361–370 of 489 posts
Future will tell, but I do think this is a good strategic move by FB. FB is now seen as an app for old people and not fun at all, and probably one of the reason is because of how it looks. With the new design, things are more shiny, and the product now looks cool. How a product is perceived has a big influence on how people use it, (for example why people use snap when they can send the same videos on insta). I would…
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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…
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…
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…
In any case, this argument is operating at the wrong level of abstraction, the issue here isn't the distinction between these two things conceptually, but if there would be less incidental complexity overall if what are typically called web applications took a different approach to implementing their features, while still maintaining the same user experience.
It's hard to look at all of the crap you need to do to get a functioning web app working to not think there must be a better approach.
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The thing is, every place I've worked that was against ORMs or frontend frameworks wound up evolving their own half-documented, half working framework. I find it's easier to spend as much time learning the abstraction as the underlying technology, and then that knowledge can be ported from system to system.
My experience too. The whole "we don't use a framework" sounds great but it always turns in to some sort of home grown framework that is poorly documented, has bugs, and isn't open source so you can't take it with you when you leave.
It is incredibly frustrating to run into an issue with a home grown framework and have to ask around only to discover that the person who wrote the part you're having trouble with left the company 2 years ago and no one else understands it.
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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.
They've probably just accepted that consuming is more popular than producing, though.
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The 2MB of CSS is needed to justify that headcount.
Where are you getting 2MB from?
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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…
That's probably something that can be measured: if the profile/wall fills out over several seconds, when do the ads appear? First, before everything else? In that case it would be cynical, but I agree that they might monetize the delays by ensuring ads appear before anything else.
The actual ads on FB desktop are the newsfeed ads, which you see as you scroll.
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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".
Ultimately, reddit made no attempt to lean into the the thing that might attract world-class people to come there: a passion for the product. Or, at most, any attempts made were surface level. Some of the best engineers I've worked with are at reddit. They just happen to be outnumbered, and some have golden handcuffs on.