Yes those diagrams exist, but you've got to remember that these components are constantly changing as well as new components being added and others being removed all the time. It's a beast and perhaps I was a little liberal with my assertion that "NO ONE" understands it. It's possible to understand at a high level: eg "...and then the posts get filtered through this ranking component"

But then that ranking component can change week over week so if you thought you understood all of the ranking mechanics last week, then you probably have some catching up to do this week.

There's also a lot of people working on this so stuff changes fast and often. Think about all of Facebook's different products vyying for attention in the feed. Think of all the PMs with agendas who want their product in the feed in certain ways.

Sounds like they need to develop a news feed news feed to keep them fed with all the latest news about their news feed development.

Plus side: if it works well, they can just replace their current unspeakable Lovecraftian horror of a system with the meta feed they develop. A new dawn for all.

> There's also a lot of people working on this so stuff changes fast and often. Think about all of Facebook's different products vyying for attention in the feed. Think of all the PMs with agendas who want their product in the feed in certain ways.

If you can't maintain a complete understanding of the process, you are playing a guessing game.

This isn't some special magical FB-centric problem.

And yet Healthcare.gov has had far more downtime and other issues than Facebook so...

Well, their aim is to create a system that’s completely compliant to spec. Facebook, as the greatgrandparent mentioned, isn’t even trying to.

This is why facebook is about to go bankrupt.