Hacker News Reader

Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I can name multiple Facebook features that have been broken for months. Temporary profile pictures most annoyingly of all. They stopped working close to a year ago. They simply never change back.

No one's sanding anything there.

View on HN

The incentive structure doesn’t encourage it. Nobody gets a promotion for going back and fixing issues; it’s all about new initiatives and boosting metrics with new ideas.

If you look at the HTML output of FB, IIRC it is about 100 levels deep <divs> that cause me physical pain.

The thing that gets me is how slow all of it is. And I’ve programmed against facebook APIs, which are ludicrously performant! Hundreds of megabytes of data in single digit milliseconds total roundtrip.

They do this in an attempt to combat ad blockers. It's an arms race that is sadly bound to create cruft like this.

exactly, one example is there are a lot of programatically absolute positioned divs to break ad-blockers or make them very inefficient, while the performance of the app suffers from many tricks like these as well.

It actually is slow, you can see the loading bar load... In 2024 with the hardware we have, it is BAD.

The "feeds" screen in the app has been throwing errors for at least a year ("Feed isn't available right now"). I only try to use the screen because a while back it was the only way to view content in the correct order.

In 2024, Facebook feels like a defunct shopping mall that’s slowly falling apart, but still houses one or two businesses you depend on.

Hate how it loses its place on the page and reloads when you zoom into a picture on mobile. I mean you have to go far out of your way to f’up that bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com