what the f... does "culture" have to do with FB vs Snapchat. I get it, they copied the functionality fast but only because it was a twist of what FB already does not because FB-engies were the best in town but because it was too easy.
There's rarely a single reason for the success of a big beast such as Facebook. Many older social networks had a 'network', Google Plus had good engineering and design... but HN's disdain for all things FB gravitates them towards choosing the least charitable reason so that they can minimize the credit that Zuck et al need to be given.
There's copying and then there's copying well and fast. Copying isn't bad in and of itself - not at all.
>> If you think it's easy then you haven't developed consumer applications at that scale and quality before >> And if you don't understand why scale matters then you simply don't have experience with it.
cringe
2. You said that I think only a handful of Facebook engineers are the gods of scalability. I never said this. I simply intended to give credit where credit is due. They executed extremely well (in my opinion) and they deserve credit (in my opinion). Also - engineers are not the only ones who help scale a product through infrastructure. As I mentioned before, there is also product architecture that needs to be considered when introducing a new feature. The larger question becomes How does this new feature work to provide value in the context of all of the other things that X does?. For something as complex as Facebook or Instagram, this is hard. A very simple example that illustrates this is user education. It's far different when you have a few users on a simple product that does 2 things and you introduce a 3rd than when you have millions of users on a product that does a thousand things and you introduce the 1,001st.
I don't understand why you're on a mission to discredit people's work or the challenges they face when building something. It's possible to not like something and still recognize that building that thing was an achievement in some way. It doesn't have to be either or.
If you have counter-arguments to what I'm saying and they're informed from your experiences or what you've learned, I'm genuinely interested in hearing them. I don't care much about being right as much as I do about pushing the conversation forward. But I think we can both agree that saying "cringe" doesn't really help anyone learn anything or push the conversation forward.