Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ashanmaril | Hacker News Reader

This article doesn't even mention how horrible the implementation is, too. It didn't merge your conversations with a person into a single thread across Facebook Messenger and Instagram. Instead it created 4 permutations of threads with a person.

* Your Messenger + Friend's Messenger

* Your Instagram + Friend's Instagram

* Your Messenger + Friend's Instagram

* Your Instagram + Friend's Messenger

Each of these conversations will result in a new, separate thread, even if your Facebook and Instagram accounts are linked. It's such a mess.

View on HN

Indeed. I'm not sure why anyone thought this was a good idea. Or why they didn't listen to programmers/architects telling them it surely wasn't.

Successfully untangling this could result in some promotions once they realize the idiocy of this.

Sometimes I feel like Facebook shuffles things around just to make work for themselves.

Well I mean, if you think about, everything they do is just making up work. They've basically succeeded in the whole "mega corporation too big to fail, huge amounts of regular automated revenue" thing. They could probably kick their feet up and just coast for a while and not worry but instead they have thousands of employees and hundreds of managers all making up things to do to try and position themselves to make more money in the future. They're already just making up stuff to do

Maybe the architects are relying on untangling to get promoted in the future?

Imagine being a new manager/vp/whatever there... do you want to go to a shareholders meeting and say "this was a great year, we mainatained all the same stuff, because it's working great already!"... or do you want to say "we've unvailed a totally new, totally better chat platform, with millions of new users, and gajillions of new chat threads!"?

Sadly, the same is happening at other tech firms, where only something "new" gets praised, and we end up with all the icons looking the same, and good products killed (just count the number of chat/communication services from google).

At this point I'm pretty convinced large organizations cannot build good proprietary software.

>just count the number of chat/communication services from google

It seems google has merged Hangouts back into gmail for some reason.

What happened to Allo? And Duo? Or is duo just for video and hangouts for chat without video? Google meet?

..to just name a few, and forget things like google wave...

This is so on point. People do things to make themselves look good without care for the product, user, or even company success sometimes.

I still find it puzzling that a bunch of people without actual product nor technical knowledge and experience dictate how products get build and evolve. Ego driven development.

Beauty is in the eye of the shareholder.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com