OAuth of Fealty: Resignation beyond sorrow on the Facebook Platform and beyond | Hacker News Reader

OAuth of Fealty: Resignation beyond sorrow on the Facebook Platform and beyond

m.bogost.com

181 pointsjlees45 comments

Facebook Platform isn't the only offender.

Occasionally I found basic features on Facebook website just don't work. For example: 2-3 days ago, I can't put description on my newly uploaded photo. I have to complete the photo upload workflow, and then click the newly uploaded photo on my album and edit the description.

Regression on basic feature.

I suppose Facebook is just like any other companies with sharp growth: you don't want to know what's inside it (or how the sausage is made). That boils down to ship features and ignore everything else (documentation, good design, good habit, better architecture, better quality, etc).

I'm not saying that's a very bad idea for them because I've seen this practice a lot in our industry.

Having said that, this is one of the many reasons why young startups want to hire the brightest and smartest engineers out of college: they need warm bodies smart enough to move forward, to deal with legacy codebases and figuring a clever (but may be dirty) hack to workaround the legacy design decision, less on solving complex new problems. The latter may be reserved for the infrastructure teams where people develop back-end infrastructure component like Haystack or something along that line.

The recent "rant" stories/articles of the quality of Facebook Platform showed us the same repeated story we've read before in the past and to confirm that Facebook engineers were not way much better than Googlers or Yahoo or Microsoft engineers.

Wasn't it the brightest and smartest engineers who created these problems?

What a great post. Given that Facebook's official motto is to "move fast and break things", I've always considered developing on their platform akin to contracting for the Marquis de Sade.

I wouldn't have put it so eloquently, but relying on consistency in a rapidly moving platform is risky.

My version of your comment would be, simply:

> Move fast and break things.

While working with the Facebook iOS SDK was a horrible experience, I don't get where this is coming from:

"Apple pushes new iOS releases...breaking software written relatively recently"

Can this really be considered true? I can't remember anything deprecated that didn't still function in iOS, with the exception of the UDID and mac address APIs which were deprecated for privacy reasons (and developers have had ages to move away from UDID). iOS 3 era code I download from Github still runs fine. At worst, this summer Apple required apps to support the iPhone 5 format, but that's a pretty easy upgrade to support, and a major user facing one.

Admittedly, it's mostly lots of little things over the course of iOS updates, small changes in the behavior of specific SDK packages rather than full-bore failures. I may have overstated that point and it certainly pales in comparison to FB. Still, you get the gist right?

Yeah I get the gist. Post definitely resonated for me and I've never written anything that's totally on Facebook's platform, like Cow Clicker was.

Like ibogost said, it seems to be more of the little things with Apple. One random example that affected me (somewhere around iOS 5) was modal views not being able to pop themselves anymore via parent (ie [self.parentviewcontroller popViewControllerAnimated]), they have to instead call that method on themselves.

Nothing terrible, but back on topic, I too dislike touching 3rd-party stuff, FB or Twitter...

Do you mean dismissViewControllerAnimated? According to the docs, calling it on self should still work:

    The presenting view controller is responsible for dismissing the view
    controller it presented. If you call this method on the presented view
    controller itself, it automatically forwards the message to the
    presenting view controller.

Quote of the day:

"Facebook is like a kindergarten run by child molesters."

I liked "The Facebook Platform is a shit crayon.".

Another reason to support federated social networking platforms like http://pump.io/ and https://tent.io/ that are outside the control of any individual company.

I feel like these come and go every few years; look at StatusNet or Diaspora for example.

Hell, I still remember when MSN tried to integrate with AIM and Y! messenger by reverse-engineering the protocols and putting them into the MSN client.

status.net and diaspora are still here and working just fine... ?

Can you really say a social network is working if nobody uses it?

Yes, I can. The networks work fine. If people need more than "this works fine, it's free, and you can use it instead of the other way around" as a reason, the people are broken.

20 years ago we hardly had cell phones and that was just fine, if you actually loved your Grandmother you'd always find a way to send her some baby photos... and now we start to cry because Diaspora is kinda basic? Even though that would change real quick if only 5% of the FB users would switch to it. I think that's silly, so I for one am reachable by phone and email, and my friends are always welcome to join me "on the actual web". Until then, I'm not supporting them in their self-harm: for whatever reasons people use Facebook, I try to avoid being one of them (edit: one of the reasons, that is).

How many friends can you really connect to on them though? Would be very few people that could say everyone they cared about actively used an open/ distributed social network.

I do care about these people as persons, but not as interwebs citizens, not at all... that is, those of them who have something to say which they actually care about have a website, and with the inane nonsense many post on facebook, I am not "connected" either way.. if anything, that made me think less of people, that's one big reason I stopped paying attention to it.

Hmm, I guess that means diaspora wouldn't change anything there, for me. I'm not going to be another human TV for them, no matter the protocol.

But the fact that alternatives* exist and people don't use them just because they don't want to do the first step and actively pull their friends with them, is just sad? That's basically admitting Facebook can do whatever the it wants, since people are (or rather feel) trapped.

(and more than that; many of these networks allow you to sign up for updates of people on other pods of other networks.. Facebook isn't even thinking of playing in the same league, it's just that the UI is similar and has words and photos in it)

I'm under the impression that people were migrating off of StatusNet onto pump.io. I know identi.ca made that transition recently.

And before that we had social networks like email and usenet, and instant-messaging systems like IRC.

Certainly these things are cyclic, but that doesn't mean they're completely beyond the influence of ordinary people, let alone the kinds of people who tend to hang out on HN.

Unrelated

Did a small oauth project a few weeks back trying to integrate with web mail providers - gmail, ymail and outlook.

Gmail was a bit of a pain, but basically worked.

Ymail - a much huger pain, and extra hoops and far less usable documentation explaining basic workflow - "oauth" libraries continually failed me, and only using the crappy php4-style example code worked. At the end of the day, it didn't come close to being easy to use (and required my users to jump through extra hoops).

Outlook/microsoft webmail? Just didn't work at all . Oauth connectivity worked, as easily as gmail, but they simply don't allow sending at all - no access to the inbox at all. Oh sure I can 'download contacts!' but can't use outlook/livemail to actually handle the sending programmatically.

It really hit me that as bad or potentially bad that google might be in this space, they're 'winning' hearts and minds just because they're less bad than the alternatives. I used to wonder why so many services and add-ons were built on Google properties vs Yahoo and MS, but I wonder no more; Yahoo/MS just don't want to compete in that space (making stuff at least usable for developers). Facebook also seems to fall in to that camp, but right now they don't have any major competition (except from G+ it seems). But FB still has an upper hand with a full platform (however crappy). I suspect when G+ rolls out stronger API stuff, the game will change dramatically.

I wish I could write rants as poetically as this.

Weird. The site has both a www- and non-www version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6141702.

This is a very poetic post. I like it for its literary value.

I laughed out loud at this:

The Facebook Platform is a shape-shifting, chimeric shadow of suffering and despair, a cruel joke perpetrated upon honest men and women at the brutish whim of bloodthirsty sociopaths sick with bilious greed and absent mercy or decency. Developing for the Facebook Platform is picking out the wallpaper for one's own death row holding cell, the cleaver for one's own blood sacrifice.

I was thinking of making a Facebook chat client as a fun project, but this post made me reconsider.

You can do something with Twitter instead. No reason to completely drop a project if the first place you look to host it doesn't seem appealing.

Twitter has their share of warts, but they're markedly different when it comes to the speed of "breaking things".

Something to keep in mind though: You're working with someone else's platform which means you participate at their pleasure. Any API provider can do whatever they please with their product so try to decouple API handling from the rest of your client as much as you can so you can reduce the likelihood of being pulled by the tides.

The OAuth bit in the title of this post reminds me that that change broke one of the author's previous projects on Twitter: http://www.bogost.com/blog/it_soared_a_bird.shtml

Twitter's responsibility does seem somewhat less, anyway, in that they've never been as platformy as Facebook: Facebook actively claimed that this was a place to deploy your games and other apps, but then broke stuff constantly.

Just be traditional and build a foul mouthed IRC bot. It's a tried and tested way to enjoy yourself and exposure a new socket API.

The "resignation beyond sorrow" - what a phrase! It's such a Kierkegaardian phrase I was surprised to google it and find it was not an allusion but original.

"OAuth of Fealty: Resignation beyond sorrow on the Facebook Platform and beyond" Would be a great metal song title.

> "Here's a thing," young white dude founder blogs...

If he would've said black instead of white or dudette instead of dude, Hacker News would have had this guy's header on a platter. Racists, the lot of you.

Nope, he's asserting that the founders come from privileged groups. Punching up is acceptable, punching down is not.

What about the young white dudes who are unemployed, or work in menial jobs, or dropped out of school and joined the army because they suddenly had to support a child, etc.? Do they deserve to be vilified because there is someone else who is successful and happens to be the same color and sex?

How are they being vilified?

By having "white guy" treated as an insult, obviously.

Great metaphor. Stealing it. Thanks.

Thanks, but not mine. :) I think this may be the original:

http://reasonableconversation.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/punch...

You might have the category wrong. It's making fun of founders for being casually ageist and racist. Or to be more specific, privileged and oblivious.

I'm surprised this article doesn't touch upon the unending hell that is "OAuth" and "federated identity"

There is an excellent solution to the author's dilemma. He does not have to use Facebook or its API. That's the great thing about capitalism and the free market. He has a choice. Also, because he is not motivated by money, he can make his own, perfect platform, motivated by the plight of the proletariat and it will be noble and superior in every way. He can give away the games he makes because who needs money in such a utopia... Give me a break. Shut up and make a better API that cares about backward compatibility. Give the aloof moral superiority a rest.

Interesting, I wasn't aware that capitalism and the free market absolves everything from criticism.

Criticize Facebook. It sucks. However, arguing that it sucks because the developers are privileged white dudes motivated by making money is not a valid argument. The author even points to an example of a good api from Microsoft. Do you really believe the developers at Microsoft back in the 90s weren't motivated by making money? The Facebook API sucks for so many reasons. Zuckerburg originally wrote Facebook in PHP, he was not a computer scientist scientist, their motto is "move fast and break things". It's an experiment and they made some mistakes. To imply its flaws are rooted in capitalism is wrong. I realize profit and money are popular punching bags. It feels good to think you are morally superior and have other people think you are a good person. However, the hate and bile being spewed at anyone trying to make a buck is irrational. No one is holding a gun to anyone's head telling them they have to use Facebook. Go out and make something better.

I think you're reading some kind of general anti-capitalism into the post that isn't there. Bogost's view seems to be that chasing short-term profit is a significant problem in this sector, which is why he uses Microsoft as a counterexample of something that was a profit-oriented business but still managed to keep stable APIs, because they were oriented longer-term. If he were trying to make a general anti-market or anti-capitalist point it would make no sense for both his pro and con examples to be large for-profit tech companies.

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