121–130 of 145 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The half an engineer was just the last team member around, only doing essential maintenance to keep it working.
So why allocate more engineers to the project when it was doing fine with half a head?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are all valid feelings / hypotheses about what happened, but even with the benefit of hindsight we can’t confirm them. For example, you think the real name policy tanked the effort. But did it really? Twitter verified status is considered to be coveted, people are lining up to get their real named acknowledged. Is that not enough to introduce plausible doubt? Similarly, we always complain about “network effects…
Twitter has a different culture. It's mostly public, whereas YouTube is mostly anonymous. It _does_ sound like a "corporate messed it up", because if they had understood the culture surrounding their products they would have probably done things differently. Here's a blatantly obvious example of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B#Commenting_on_YouTub...
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/facebooks-news-feed-i...
Lots of people hated it can claimed in the moment that corporate ruined everything. Then it went on to become one of the most successful products of all time.
Even if you hate FB today, you have to recognize that FB was beloved between 2007 ~ 2011 by pretty much everyone.
How was anyone to know, in that moment, whether the G+ name thing would be a major flop or a world changing product?
This isn't about Google capturing the FB space. Simply denying it to FB.
Honestly:
- no ads. (Seriously Google, no ads. But you know they can't which is why this is a pipe dream....)
- could sort your own timeline by timestamp, number of comments, whatever
- can't be shutdown due to content.
Bonus points for: - Events and adding Events into your local phone calendar.(Please don't give me another calendar to cross reference.)
Google twist the knife effort: - Free public facing web hosting for those who actually want their "Wall" public. IE companies, businesses, "personalities" etc.
They did this for Android to compete with Apple. They can do it with Signal to compete with FB.
If nothing else, could they "buy" the features from the Signal team in a similar fashion to Blender? This'd be my preference so that Signal maintains independance at least somewhat.(Money always talks I know.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter has a different culture. It's mostly public, whereas YouTube is mostly anonymous. It _does_ sound like a "corporate messed it up", because if they had understood the culture surrounding their products they would have probably done things differently. Here's a blatantly obvious example of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B#Commenting_on_YouTub...
What about Facebooks 2006 redesign (although to consider this case study, we have to put aside the HN cultural disdain of FB and look at the situation clinically) https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/facebooks-news-feed-i... Lots of people hated it can claimed in the moment that corporate ruined everything. Then it went on to become one of the most successful products of all time. Even if you hate FB today, you hav…
A quote from Zuckerberg's post regarding the News Feed is: "This is information people used to dig for on a daily basis, nicely re-organized and summarized so people can learn about the people they care about."
This does not sound like they were trying to push back against users, whereas Google basically said "no, you do it our way".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like the South African government approach, except they released their own browser with the last Flash version: https://www.zdnet.com/article/south-african-government-relea...
I don‘t know if this is better or worse than the whole South Korea ActiveX thing, which became so ridiculously drawn out it was an election promise in 2017 and finally killed in 2020. https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/12/10/south_korea_activ...
At least now online payment is much more convenient now (for most sites it even works on Linux, given that you're using a mobile app for authentication...)
TLDR: Facebook built the app responsible for their entire ad platform on a chrome-only tech (WebSQL), and when it was deprecated, instead of dropping in a widely-used polyfill, they decided to do a major 3yr rewrite risking 25% of their revenue in the process. I guess this is the stupid shit that being "too big to fail" permits.
There are a lot of big, messy, "terrible" applications with dumb dependencies that seem to live far longer than they "should". It's mostly in large companies but not really related to these companies. These same applications usually have unique functionalities and user who have become expert in the use of apps, including knowing the "stupid parts". Writing these apps is hard and it's a completely rational decision to…
Personally, I think the article is a dramatisation - I would certainly be too embarrassed to write such a thing if it were true.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like the South African government approach, except they released their own browser with the last Flash version: https://www.zdnet.com/article/south-african-government-relea...
I don‘t know if this is better or worse than the whole South Korea ActiveX thing, which became so ridiculously drawn out it was an election promise in 2017 and finally killed in 2020. https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/12/10/south_korea_activ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don‘t know if this is better or worse than the whole South Korea ActiveX thing, which became so ridiculously drawn out it was an election promise in 2017 and finally killed in 2020. https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/12/10/south_korea_activ...
However, things have still been shitty even since ActiveX was duped, if you're doing any kind of banking or printing out documents from the government now we're forced to run some dubious exe install files, which will spawn startup processes always running in the background taking up CPU and memory (regardless you're using the banking service or not!). At least now online payment is much more convenient now (for most…
This story is a fun read, but the "Chrome could ruin us at any moment" angle is more story telling hyperbole than reality. At that time on Chrome we were just figuring out a process to remove features and were pretty conservative. We debated a lot about the right way to remove things without causing damage to the web ecosystem. In an early attempt we had failed trying to remove a legacy feature and needed to revert i…
Title: "Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch"
Reality: that seems to have been true.
Your take: yes, but we wouldn't have done so because we're not in the business of breaking backwards compatibility on a whim.
Although it's good to hear reconfirmation of that fact, it's not technically a rebuttal nor showing that the story is hyperbole.
Google+ was very poorly designed.
Google+ when it was about a year old, was still the best social network ever. But then Google tried to force Youtube integration, killed off Events and Hangouts, not to mention the questionable "no unusual name" policy.