

Yeah, if people stops vaccinating their kids, then the numbers would obviously go up instead of down. It's pretty scary that a lot of people don't realize this.

Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)

#54
post #47
post #40

What was CS235? I graduated 2016 and I don't remember a course with that number ever being offered

CS 235: Applied Robot Design for Non-Robot-Designers: How to Fix, Modify, Design, and Build Circa 2012-2013

This is about a decade earlier, though.. would it have been the same?

Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)

#56

Jesus christ. It's so hard to believe that's only from 2004. I feel like that era transpired 40 years ago. The period of time before smartphones feels like it happened in the 1970's to me. The difference between 2000 and 2015 is so absurdly radical it begs disbelief.

Now that you put it that way, man... things have changed. I can't help thinking about further back, too. Just imagine how it felt to live around the turn of last century! Planes, [newer] trains, and automobiles! Electricity, plumbing, underground subway transportation. Hygienic medicine. Vaccines. Telegraphs reaching out overseas and powering thousands of morning daily papers; becoming a commodity instead of luxury.…

The really weird thing is how actual technology in movies from the 80's and 90's looks so much worse to people in 2017 than technology in moves from the 50's and 60's looked to people in the late 90's.

Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)

#57

Jesus christ. It's so hard to believe that's only from 2004. I feel like that era transpired 40 years ago. The period of time before smartphones feels like it happened in the 1970's to me. The difference between 2000 and 2015 is so absurdly radical it begs disbelief.

>The difference between 2000 and 2015 is so absurdly radical it begs disbelief. The first movie I watched on my GearVR headset was called Strange Days, a 1995 film rather aptly about the introduction of Virtual Reality and how the government is involved in all sorts of dirty cover-ups. The movie was terribawesome, but it was amusing to see what 90's ideas of the future were getting right and wrong. Though, the time b…

It is not terrible, but legitimately awesome.

Written by James Cameron and directed by his then-wife Kathryn Bigelow. It's such a great movie. And has a great track by Peter Gabriel at the end as well!

Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)

#58

Jesus christ. It's so hard to believe that's only from 2004. I feel like that era transpired 40 years ago. The period of time before smartphones feels like it happened in the 1970's to me. The difference between 2000 and 2015 is so absurdly radical it begs disbelief.

> It's so hard to believe that's only from 2004. It's surprising Holt could still get away with writing "Cornell girls are hideous" as late as 2004!

That was as far as I got into the article....

Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I thought part of Facebook's instant success was because, with the exception of wilfully-obtuse student columnists, most students instantly "got" it because they'd had some sort of internet profile and compulsively-updated statuses since their parents had finally succumbed to the avalanche of AOL CDs in 1997. Even the university, moving at such glacial pace it still ran a nineties Windows NT, was trying to g…

The original Facebook didn't have a status to update; that didn't come until around late 2007 or early 2008. There was no chat until that time as well, just "poke." In 2004 it still managed to be "social" for its time though, especially with its focus on a campus. For a very long time Facebook was just mostly static pages with a list of friends and a "wall" your friends could write on, and maybe, IIRC, photo upload.…

the wall was chat.

there was one screen where you could check on who's online, then you'd write on their wall

Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)

#60
post #11
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pure HTML y'all. No megabytes of css, no bootstrap, no webpack with plethora of dependencies to load, parse and execute. We went the other route.

Why the drive-by attacks on good tools? This kind of stuff is tiring and just adds to the noise. > No megabytes of css Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site, apart from for ads, which is the main problem with modern 'content sites'. > no bootstrap Bootstrap can be tiny, and a big win in productivity/quality, so 'no Bootstrap' likely cost the devs in its lack of availabilty at the time. It looks far…

> less usable on mobile

To be fair, there really wasn't any "mobile" to speak of back then, so the developers couldn't even try to make it look good on mobile.

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