If a $500b company with a product used by 1/3 of the human population isnt a success, i dont know what is.

As for whether its beneficial to society is another question.

> If a $500b company with a product used by 1/3 of the human population isnt a success, i dont know what is.

It's not exactly a success (except from the most selfish and financial perspectives), it's more like proof you can abuse your users and get away with it.

This take reduces the idea too much. If everyone was just "Abused", they'd stop using it. Clearly, many people see benefit despite the abuses.

I used facebook messenger to keep in touch with my family across the world. My family is incapable of using signal, whatsapp, sms, email, telegram, phone calls, or anything else.

I also use facebook to buy stuff on the classifieds. It's like craigslist except there's at least a picture of someone and a paper trail if they decide to murder me.

My neighborhood organizes events using a facebook group and we've been able to have festivals and organize groups to go fight against companies that want to industrialize the area.

Facebook is trash at what it was initially built to be, but it is still very useful.

But the point is about the quality of the product, not the financial size or userbase of the company. Isn't it possible to have the (impressive) attribute of size while simultaneously making a bad product?

What about Myspace? $800m in revenue from 115m users. The classic 'good product' story, right?

People that are calling it a failure because of quality are missing the point.

Facebook makes its money by leaving the feed an unorganized mess of random posts, leaving the user disoriented so that more eyeball time can be harvested for advertisements while the user searches for the content they want (or gets stuck mindlessly scrolling the infinite reel of videos and other content for that dopamine hit).

It's not lost on the army of six figure salaried engineers that a lot could be done easily to make the experience better. But that isn't in the interest of the shareholders. The quality is a feature, not a bug.

It's used regularly by over 1/3 of the human population. I think that by itself tells you it's an useful product. It might have some flaws (as do many other products), but it seems the vast majority of users overlook those flaws. I'm definitely not a regular FB user, and even hate it, but I can't deny many many people find it useful in their daily lives, flaws and all.

The break things experiment was a roaring success. But they ditched "break things" a long time ago, and arguably it's the new phase of stability they're struggling with.

I completely agree. The current codebase, a rebuild on React called FB5, is very broken at the best of times.

In fact, it's sometimes unusable on Firefox on an M1 MacBook Air.

For one thing, the "report a bug" tool doesn't work in my browser but it works perfectly fine in Chrome. I can't click the dropdown boxes— they're empty. I also can't submit my report in the rare instance the drop downs work.

I also get weird trouble where my news feed will just start randomly loading crap and go into a rapid endless scroll loading new stories. The only way I can stop it is to do a hard refresh.

There are so many problems with posts not updating... You get a notification about some new comment like and when you click the notification, it just shows how it looked the last time you loaded it.

Again, the only way to see the update is CMD + R.

It's so broken and the latest interface doesn't even feel good, new, fresh, or like you want to explore.

> move fast and break things

This is basically the same philosophy as "Worse is Better" (in contrast to "Do the Right Thing") and it's how UNIX and C took over "like a computer virus".

I'd say Facebook has succeeded in that "viral" aspect, unfortunately for society. Apparently, their broken interface is good enough for a lot of people.

Their software development philosophy is not the reason why Facebook is falling apart. It's their lack of vision, lack of respect, decency, human values, care and social responsibility.

My biggest piss off with Facebook is they refuse to mod their site. The reporting function is useless and no matter how many times I’ve reported profiles they do nothing. Also the reporting options are a joke and have a limited number of options to which you can report something. I had an old acquaintance say hi. A week later I say hey how is it going. He replies how are you. 2 days later his picture changes to some random guy and his info is completely changed and it’s obvious his account was taken over. I tried to report this to Facebook but there is no obvious report section to describe what I saw but picked the one that best fit and later get a response back that they have decided to keep the account active. Also dozens of times reported spam accounts and scam accounts and nothing ever happens. What is wrong with you Facebook?

Surely there are trivial ways for them to detect when a name changes drastically (ie. not just the surname), or when the biometric features of the new profile photo don’t match the old one?

They could even extend their biometric capabilities could even step into the ‘slightly unethical’ realm, by perhaps detecting a flirtatious message from a profile with a cute Japanese girl, via somewhere in Northern Africa. Even just putting basic controls around messages from complete strangers.

This feels like something that would annoy the trans community quite a bit.