Comment by tannedNerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tannedNerd | Hacker News Reader

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While this could be related to the holiday shut down this is the longest they have gone without updating their apps over the holiday shut down in a few years.

“Dec.19, 2018: We fixed the tubes that bring you videos – and some bugs too.

Jan.7.2019: Fixed what needed fixing and squished some bugs.

Dec.15, 2019: Bug fixes, stability improvements, repairs to time-space continuum, etc. etc.

Jan.5, 2020: Fixed what needed fixing and squished some bugs.

Dec.6, 2020: Fixed bugs, improved performance, took the afternoon off.”

If I were to bet they are probably waiting to see how people react to the labels. FB listing everything and it not making major news doesn’t bode well for people caring about these long term.

Am I the only one who finds these kind of "what's changed" messages extremely annoying? They literally tell you nothing. They might as well put an empty space as what has changed.

The same goes for other companies that put useless messages:

- Netflix and the weekly updates (what are they possibly updating about choosing and streaming video and seeking to a point in time that requires WEEKLY updates????)

- Slack and their smarmy update reasons.

- All Google apps.

Nobody would accept if they released cars with the same lack of highlighting of new features. "It's better!"

you're definitely not the only one. however, your car analogy doesn't really work as everyone has a fairly basic understanding of automobiles to the points they can hold a discussion about what's new in a more recent model. i don't think the same applies to software. plus the update frequency is much higher.

still on the analogy, with more recent models you also don't get detailed updates about what changed in the internals (e.g. "we're now using fuses Xyz mk2" vs "we've updated an internal dependency").

i guess making their update messages more interesting would require much more transparency on their development processes (e.g. open bug tracking). there aren't many solid reasons (in their pov, i assume) for them to do it.

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