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If you want an example of company that crumbles under its weight because of code quality, look at Frendster. Maybe you never heard about it, but it was the lea
by eloisant 6y ago
If you want an example of company that crumbles under its weight because of code quality, look at Frendster.
Maybe you never heard about it, but it was the leading social network before MySpace then Facebook.
It was unable to scale, and as a consequence suffered bad performances and downtime and eventually all the users moved to more recent SN.
MySpace also had similar problems, their main app was an crappy ColdFusion app that they struggled to update to add features or fix bugs.
Facebook on the other hand, was far better technically and it's probably why they won the social network war.
- lmm 6y agoThe version I heard was that Friendster failed to scale not because of low quality code but because the CEO refused to compromise on a feature that was inherently unscalable. MySpace was sold to News Corporation for millions, it definitely didn't fail as a startup. There's a point where code quality becomes important, I don't think anyone's denying that, but it's after you've got traction and product-market fit.
- andrewem 6y agoHere’s a 2011 HN post describing that claim about an unscalable feature in more detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2370291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2370291 (That was linked from http://highscalability.com/blog/2007/11/13/friendster-lost-lead-because-of-a-failure-to-scale.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2007/11/13/friendster-lost-l... but I had to fix the link, since it went to apps.ycombinator.com which must have been the HN URL at the time. Maybe dang can update DNS to make those old links redirect? Everything after the host was still correct.)