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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

#371

Post by beagle3 »

karmakaze wrote: post #322
radicalbyte wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are many users for which it is not fun, but an addiction. I have spoken to lots of people who say about once a month something like "Yeah, facebook is really bad for me, I just waste time and get upset", but they can't stop checking it every hour, and responding to posts that touch them emotionally, in either a good or bad way.

That's by design, of course - it benefits Facebook greatly that its herd is addicted, and unlike people addicted to alcohol, nicotine or other substances - there's not even another supplier they can turn to: It's either feed your addiction or suffer withdrawal symptoms.

And I think the success rate of quitters (as a percentage of those who actually want to quit) is also comparable, at single digit percent.

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

#372

Post by seph-reed »

hmcdona1 wrote: post #331
seph-reed wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React, Vue, and Angular all use a virtual DOM, which means they're already deprecated 5 years from now. A virtual DOM is dumb. SASS, SCSS, LESS, etc are kind of great though. It sucks you have to compile them to css, but you can do this: .App { .Topbar { .Logo { color: green } } .Content { h2 { color: orange; } } } Saves a lot of time and effort.

Angular uses an incremental-dom not a virtual dom: https://github.com/google/incremental-dom

https://github.com/google/incremental-dom#usage

Technically correct. The point is, it's not native.

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

#373

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

Impossible wrote: post #321
lawn wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

When were you there, if you don't mind me asking?

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

#374

Post by smadge »

Dotnaught wrote: post #362
ianmobbs wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest assumption you're making here is that most people care about ads - and they don't. Fundamentally, when I'm scrolling through Facebook or Instagram or Reddit or whatever, I just don't care that I see ads while I'm scrolling. I'm not going to pay $1/2/3/4/5 a month to avoid something I don't care about, and that's really only the value add of a subscription-based service. I'd also say most folks don…

Being unwilling to pay for the service suggests to me that the entire experience has no meaningful value.

Economists have done studies where they tried to determine how much someone would need to be paid to stop using Facebook for a year. Maybe people are not willing to pay for the service, but they would rather have the service than $X.

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

#376

Post by willio58 »

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…

I may be the only one here that thinks Reddit’s new design is fine now. At first, it was buggy and sluggish. Now it is fine.

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

#377

Post by cameronbrown »

freediver wrote: post #347
ianmobbs wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest assumption you're making here is that most people care about ads - and they don't. Fundamentally, when I'm scrolling through Facebook or Instagram or Reddit or whatever, I just don't care that I see ads while I'm scrolling. I'm not going to pay $1/2/3/4/5 a month to avoid something I don't care about, and that's really only the value add of a subscription-based service. I'd also say most folks don…

I'd really like to understand how does one not care about ads. To me it's like potholes on road. It would require terrific willpower to ignore them.

People do. My dad doesn't install an adblocker because he simply doesn't care. I wouldn't either if it wasn't for the serious performance impact.

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

#378

Post by [deleted] »

smadge wrote: post #374
Dotnaught wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being unwilling to pay for the service suggests to me that the entire experience has no meaningful value.

Economists have done studies where they tried to determine how much someone would need to be paid to stop using Facebook for a year. Maybe people are not willing to pay for the service, but they would rather have the service than $X.

[deleted]

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

#379

Post by discreteevent »

EGreg wrote: post #311
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…

Can you please compare the speed of https://yang2020.app/events ? On the mobile web or desktop, either one. (We're running it off of one server, it might get the HN effect, we'll see.) We have been building our own, open source social networking platform and we have tried to make a lot of things more efficient while doing so. The site I linked to didn't minify any files or optimize images. However, it loads things on…

I've never been on Facebook so I can't compare but your site responds pretty quickly for me. Also you left out the h in GitHub in your link so it goes to a domain for sale site.

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

#380

Post by robertoandred »

agluszak wrote: post #367
robertoandred wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you getting 2MB from?

"On our old site, we were loading more than 400 KB of compressed CSS (2 MB uncompressed) when loading the homepage, but only 10 percent of that was actually used for the initial render. We didn’t start out with that much CSS; it just grew over time and rarely decreased. This happened in part because every new feature meant adding new CSS."

Read the first four words.
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