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Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com

engineering.fb.com

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

#252
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I won’t take blame for that. Still haven’t found a use case for React/Angular or SASS/whatever. If I’m guilty of something is not recognizing the validity of those tools, as I’m sure there are. But 2MB CSS is simply inconceivable to me.

Big +1. I would be really interested to find one, only ONE, website where React/Angular was really bringing a better experience and better final product than a standard pure JS with simple Ajax system.

What simple Ajax system?

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

#253

I don't like it. Round borders with misplaced text, cannot go to a specific time on my timeline anymore, does not feel very responsive. Overall, the UI does not look very appealing and feels like a downgrade.

Reminds me of the new Chrome UI. Not a fan of this soft, rounded-off aesthetic that seems to be spreading about.

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

#254
Future will tell, but I do think this is a good strategic move by FB.

FB is now seen as an app for old people and not fun at all, and probably one of the reason is because of how it looks. With the new design, things are more shiny, and the product now looks cool. How a product is perceived has a big influence on how people use it, (for example why people use snap when they can send the same videos on insta).

I wouldn't be surprised that this is a beginning of a lot of changes on FB

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying "cabinets don't help organize a kitchen if you don't put anything in them" -- I mean, duh, you have to use it right. That's not an argument to have no cabinets. There's a reason nearly ALL major web applications rely on a _framework_....rails, django, laravel, you name it. These exist because it's really hard to organize vanilla code without a framework. React and FE JS are no different. If you're…

Yeesh, you've badly misinterpreted my comment. Re-reading it, I'm partly to blame here. >That's not an argument to have no cabinets. This isn't the point I was trying to make. I didn't mean to piggy back on this part of the parent comment: "Have you worked on a platform that uses nothing but pure JS and fetch calls?" I meant to respond to this part of the parent: "they are tools for developers to streamline developme…

To be clear I'm not advocating for React on every possible use case. In fact I've grown weary of it over the years, but not for the reasons the comment I was responding to pointed out. My point is that React makes the process of organizing frontend code easier, not that it's the only way to do so.

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

#256
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you; however, the key disconnect is that Facebook is not a photo, video, post and message sharing website. It's a marketing platform intended to extract the most value out of you, the viewer, and transfer that value to Facebook and its advertisers. If you think of it this way, you can see how you may need 2MB of CSS: to battle the bots trying to scrape your information and replicate your network, to side…

Imagine this: A "free" ad-driven social networking site that brings in gigantic revenue, but that has to pay thousands of high-priced engineers to implement all of the cruft you just described. versus ... A subscription-based, non-ad-driven social networking site (perhaps operating as a member-owned cooperative?) that brings in much more modest revenue but that also can operate with many fewer engineers because it ca…

Facebook's problem is that a subscription fee would drastically limit adoption and prevent them from monopolizing the social graph. They see more potential to make money without charging users directly.

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

#257
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you; however, the key disconnect is that Facebook is not a photo, video, post and message sharing website. It's a marketing platform intended to extract the most value out of you, the viewer, and transfer that value to Facebook and its advertisers. If you think of it this way, you can see how you may need 2MB of CSS: to battle the bots trying to scrape your information and replicate your network, to side…

Imagine this: A "free" ad-driven social networking site that brings in gigantic revenue, but that has to pay thousands of high-priced engineers to implement all of the cruft you just described. versus ... A subscription-based, non-ad-driven social networking site (perhaps operating as a member-owned cooperative?) that brings in much more modest revenue but that also can operate with many fewer engineers because it ca…

People just don’t want to pay for social networking platforms. We’ve been conditioned to think that these things should be free.

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

#258
post #223
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine this: A "free" ad-driven social networking site that brings in gigantic revenue, but that has to pay thousands of high-priced engineers to implement all of the cruft you just described. versus ... A subscription-based, non-ad-driven social networking site (perhaps operating as a member-owned cooperative?) that brings in much more modest revenue but that also can operate with many fewer engineers because it ca…

> A subscription-based, non-ad-driven social networking site (perhaps operating as a member-owned cooperative?) that brings in much more modest revenue but that also can operate with many fewer engineers because it can be largely cruft-free. I, too, loved App.net. Alas, seems that people won't even pay a couple bucks a month to see what their friends are eating for lunch.

People instinctively know the value of something when asked to part with their money. :D

Yet they still spend their time on it. Huh.

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

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't though. You have a cache.

Facebook release multiple times a day (or they did), so the browser cache is irreLevant.

I would bet that js bundling and splitting might prevent that from being true?

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

#260
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter's new design is pretty fast. Sure, it does a lot less than Facebook but it's using similar modern SPA tech. Facebook is still pretty slow even on a Ryzen 3900x with 32GB of 3600mhz RAM. It's a lot better than it used to be though.

Yeah, I think that Twitter did a pretty good job. After the initial load, it even works offline, so the actual API calls are the only thing that it's fetching over the network.

After the twitter update, I can't seem to get the initial load of an individual tweet to work. Ever, on any device, on any network. I encounter this issue on my laptop (on both Windows and Ubuntu), on my desktop (also both Windows and Ubuntu) and on my Android phone. It doesn't matter if I'm logged in or not, I always get "something went wrong" when I load the page and have to refresh at least once.
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