5 ms·

As an aside, I’m always surprised at just how bad Meta’s software quality is, especially for a FAANG company with lots of expensive engineers. Instagram and Fa

As an aside, I’m always surprised at just how bad Meta’s software quality is, especially for a FAANG company with lots of expensive engineers. Instagram and Facebook are some of the buggiest platforms I use. I often run into bugs in several key user journeys that go unresolved and it baffles me how they don’t pick up on them. One of the problems is it’s basically impossible to get in touch with Meta to report them.

DoingIsLearning 3y ago
No positive incentives, nobody gets promoted doing bug fixes, everybody tries to focus on hot features. No negative incentives, it's not safety-critical so nobody will recall or sue.
kristiandupont 3y ago
I can't speak to what is going on but one thing I've heard that makes things difficult for at least the frontend teams is that they are battling ad blockers. In order to work around them, they create incredibly obfuscated HTML that no one would normally ever create.
- benterix 3y ago
  So how is this working for them? Because thanks for uBlock Origin I haven't seen an ad on FB for years.
  - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
    Adblock plus is what they focused on, back in the day at least.
- c7DJTLrn 3y ago
  And this is where some of the greatest, most educated minds in computing are going. What a waste.
KingOfCoders 3y ago
If you think they are buggy, become a seller on Amazon. The buggiest software I have ever had. And they are influencers with the "two pizza rule". The second worst is Spotify. It still does not remember where you've stopped listening on radio plays after a decade. From the influencer people who brought you "tribes".
saiya-jin 3y ago
Strong agree here, at least on FB (don't use Instagram because why). I fully tolerated their growing pains back in the day when site went down for hours, or frequent blank pages after some standard click on something. The thing is, even when things improved over time its still buggy as hell. I had so many problems with uploading photo albums for example, all the time for past 15 years. I used to put thousands of pictures from my full frame camera travel and mountain adventures on FB till I got fed up with wasting so much time redoing it all and battling with the site. They literally pushed away genuine content creator, at least in my social graph I was by far the most active one, and folks liked what I uploaded. Sometimes it uploaded twice. Sometimes some photos refused to upload, while being same in every aspect as rest which worked OK. Wiping out descriptions I painstakingly put to every photo. Sometimes, even these days, whole feed is blank, just menus on the side. I deleted their mobile app since if was snooping for all the data it could get and draining battery while not used at all - this was actually a great move for my own personal happiness so not complaining about this one. I'd say that FB is so successful despite their consistent lack of technical quality. They just nailed perfectly the hole in the market people didn't even know they wanted and their timing to market. This is not unique to FB - if there is little pressure from cca equal competition, every business I've seen is subpar, and/or overpriced. Then you use google's products and its night and day. I don't recall a single bug that affected me, ever. Too bad Google+ never stood a chance.
- benterix 3y ago
  > I had so many problems with uploading photo albums for example I suspect it is by design, in a way. FB is not a photo storage platform, they need to compress the images a lot. A single photo may increase interaction and hence metrics like MAU but a whole album is unlikely to do so.

DoingIsLearning 3y ago

No positive incentives, nobody gets promoted doing bug fixes, everybody tries to focus on hot features. No negative incentives, it's not safety-critical so nobody will recall or sue.

kristiandupont 3y ago

I can't speak to what is going on but one thing I've heard that makes things difficult for at least the frontend teams is that they are battling ad blockers. In order to work around them, they create incredibly obfuscated HTML that no one would normally ever create.

benterix 3y ago
So how is this working for them? Because thanks for uBlock Origin I haven't seen an ad on FB for years.
- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  Adblock plus is what they focused on, back in the day at least.
c7DJTLrn 3y ago
And this is where some of the greatest, most educated minds in computing are going. What a waste.

KingOfCoders 3y ago

If you think they are buggy, become a seller on Amazon. The buggiest software I have ever had. And they are influencers with the "two pizza rule". The second worst is Spotify. It still does not remember where you've stopped listening on radio plays after a decade. From the influencer people who brought you "tribes".

saiya-jin 3y ago

Strong agree here, at least on FB (don't use Instagram because why). I fully tolerated their growing pains back in the day when site went down for hours, or frequent blank pages after some standard click on something. The thing is, even when things improved over time its still buggy as hell. I had so many problems with uploading photo albums for example, all the time for past 15 years. I used to put thousands of pictures from my full frame camera travel and mountain adventures on FB till I got fed up with wasting so much time redoing it all and battling with the site. They literally pushed away genuine content creator, at least in my social graph I was by far the most active one, and folks liked what I uploaded. Sometimes it uploaded twice. Sometimes some photos refused to upload, while being same in every aspect as rest which worked OK. Wiping out descriptions I painstakingly put to every photo. Sometimes, even these days, whole feed is blank, just menus on the side. I deleted their mobile app since if was snooping for all the data it could get and draining battery while not used at all - this was actually a great move for my own personal happiness so not complaining about this one. I'd say that FB is so successful despite their consistent lack of technical quality. They just nailed perfectly the hole in the market people didn't even know they wanted and their timing to market. This is not unique to FB - if there is little pressure from cca equal competition, every business I've seen is subpar, and/or overpriced. Then you use google's products and its night and day. I don't recall a single bug that affected me, ever. Too bad Google+ never stood a chance.

benterix 3y ago
> I had so many problems with uploading photo albums for example I suspect it is by design, in a way. FB is not a photo storage platform, they need to compress the images a lot. A single photo may increase interaction and hence metrics like MAU but a whole album is unlikely to do so.