This reads like someone wanted to capitalize on the Facebook outage to get some traffic, so they threw their developers under the bus for some clickbait.
I wonder how good their presumably hard-working developers feel about the company blog implying that they’re all using so much Facebook that their productively suffers by a measurable amount every day.
I think the author should have heard one phrase before starting on this blog post: correlation does not equal causation.
In other news I'm working on a blog post about how the Facebook outage caused temperatures to drop 20% in New Jersey. Idk it's either Facebook or a cold front
What happened to the talks of breaking up Big Tech? It seems to have disappeared.
goes well beyond breaking up big tech though, needs an entire reversal of culture at this point
Please stop with this appeal to get others to be constantly productive; it is not helpful advice, and being unproductive is crucial to helping the brain relax.
I’m not endorsing toxic social media, but I’m debating your overall gist nonetheless.
Secondly I surely do waste too much time on social media, I don't see how that should stop me from appealing to others as well as myself though, consider me included in the criticism, I'm not a saint. However this holier than thou silencing tactic of thinking we can't criticize culture just because we're also part of perpetuating it has always been silly.
While you didn’t use the word, the exemplar “social” activities involve more productivity in the general sense of the word, than doom scrolling on social media does. There is space in our lives for both.
> holier than thou silencing tactic of thinking we can't criticize culture just because we're also part of perpetuating
That is not what I meant. You implied that people should not want a certain aspect of relaxation, while enjoying the same aspect yourself. This is akin to rich people saying “money doesn’t buy you happiness” while enjoying the outcome of having money. There are nuances, but the appeal is flawed nonetheless.
Note: Here my de-stress is playing video games. I don't do it much, but a couple hours here and there adds up to thousands eventually.
At some point there needs to be personal accountability
At first, it was small private chats but now everyone is on 10+ big servers with thousands of members and enough channels to drown in.
Everyone is spending their times on it, staring at the screen waiting for a precious message, scrolling the channel list in the hope that one of them contain a good conversation.
At work, Discord was used so much that the company had to ban it from the computers.
How far do we have to go in order to fulfil the end goal that comes from wanting to delete Facebook?
HN has no marketing, the simplest of design and the most basic of features. Yet, any still refresh it hourly, to the point where the site implemented features to keep you away from it.
Facebook is a problem but it is not the problem.
The reason is as old as time - the administration changed.
Yes what a dystopia we live in
Global warning may feel hopeless but compare that to the threat of ozone layer disappearing or acid rain or..
Covid has kill 700+ h1n1 killed 575+. wwi+ii millions
People are so much safer and less likely to die but we have so much more media so we invent things to be scared of because people want you to pay attention to their ads.
i) facebook has not contributed an iota to the consumerist utopia you seem to cherish. it is the result of a long period of scientific / technological development. communicating instantly with people around the globe can be done perfectly well with, e.g. Signal. you do not need the apparatus of surveillance capitalism to deliver it.
ii) said consumerist utopia is neither available to large fractions of humanity, nor is it environmentally sustainable for those who currently enjoy it beyond a few more decades
More fundamentally, if we do not develop "social media" that are trully social: actually promote global mutual understanding, support fact based consensus, promote the genuine empowerment of individuals instead of exploiting and aggravating their ignorance etc. many of the real gains and progress (<ref>Hans Rosling</ref>) achieved in the past century will be squandered, never to return
Free communication with almost any human on the planet: check. Advertise alongside industry incumbents with any ad budget: check. Oh yeah and React, React Native, GraphQL, pyTorch, and a whole lot more.
As for small businesses, its walled garden simply cannibalized their earlier websites and made every small trader dependent upon opaque and arbitrary discovery algorithms that can wipe them out without warning.
The open source projects you mention have multiple alternatives, many from genuine community projects that will sustain irrespective of a corporate sponsor.
Rather than seeing any dramatic increase in programming productivity, we saw developers taking care of their housekeeping.
As Kan, our CTO, explained to me this morning: “ Facebook going down made developers clean their backyard”.
> the Facebook outage started at 15:24 UTC.
> Between 21:00 UTC and midnight, we saw roughly a 2.6x increase in the number of Pull Requests being merged.
> midnight UTC aligns with 17:00 Pacific time (where many Haystack customers are located).
So even according to their own metrics, there were 5 and a half hours where the issue was (at least partially) occuring but there was no change.
Plus, measuring developer productivity by pull requests merged is a very noisy way to measure "throughput"
I'm sure it's related but I'm also sure it's not as related as they are trying to casually sell it.
In the end, this whole FB outage and this blog post it's just a blip with a half-life of a few days.
Need to have the right people who are asking the right questions.
Don't use commit history to measure any sort of performance if you have competent managers who can communicate with developers, and don't accept "devs are hard to talk to" as an excuse.
So, in a way, developers who are cut out from their social connections will work free overtime?
Don't tell companies!
This post makes me doubt anything else haystack says
Really, it should be down for at least a month, so people can adapt, and samples can be taken over a longer time period.
Still, there are marginal benefits to reducing the quality of the distraction by banning myself from those I most enjoy.