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Slight tangent here but is it me or has the experience in social networks taken a hit? Feels like it was better with low complexity hack technology than with te
by rubyfan 11y ago
Slight tangent here but is it me or has the experience in social networks taken a hit? Feels like it was better with low complexity hack technology than with technology solutions focused on scaling the experience. I sometimes wonder if we are changing experience too much for technology optimization.
- LinkedIn has been terrible for about 2-3 years since things stopped updating real time and the timeline started getting random
- Facebook randomly suggesting things from your graph based on what it thinks you like
- Twitter I heard soon will be no longer in chronological order?!?
I think there is something to be said for low complexity MySQL and memcached.
- chrisseaton 11y agoI don't think any of those things are caused by optimisations or needing to scale. Saying that Facebook is recommending things simultaneously at random, based on a reccomendation algorithm, and also as an optimisation which wouldn't be needed if they used MySQL, is obviously nonsense.
- rubyfan 11y ago@chrisseaton - big fan of your work, eagerly awaiting Truffle JRuby production ready release. I'm not saying MySQL > some specialized solution for scale... I'm guess I'm drawing the correlation that when companies have to make investments like this they are also trading off experience, or maybe to your point screwing up the experience using recommenders and algorithms instead of letting my feed flow.
- chrisseaton 11y agoYeah I see your clarification in your other comment where you say that when they start to scale it opens the door for tons of other complexity. That makes more sense.
- bananaoomarang 11y agoI don't think that's to do with stack complexity, more like: "Crap how do we make money" "Crap how do we retain users/keep them here longer" The stack is to do with providing a fast performance to vast numbers + making it easier to work on for engineers than it might be at that complexity.
- rubyfan 11y agoyeah I hear that and to be clear I'm not blaming all their experience issues with the stack. But there are definitely stack complexity trade offs when you get to the scale of these guys. Also could be more correlation not causation that when you get to a certain scale and more stack complexity you also start hiring specialized staff that end up diluting the culture and spirit of a startup.