3 ms·

Would be surprised if this extension doesn't shrink in a subsequent release

arcticbull 3y ago
Almost certainly just a dependency graph pruning issue. They likely pulled in too much of the main app into the plugin, which no longer has the strict sizing requirements that it used to. They'll trim it over the next couple of releases and the binary size shrink will look good on someone's performance review. Any kind of quantifiable changes like this counts as solid impact, heh, even if it has no real impact on usage. Let's be honest, nobody cares how big it is, so long as it doesn't force you to download over WiFi. Nobody sorts the App Store by 'size.' It's more important in the initial release to prove product market fit rather than spending time whittling down the share extension. They made the right call to get to market fast.
- tschwimmer 3y ago
  Your comments vis a vis app size are not correct. App size (and battery consumption) have a strong, linear inverse correlation with initial downloads and engagement. There are a number of reasons users may not like large app sizes including being on a strictly data capped phone plan or having bad reception. Even reduction of megabytes showed big changes to engagement (often bigger than feature changes). Reducing app size was and I imagine continues to be a high level strategic priority at Facebook. I agree with your overall conclusion however. Going to market with something is more important than optimizing for size. Source: former FB employee
- coldcode 3y ago
  They are missing substantial features like hashtags and follows, leaving you at their mercy to show you content. That would imply it's just a WIP shipped to nearly 100M people. It's doubtful it will ever shrink, given how much is missing, unless it's in there but not production quality. My guess is they shipped it in a hurry, and now there is enormous pressure on them to add all the missing features quickly, never a good plan.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    Features are a looooooong second place to userbase. Hashtags mean nothing compared to having millions of users to interact with. Launching in a hurry to capitalize on the mistakes of your competitors is an amazing plan. Better to ship without the feature than to ship the wrong feature and be stuck with the tech debt. Better to launch and acquire users when possible, and slowly add the necessary parts. A far more important piece than hashtags is the ability to search posts. But even that is far behind the ability to have good image sharing on posts, and Threads already does that better than Twitter, as the carousel allows far better viewing.
    - wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
      Hahah I love the bias here. Musk ships & changes things on the fly, Twitter is going to hell. Zuck releases threads, amazing he dears to launch an MVP that fast.
      - jeromegv 3y ago
        What has Musk shipped exactly that benefits non-blue users?
      - arcticbull 3y ago
        The difference is simply in stage. Threads is 0 to 1. Twitter is legacy. If Twitter shipped a massive extension it would rightly be mocked as it, until recently, had a staff of folks iterating and improving on it. Threads is probably 15-20 people proving a concept. The dissonance you’re pointing out is Twitter is being mocked for turning itself from incumbent to upstart when it certainly didn’t need to. It’s the stick in the spokes meme in corporate form. Threads on the other hand is a proper upstart from a company that very much isn’t - and notably one that hasn’t shown itself particularly adept at building 0 to 1 products. Meta is doing an uncharacteristically good job launching Threads and Twitter is doing an uncharacteristically bad job of maintaining and iterating on Twitter. [edit] I can't help but feel like the Twitter changes are just like the Digg re-design that led to its relegation to archive.org, and if this had never happened, I seriously doubt anyone would have challenged Twitter, let alone Zucc.

Almost certainly just a dependency graph pruning issue. They likely pulled in too much of the main app into the plugin, which no longer has the strict sizing requirements that it used to. They'll trim it over the next couple of releases and the binary size shrink will look good on someone's performance review. Any kind of quantifiable changes like this counts as solid impact, heh, even if it has no real impact on usage. Let's be honest, nobody cares how big it is, so long as it doesn't force you to download over WiFi. Nobody sorts the App Store by 'size.' It's more important in the initial release to prove product market fit rather than spending time whittling down the share extension. They made the right call to get to market fast.

tschwimmer 3y ago
Your comments vis a vis app size are not correct. App size (and battery consumption) have a strong, linear inverse correlation with initial downloads and engagement. There are a number of reasons users may not like large app sizes including being on a strictly data capped phone plan or having bad reception. Even reduction of megabytes showed big changes to engagement (often bigger than feature changes). Reducing app size was and I imagine continues to be a high level strategic priority at Facebook. I agree with your overall conclusion however. Going to market with something is more important than optimizing for size. Source: former FB employee
coldcode 3y ago
They are missing substantial features like hashtags and follows, leaving you at their mercy to show you content. That would imply it's just a WIP shipped to nearly 100M people. It's doubtful it will ever shrink, given how much is missing, unless it's in there but not production quality. My guess is they shipped it in a hurry, and now there is enormous pressure on them to add all the missing features quickly, never a good plan.
- epistasis 3y ago
  Features are a looooooong second place to userbase. Hashtags mean nothing compared to having millions of users to interact with. Launching in a hurry to capitalize on the mistakes of your competitors is an amazing plan. Better to ship without the feature than to ship the wrong feature and be stuck with the tech debt. Better to launch and acquire users when possible, and slowly add the necessary parts. A far more important piece than hashtags is the ability to search posts. But even that is far behind the ability to have good image sharing on posts, and Threads already does that better than Twitter, as the carousel allows far better viewing.
  - wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
    Hahah I love the bias here. Musk ships & changes things on the fly, Twitter is going to hell. Zuck releases threads, amazing he dears to launch an MVP that fast.
    - jeromegv 3y ago
      What has Musk shipped exactly that benefits non-blue users?
    - arcticbull 3y ago
      The difference is simply in stage. Threads is 0 to 1. Twitter is legacy. If Twitter shipped a massive extension it would rightly be mocked as it, until recently, had a staff of folks iterating and improving on it. Threads is probably 15-20 people proving a concept. The dissonance you’re pointing out is Twitter is being mocked for turning itself from incumbent to upstart when it certainly didn’t need to. It’s the stick in the spokes meme in corporate form. Threads on the other hand is a proper upstart from a company that very much isn’t - and notably one that hasn’t shown itself particularly adept at building 0 to 1 products. Meta is doing an uncharacteristically good job launching Threads and Twitter is doing an uncharacteristically bad job of maintaining and iterating on Twitter. [edit] I can't help but feel like the Twitter changes are just like the Digg re-design that led to its relegation to archive.org, and if this had never happened, I seriously doubt anyone would have challenged Twitter, let alone Zucc.