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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

#321

Post by Impossible »

lawn wrote: post #310
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…

> It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers can't make a photo, video, post and message sharing website that is not a pain to use. Too many cooks spoil the stew. I might even go so far to say that 10 engineers would have a larger chance of success than 10k+ engineers.

This was my experience at Facebook. Attempting things with a small team (or heaven forbid by yourself) was heavily frowned upon because it didn't justify manager and director salaries. As a result you ended up with poorly performing over-engineered code bases that prefered complex, expensive systems that would take multiple teams to build, but for whatever reason complexity that would improve performance was frowned upon. I'm sure this is common at many big tech companies. I didn't work on the mainline FB app but it seemed like part of the culture.

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

#322

Post by karmakaze »

radicalbyte wrote: post #287
karmakaze wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not even, users can just 'not play' (or play less) if the game's no fun.

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

#323

Post by mtsr »

zdragnar wrote: post #288
jawns wrote: 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…

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 s…

What you argue here could probably be said about half the companies admitted to any YC batch, and still there are successes. Maybe the glass can be half full too?

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

#324

Post by robertoandred »

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #22
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…

The 2MB of CSS is needed to justify that headcount.

Where are you getting 2MB from?

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

#325

Post by robertoandred »

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…

Where did you get 2MB from?

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

#327

Post by saagarjha »

goatlover wrote: post #267
hindsightbias wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the internet today, I think we need to lower our expectations and be realistic. At least in the US. We are still driving 60mph on freeways and what trains we have do not travel at 300kph. Perhaps many of us flipped out when we only had 9600 baud modems, but you could get up, brew some tea, walk the dog, or read a book while waiting for a page to load. We all had so much more patience back then. Why do we n…

Because the underlying computing technology has gotten so much faster, unlike the case with cars and roads.

And computing technology is not beholden to oil/car interests and NIMBYs.

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

#328

Post by saagarjha »

aylmao wrote: post #265

A big point of contention in the comments here lies around the concept of what a website should be. A school of thought in web development believes the web to be the next frontier in application development. For them it makes sense that websites like this feel and act like apps, both as an end-user (animations, transitions without full-page reloading, rich dynamic content, etc) and as a developer (client-side state m…

You can make a single-page app that isn't bloated.

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

#329

Post by dbspin »

hckr_news wrote: post #257
jawns wrote: 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…

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

Perhaps it's just a figure of speech, but I feel you should be challenged on the use of 'been conditioned to'. I see conditioning misused as an explanation all the time in tech discussions. This isn't an example of conditioning, but of anchoring, which if you want to view it through the lens of learning theory is an example of modelling rather than conditioning. But really it's better understood through the lens of behavioural economics. A value has been established and normalised, and other values are judged against it.

The reason I bring it up is that in changing user norms, it's much less helpful to think about them in stimulus response terms, than in terms of modelling other users behavior - which itself is guided by limitations on our capacity to process information, and heuristics which though adaptive are poorly adjusted to the modern media landscape. So people didn't flock to facebook initially because they were conditioned to prefer it - they used it because (in addition to offering a peek into the lives of others, it was cool). Conditioning is an important part of why people become addicted to the reward loops of social networking sites, but it's an insufficient explanation for their appeal and often misapplied.

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

#330

Post by saagarjha »

the_other wrote: post #231
lookdangerous wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The all-but defacto use of javascript transpilers especially invokes the image of 'Rube Goldberg' machines.

When you don’t use transpilers, you have to write ES5 code. No-one wants that.

Is ES5 really that bad that nobody can stand it?
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