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Comment by pshin45 | Hacker News Reader

> ...is the unwritten motto...

Exactly, it's unwritten because no dev shop would explicitly market themselves as being willing to break things in the name of speed. It's an unfortunate side effect that they don't want to call attention to, whereas Facebook wears it as a badge of honor.

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Facebook, where the users are the QA department

This is the most important point here. Facebook can afford to do this because their users don't care. No one really needs Facebook or depends on it to work at critical times. Most products are not like that. Imagine what happened if Gmail started doing move fast and break things. Oops some of your email vanished.

On the contrary, I have to believe they do care. Many here might not remember or know, but early on, Facebook was very unstable due to the sheer server load. Performance is still an important metric for them. It is why they created HHVM, Hack, and React.js.

How often do you hear of Facebook going down or breaking completely?

I agree, remember Twitter? It started getting popular quite a while ago, but servers couldn't handle the load which lead to a lot of down time.

Eventually, users just left twitter and they shut down the site a year later.

You say it like it's a bad thing.

Sure, break things when you're trying out a lot of new features. I get that, and for the user-facing side of Facebook, it makes sense. It doesn't make sense (and is extremely frustrating) when you apply the same principle to your third-party APIs.

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