Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com • Hacker News Board

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#151

Post by dhimes » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

raphaelj wrote: post #19

Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow. Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago. It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers…

I don't know if I have the new stuff or not, but I agree that some parts are currently frustratingly slow to use on desktop. I figured it was because so many people are spending much more time on it (including, tbh, me). But I was trying to message with an old friend and simple gave up a few days ago.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#152

Post by duckfruit » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

jseliger wrote: post #116

raphaelj wrote: post #19

Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow. Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago. It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers…

Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago We'll see what the data show. I have been reading comments about Facebook's supposed decline for as long as I've been aware of Facebook and yet their published numbers continually show greater engagement. https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo...

The unquestioning supplication at the alter of 'engagement' (a sterile marketing term if there ever was one) is what lead to where we are now in the first place. This is an affliction that pervades the entire consumer internet sector, but the folks at facebook seem to have refined it to its fullest potential.

The other day I got a facebook notification on my phone, which said something along the lines of "You have 4 new messages". Of course, thinking it was from my friends I opened the app to look at them. 3 of my 4 "messages" were notifications for friend requests from people I had never met. The last one was a photo someone had posted of cake she'd baked (not to me specifically, just in her feed). To someone sitting at her desk at facebook, looking at an engagement metrics chart, the notification would seem to have served its purpose - another data point, another person enticed to open the app in response, engagement maximized. But of course, this was deception. I found this experience distasteful enough to disable notifications entirely - probably another data point for their metrics team - and annoyed enough to complain about in an HN comment.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#153

Post by dhimes » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

3PS wrote: post #122

I'm actually really surprised by the number of comments in this thread about how the new redesign is slower. I've had it since yesterday and it genuinely feels much faster and more responsive than the old Facebook UI - though, to be fair, that's not a huge accomplishment give that the old UI would take forever to finish painting or respond to input. I'd consider it a success, especially when compared to the disaster…

Are you using desktop of phone? I've found the desktop quite slow lately- I thought it was probably due to high usage.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#154

Post by cerved » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #6

pathartl wrote: post #3

Great write up. Glad to see they're making some changes as the current interface still feels like 2005 with the main feed at 500px wide. And as always, dark mode is welcome. I really hope this helps performance on the site. In the past year or so I've been noticing that when the page sits in an unfocused tab for a while, clicking back usually takes 20+ seconds to actually load and I'm stuck at a white screen. It actu…

> And as always, dark mode is welcome. I don't get this infatuation with dark mode, beyond it looking cool. People claim it helps with eye strain, but a brighter background constricts your pupils, improving focus.

OLED

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#155

Post by bzb3 » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #130

bzb3 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I've said, and I somewhat agree with the original point, but this trend of wanting to cater to the lowest denominator rubs me the wrong way. Some guys think the web should be usable with a 50€ smartphone on GPRS, and I say no, because there's a middle ground.

There is absolutely no excuse. The app is not doing protein folding, its merely showing text! Surprise, many many ppl use facebook in crap laptops, fb is popular with everyone.

No, it's not merely showing text. Facebook does a thousand things more than show text. You could argue those features don't belong in Facebook, but you can't argue that features are supposed not to take up any space, because that's unrealistic.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#156

Post by nck4222 » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:43 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #4

This is 100% incidental complexity. It's painful to consider that this level of sophisticated engineering is needed to render a website quickly in 2020. What went wrong? I'm personally excited about things like turbolinks and phoenix liveview, which may provide a path out of this mess.

>This is 100% incidental complexity.

The article talked a lot about their new dark mode feature, how they wouldn't have been able to implement it in their old tech stack, and how they were able to reduce their CSS size while adding a dark mode.

But is dark mode all that important? Even as a developer I don't care at all about FB having a dark mode, did they really need to rewrite their entire site to implement features no one cares about? Also, for a photo and video sharing site, is CSS size really important? I just loaded the page and it loaded 13.2mb worth of data while making 249 requests. Thanks for cutting down your 400kb CSS file though I guess.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#157

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:43 PM UTC

dewey wrote: post #40

raphaelj wrote: post #19

Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow. Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago. It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers…

I guess they probably could build a nice and fast website if it was up to them. But there's probably a lot more requirements than just that. Things like https://twitter.com/wolfiechristl/status/1071473931784212480... are probably not decided on and implemented by the engineering team but are coming down as a requirement from the top. This is probably the case for a lot of other decisions that slow down the page ("We…

[deleted]

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#158

Post by Groxx » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

axyz wrote: post #142

Groxx wrote: post #75

> We addressed this by generating atomic CSS at build time. Atomic CSS has a logarithmic growth curve because it’s proportional to the number of unique style declarations rather than to the number of styles and features we write. I've always wondered... has anyone checked to see if this strategy of CSS (which AFAICT is slowly growing in popularity, since it's a super simple minification trick) ends up costing more in…

we use this approach since more than a year with very good results. Regarding the data transfer it is not much of a problem because those classes usually get repeated a lot across the elements and having lot of repeated string is the best case scenario for gzip compression leading to basically no size impact. https://github.com/utilitycss/atomic This is the framework we developed to create atomic CSS component librar…

Your HTML is still undeniably larger than something with dramatically fewer class attributes though, if you minify the same way. Hence my "single page" vs "many" difference.

gzip helps for sure, but I doubt `...` ends up larger than `...`.

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#159

Post by aeyes » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

core-questions wrote: post #20

gfodor wrote: post #4

This is 100% incidental complexity. It's painful to consider that this level of sophisticated engineering is needed to render a website quickly in 2020. What went wrong? I'm personally excited about things like turbolinks and phoenix liveview, which may provide a path out of this mess.

Facebook rendered just fine a decade ago. What changed between now and then, in terms of actual improvement to end user experience, to make it so slow this kind of crap is needed? My guess is: - Desire to offload more processing to end user machines to save compute - More and more ads and user analytics in order to pick which ads to show - More engineers that irrationally hate the simplicity of PHP Duct tape on top o…

A lot more features?

Facebook of 12 years ago didn't have groups, marketplace, dating, live videos, stories, ...

Re: Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

#160

Post by muglug » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

jseliger wrote: post #116

raphaelj wrote: post #19

Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow. Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago. It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers…

Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago We'll see what the data show. I have been reading comments about Facebook's supposed decline for as long as I've been aware of Facebook and yet their published numbers continually show greater engagement. https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo...

I would be very surprised if engagement wasn't down among Americans under 50 – it may well be counteracted by growth in other markets and in other apps (especially Instagram), but there's _much_ less activity on Facebook.com from my peers than there were five years ago.