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Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

I am willing to bet that 9 out of 10 'weekend projects' have had to be thrown out completely and redeveloped from scratch when the number of users became significant.

9 out of 10 weekend projects never get to a significant number of users.

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Probably more like 99/100 or 999/1000 but yeah. Also, you can get pretty damn far with PHP and MySQL. Just look at Facebook. Just don't rely on Drupal or Wordpress to get you there and it'll be fine. KISS and solve the scaling issues as they come up. Far too many projects focus way too much on infrastructure and architecture and micro services instead of building something that solves a real problem for users. Focus on that first. It doesn't matter if the tech behind it is a bunch of bash scripts if it does something that is really useful to a lot of people.

Drupal is for scaling, learn the architecture and you see it.

An alternative view on history: Facebook succeeded because the competitors failed to scale.

Do you remember MySpace? The big social network with hundreds of million of users that came before facebook.

They had massive scaling and performance issues. At the peak when everyone was moving to social media (almost a decade ago) the site could take an entire minute to load (if loading at all). They lost a lot of users, who went straight to facebook and never recovered.

I was a big MySpace user and late FB user, and I can tell you that it had nothing to do with [tech] scale. Back then I didn't know about programming (my first lines of code were some CSS in MySpace!) and the real reason is that users were becoming more hostile in a site that was a niche on its own. You had to start filtering out and removing SPAM all the time from your public wall. The fact that people could personalize their site and the community (heavy on music and alternative people) put most of the people away.

You can say that it failed to scale, but I wouldn't say that it failed to scale technically; it failed to scale the community. Then at some point when it was already dying they started to change the layout big time I guess to attract more people, alienating the initial community.

MySpace and Friendset have been largely commented in this discussion, in other comments.

I agree, they were different from facebook enough, that it's not all about scaling. Yet, don't underestimate the impact of having your site unreachable, when the competitor is coming strong. Not a good position to be in.

indeed, I would go so far as to say 9/10 weekend projects never get finished, let alone released, let alone getting enough users

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