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The sad story of Facebook Platform

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Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#101

Post by aboodman »

jgon wrote: post #83
aboodman wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an overly simplistic analogy. No platform developer, when faced with weeds would say "let's torch it". What really happened in my opinion is that they tried a weed killer. However, as in real gardening, it turned out that distinguishing a weed from a non-weed is complex, subtle, and full of value judgments. In some cases, even if a plant has weed-like traits or capabilities, it's not a weed in the eyes of the…

I agree that the analogy is simplistic but I disagree with your weed killer analogy. I use weed killer on my own lawn and when I do I apply it in a targeted spray specifically to the weeds in question. I am still making a judgement and doing the hard work to separate parasites from useful organisms. Based on the article is sound like they sprayed everything ie removed the apis in question, and weed killer will indeed…

I interpreted it as: they removed an API (or reduce the functionality of an API in a way that) they thought was only useful to weeds. But it turned out that there were legitimate uses for that functionality, and it hurt more than just weeds.

I don't really know the details; this is just reflecting my experience from working on platforms.

As you say, in many cases, it ultimately requires human judgement, which is something that engineers are loathe to rely upon.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#102

Post by chrisblizzard »

ripter wrote: post #47
Eduard wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brief, frustrating experience maintaining a Facebook application consisted of the app breaking every two weeks as Facebook somewhat randomly changed things without warning. When did you have this experience? How long ago is it? For now quite some time, Facebook has been open with upcoming "breaking changes", giving Facebook App developers three months in advance to adapt accordingly: https://developers.facebook.co…

How about two weeks ago? They fail to mention in their list of breaking changes that the id format would changed from profileId_postId_commentId to profileId:postId:commentIdThatMightContainUnderscores Except that not all posts follow the new ID format. Not all new posts even follow it. It's now a mix of the two.

Hi. I work on Facebook's documentation for developers. It's true that IDs are opaque and I don't think that we declare that anywhere in particular. (It's a known unknown?)

I've updated the Graph API getting started guide to mention the fact that IDs are opaque and also mentioned it in our comments guide since comments are one of the few places where we have IDs that are made up of other keys.

Thanks for the feedback - it's good to hear about things we can fix.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#103

Post by chrisblizzard »

rmc wrote: post #59
ripter wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about two weeks ago? They fail to mention in their list of breaking changes that the id format would changed from profileId_postId_commentId to profileId:postId:commentIdThatMightContainUnderscores Except that not all posts follow the new ID format. Not all new posts even follow it. It's now a mix of the two.

Here here. You can't trust the Facebook docs to be complete. I have numerous comments in our codebase of "Facebook API docs are wrong, it's actually X..."

Do you have specific examples? I've killed a lot of docs-that-are-wrong over the last few months but I would love a list of anything I've missed.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#104

Post by chrisblizzard »

ripter wrote: post #68
rmc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here here. You can't trust the Facebook docs to be complete. I have numerous comments in our codebase of "Facebook API docs are wrong, it's actually X..."

Somewhere on the site they actually tell you to use Stackoverflow because it's more up to date.

Do you have an example?

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#105

Post by freshhawk »

sidcool wrote: post #92
freshhawk wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal blogs mostly, I haven't seen a for profit non-tiny organization ever not turn into a content farm when it got down to either firing people or turning on the crap firehose. Reddit and HN are great for scanning for new bloggers to follow (hence the number of posts in these places pissed about the Google Reader shutdown).

True, although Reddit's programming subreddit been degrading in value. I have been trying since a year to revive it by posting regularly, mostly from Hacker News. I have earned Karma but the subreddit overall is on a downhill journey.

In my experience they all are, it's pretty much built in to the model (not just Reddit). If content is determined by voting and the community grows then you get regression to the mean. And "the mean" type of content is probably why the early adopters moved to something else in the first place.
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