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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

#281

Post by AlexandrB »

xd1936 wrote: post #215
infogulch wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a website does not imply informed consent.

No, but signing up for an account and agreeing to the Terms of Service does. The not-logged-into homepage is 1.3mb. Still not tiny, but definitely not the same as the web app.

No it doesn’t. Informed consent is not the same as shoving a ToS/EULA in front of someone who may not have the legal or technological education to understand it or its consequences.

From the Wikipedia definition[1] of informed consent (in medicine):

> An informed consent can be said to have been given based upon a clear appreciation and understanding of the facts, implications, and consequences of an action. Adequate informed consent is rooted in respecting a person's dignity. To give informed consent, the individual concerned must have adequate reasoning faculties and be in possession of all relevant facts.

What tech companies do is obtain the minimum legally required consent - and sometimes not even that. This may be legal, but it’s far from ethical.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consent

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

#282

Post by plorkyeran »

saagarjha wrote: post #188
delusional wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when they had to monkey patch the android runtime because their app had too many methods? https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th... It's a fun hack, and I enjoy spectacle, but it might be a sign that you are complicating your app more than you need.

Remember when reached the limit for __TEXT and had to put code in sections that weren’t really meant for it: https://blog.timac.org/2016/1018-analysis-of-the-facebook-ap... ? Remember when they were taking to long to start up that they pulled stuff into a separate framework just so they could meet launch deadlines: https://blog.timac.org/2017/0410-analysis-of-the-facebook-ap... ? Remember when the app had 18,000 Obje…

The root cause of the problem is that they have too many people working on it, and that's obviously not a problem you can hire your way out of.

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

#283

Post by gorgoiler »

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.

You have a ten digit user base that you need to engage, so you have a four (five?) digit engineering team that somehow needs to coordinate their patches in a way that doesn’t cause the complexity of the site to explode.

It’s huge and pretty impressive.

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

#284

Post by rrdharan »

runawaybottle wrote: post #272
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…

Let’s go on this tangent, why is Reddit’s frontend so sluggish and lacking quality of life improvements that should be in place by now? Surely they are hiring world-class devs, so what’s holding them back?

> surely they are hiring world-class devs

What makes you think that?

Reddit seems like a place where the kind of experienced and talented people needed to turn it around could make a lot more money (via stock grants in addition to salary) and frankly have a lot more impact, at any of FAANG.

I've not seen anything to indicate that Reddit is hiring, or trying to hire, "world-class devs".

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

#285

Post by Kinrany »

hetspookjee wrote: post #274
vbezhenar wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, works fast for me too. Random profile opens in 2-3 seconds max for me. But for some people websites are slow for some reason. I've heard complains about Gmail loading 30 seconds, while it takes 2-3 seconds cold start for me.

I don't understand how you think a 2-3 second load time is "fast" for such an enormous platform and the actual content the user sees. I sure get that Facebook is way more than that, but to think a page loading in 2-3 seconds is fast is something you could've gotten away with in 2000, but in 2020..? I genuinely don't understand why you find it quick.

My guess is that Facebook is popular enough that they are not optimizing for first impression.

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

#286

Post by dullgiulio »

badfrog wrote: post #217
core-questions wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Facebook rendered just fine a decade ago. What changed between now and then It does way more things. In particular, there are a lot more interactive experiences. A decade ago, it just loaded a web page and nothing changed until you refreshed. Now live videos and other content types have streams of comments and reactions pushed to the client in real time.

I really don't want a video to autoplay on the side of the screen when I'm reading some news article, for example.

It was so much better before when there just were less ways of doing what the website wanted and more ways of doing what you wanted with your browser and your computing power.

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

#287

Post by radicalbyte »

karmakaze wrote: post #202
ipython wrote: post #167

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…

These views are aligned. A site that's fast and a pleasure to use advances both agendas. It's still a failure.

Only if there's competition. The network effect ensures that there is no competition. Leaving us where we currently are.

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

#288

Post by zdragnar »

jawns wrote: post #209
ipython wrote: post #167

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…

Food for thought- the value of each user is radically different when accounting for geographic (i.e. income) markets.

For subscription to work, you either:

1- undercharge users from wealthier countries

2- price poorer users out of you platform

3- give up on the idea of worldwide adoption (Facebook scale, as you say) entirely

4- attempt to charge different amounts by country of origin, and watch your users cheat the system mercilessly

5- go freemium, and suffer the same fate that news organizations do- find that far too few are willing to pay to go ad-free, stick ads back into the free version, and end up leaking data anyway

I suppose 4 might be the most feasible option, but once it is obvious that some people pay more for the exact same value, they are likely to assume that the product has less value than it actually does, feeling that they are being ripped off.

In short, there is probably a good reason that paid services will never reach Facebook scale.

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

#289

Post by linuxftw »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #43
Amezarak wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using the new Facebook and the interface is even slower than before. It also feels (may not actually be) less information-dense, forcing me to interact with the page more to see the same information, compounding the problem. This is on a i7 laptop.

> forcing me to interact with the page more to see the same information Product Lead to Zuck: user engagement up 5% after this update! Zuck: great, here's your bonus check

This is the only reasonable explanation. The user density is terrible as GP said.

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

#290

Post by AlexandrB »

badfrog wrote: post #217
core-questions wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Facebook rendered just fine a decade ago. What changed between now and then It does way more things. In particular, there are a lot more interactive experiences. A decade ago, it just loaded a web page and nothing changed until you refreshed. Now live videos and other content types have streams of comments and reactions pushed to the client in real time.

> Now live videos and other content types have streams of comments and reactions pushed to the client in real time.

Many of these are anti-features I’d love to be able to turn off.

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