Agreed. There are a lot of really smart engineers at these companies. No doubt about it! They often have to pioneer solutions to challenging problems, which have downstream benefits for everyone else.

I do wonder though if we will look back on this period in history and regret the economic and cultural incentives which have co-opted so many smart people into the service of ... advertising.

100%. We spend more money working on cures for erectile dysfunction than ebola. We spend more money working on cures male pattern baldness than we do diseases that plague the third world. How many smart amazing engineers have worked for the auto industry over the last 100 years when their expertise could of been used in a civil manner to improve infrastructure and our overall existence? This is capitalism and whoever has the money can buy up the most talent. Whether that is a good use for that talent doesn't seem to matter.

I am guessing the people working on the erectile dysfunction medicines are motivated by financial compensation; and that it happens that the people who provide such compensation do happen to intersect with the people who have ED but do not intersect with those who have Ebola.

This is more than capitalism, it's freedom. If you are suggesting that we spend more money on Ebola or public transport, that's tyranny.

“We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.” -Kurt Vonnegut, University of Oregon speech, 1990

> This is more than capitalism, it's freedom. If you are suggesting that we spend more money on Ebola or public transport, that's tyranny.

Yikes. It’s actually exactly capitalism. We spent more money than god on COVID research basically from 0. That research didn’t restrict freedoms. We decided to co-opt capitalism and pump money directly where we needed it. This incentives people to research Covid within the capitalist market. We could do the same for Ebola or Public transportation but we chose not to.

> This is more than capitalism, it's freedom. If you are suggesting that we spend more money on Ebola or public transport, that's tyranny.

Anything can be whatever if you define your terms in obtuse or unusual ways.

Launder it by burying the questionable definitions a couple layers down from the garbage you’ve set out to “prove”, and you can fool even some smart folks.

The right word is surveillance.

Ubiquitous surveillance is what pays most of the VerySmart gathered here.

Advertising is just the part of the market we can talk about in stand ups.

Advertising is the reason for the surveilance. The whole reason Facebook gathers all this data on its users is to drive their ad platform.

Knowledge is power.

Do you really think that the usefulness of knowledge is limited to trying to sell you stuff?

If so, you’ve never thought about it very deeply.

I have a totally opposite view. FB at least is an "easy" problem in that it's a free product that's mostly casual use. The end result I see is that FB is massively inconsistent, you can literally see different parts of the FB system having a different view on a moderately heavily commented post. Comments will pop in and out of existence on a given device, and different people will have wildly different views for up to a few minutes. If accuracy mattered FB would be just awful.

It's called eventual consistency...

No, it's something newer; last year or so. They show "top comments", with a "view all" option, but that "view all" option will often say there's 49 comments and zero show up, even on an old post.

The Graph API has also fallen apart, with their solution being to close the bug submission tool for most issue types. The "replacement" is a discussion forum where no Facebook employees visit, most posts have zero responses, and no issue tracking whatsoever.

Seems like Facebook is more in maintenance mode vs Instagram. Lets not also forget they made a massive push into Metaverse so I'm sure engineering was stretched thin on their other platforms.

Wasn't Graph API going away because of that whole Cambridge Analyitica scandal?

This actually seems like a great way to say it: maintenance mode. I'm really shocked at how badly facebook.com runs in Firefox latest on an M1 MacBook Air. It's completely broken and has been since they've launched this React version.

Isn't instagram using more or less the same tech stacks they were using before the acquisition?

I wonder if there were also people motivated by their hatred of what happened post Twitter. I recall that Meta hired a bunch of ex-Twitter people. Some probably had an axe to grind.

Whatever they did Twitter folks or not, it was an extremely slick launch. Any Threads people reading this should pat themselves on the back.

On a side note: It was also fun watching Musk fuming that week when the Threads numbers came in. :D

Except that they botched the most important part of the launch by releasing a bare-bones MVP too early.

I disagree, I felt it had the features a typical user would be ok with. II didn't really feel like I was missing anything but maybe im too much of a lite user.

It didn't have search, trending topics, DMs, a web version, non-Instagram account creation, or availability in Europe. All are very popular. No real innovation over Twitter either, but that's not unexpected.

This is excusable in a normal startup MVP, but not when you promote it all over Instagram.

You are making an assumption that there is a tighter coupling with Instagram's infra than in reality...especially at launch.

I could see maybe trending topics as possibly a feature that would be nice to have at launch but the others?

The following are my thoughts if I were a PM choosing features.

search - What are you going to search for when the app is brand new? I believe we did have user search as I recall using it so you must be referring to content search.

DMs - Do we know what their anticipated user projections were going to be? I could see this feature being a worthless endeavor vs other things they could have done if the userbase ended up being small.

a web version - These guys are a mobile first company, the large % of users are on mobile, their existing web properties are either in maintenance mode(facebook) or just thin wrappers(instagram). I can see why this wasn't a priority.

non-Instagram account creation - Sounds like either this was a way to bypass overhead in their typical new user generation or they felt one click signup from IG would encourage more active users/reduce issues of bots which may not have been thought out at launch. It would be interesting to learn more about this unclear part of the infra.

Europe - Even for big company launches they typically american first, likely for the same reasons why we dont see big new tech companies ever launched from Europe anymore: too many little issues dealing with all the different countries in the union, issues with complying with various regulations.

See their friends updates instantly? Is this a joke? You do realize real-time reverse chronological feeds are long dead right? meta optimizes for the "algo", which is to shove ads and influencers and trending nonsense in front of your face.

Can you please not post in the cross-examination or flamewar style? The damage it does to the channel isn't worth it, and you can always make your substantive points without this.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Both Facebook and Instagram have real time reverse chronological feeds. Stop spreading bullshit.

lol. i have respect for these skilled engineers. but let's not pretend making posts show up on a feed is as difficult as curing cancer.

half the time my app screen freezes or there's an issue with posts showing. it was good at the start and that's how fb gained users, but at this point people put up with the poor UX because of friction.