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Comment by calbear81 | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad Julie took the time to respond to Dustin's article and dispel the lower revenue assumption. I looked back at the articles in March of last year and it does appear that everyone reported that the new design would bring in more ad revenue via more engaging ad formats for advertisers.

One thing I want to understand is if the concern is about accommodating people on less-than-the-latest tech or smaller screens, etc. then we've solved largely for that via responsive design. It's not hard to detect that I have enough real estate to support having a 2x larger photo in my feed. Why not adjust as needed?

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How exactly did she dispel the lower revenue assumption?

There is not a sentence in this article that does that.

"The old design we tested last year would actually have been positive for revenue. But that’s not a reason to ship a worse design."

She states it directly:

"The old design we tested last year would actually have been positive for revenue."

No.

Neither the old design nor the design dcurtis mentioned are current.

But the current design is more similar to the old design.

I'm not sure what you mean?

She is pretty clearly referring to the redesign from 2013 versus the design before that.

So what Curtis says is false? Then did he get this from?

"After an investigation into the problem by Facebook’s data team, they discovered that the new News Feed was performing too well. It was performing so well from a design standpoint that users no longer felt the need to browse areas outside of the News Feed as often, so they were spending less time on the site."

You're right. We should disregard a first hand account and instead believe second or third hand rumors.

Someone presenting speculation as fact ON THE INTERNET? Never. I'm being snarky, but it certainly seems that she's in a better position to know what facebooks data and reasoning were.

I'm just saying that he states it as a fact, like someone on the Facebook team had told him.

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