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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

What annoys me about Facebook is that:

* Production appear to be the only QA they do

* Most of the time _something_ doesn't work... then you come back and it suddenly works, then it's broken again

* The news feed is non-deterministic. You can refresh and see something completely different

* Features [like the one in question] are always "opt-out" or "on by default". The attitude is "force the user to use the new feature" rather than improving it until people _actually want_ to use it

I'm glad to see them get into hot water on that last point. I see this user-hostile "we know better than you" authoritarian attitude taking over quite a few tech companies.

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The news feed is non-deterministic. You can refresh and see something completely different

This always struck me as intentional. It gets you to refresh more and stay on the site longer hoping to get a little bit of something new.

Yeah, as a user I actually like it. They have so much data that I can refresh and usually find something more interesting than the queue I'm standing in. It doesn't work somewhere like Twitter/Instagram where the order of posts can matter and people post multiple times per day but on Facebook it generally works.

To each their own, I can see how some would like it but it's absolutely infuriating to me to be clicking away, and then suddenly see something interesting that I want to open in a new tab. So I go back, and surprise! Entirely new list of items.

"Oh, I guess my friend didn't post that, Facebook was just showing me something they reacted to".

No way of ever finding it again, unless if someone can conjure up or point me where to watch my friends reactions? The inconsistency of the newsfeed (between the above behavior, and the constant need to change the sort order to "most recent" because no matter how many times I choose that option I always find it flips back to "Top stories") is by far the most aggravating thing about using the site to me, personally.

On Facebook I use their 'saved' feature so I save anything I see that I find interesting before moving away. I totally understand though as I have this problem with Instagram.

The really annoying part is when you accidentally click some link that opens in the same tab, or click back, or do anything else that needs to reload the page to open the feed. You effectively lose all progress you've made reading through it.

This is my biggest problem with it. I don't mind so much that if I force refresh of the timeline it changes but if I click on something, either on purpose or accidently, and I come back I am not where I left off and the timeline is completely different now.

> Features [like the one in question] are always "opt-out" or "on by default". The attitude is "force the user to use the new feature" rather than improving it until people _actually want_ to use it

Actually, they are not even "opt out" just "not now" (temporal opt out). Some time later, they WILL ask you again and then some time later again. Pretty annoying!

* Production appear to be the only QA they do

This [1] is a good video on part of their QA process, and it gives an overview of how something goes from dev to production.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcVx3g3SmmY

> * Most of the time _something_ doesn't work... then you come back and it suddenly works, then it's broken again

It does say, "Move fast and break things" on the walls there.

It seems like this would eventually lead to a codebase that's, at Facebook's size, unmaintainable garbage. How do they make it work?

> How do they make it work?

Given that things are broken so often, maybe they don't.

#3 is why I use Most Recent sort, which of course they boot me out of every once in a while, and I have to re-select.

So do I, but even that seems non-deterministic. FB is thoroughly awful, but still somewhat useful to me.

Bookmark this instead to avoid being booted out of it:

https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

They embrace their culture: Move fast and break things.

Before I complain, is there anyway to save a post on fb? Every now and then I like something and want to get back to it someday...

Yes. In the top right of the post there is an expandable menu. One of the choices is save post or save link to post.

I don't like the news feed, but it's still better than most apps.

I almost quit FB. They got me back with the news feed, but as always, with a fake idenity. It's just going to get better--which is troubling.

I see so many new start-ups, and wonder why I still can't get a good news site. A site that takes advantage of big data?(Yes--I know you don't have that easy "viewed" data).

If I was designing a news site, I would first need a good source of news. I would then need a program (didn't say algorithm because it's overused) that feeds the news to the customers on data(views--where to get that? Twitter? Google?). Then you need the program to filter out the gratituios views(any news story with a big ass, or sexual in nature). The API needs to be intuitive.

There's probally a website out there that accomplishes this, but I'm too lazy to hunt, and will not pay yet.

Hell--at this point; I thinking of incorporating a serious news site, with a light porn site. It seems like porn is the only thing that most people will shill up for?

People pay money for porn?

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