The latest Cloudflare outage is crazy -- all POST bodies are dropped between my browser and my backend via my local Cloudflare POP. It's not affecting all regions, but the regions it affects are completely FUBAR.
424 karma · joined October 14, 2012
A few considerations off the top of my head:
- relationships are extremely fragile and can exist in all sorts of awkward middle states, outside of just "friend enough to notify when I'm in town" vs not. the risk of creating awkward meatspace side effects is extremely high with this kind of thing, with very large downside risk that human beings are very attuned to. for example: exes, former bosses or colleagues gone sideways, people you said something weird to once at a party, stalkers, etc. are all people you might have in your contacts
- relatedly, contacts growing out of sync organically over time is actually a feature, not a bug. it's easy to let contacts die when they die by themselves without having to prune them -- and nobody's delicate feelings get hurt by letting this happen
- existing on a mobile phone while not being an attention-sucking nightmare cesspool -- while also not /creating/ another attention-sucking cesspool, despite having all the social data necessary to do so -- seems like an impossible challenge. how do you get people to remember your little app in a sea of Trending Flamebait notifications? (others have noted this related to funding model, but that part feels surmountable, especially as a passion project from a billionaire)
...
1) the CH iOS app itself has a long history of powering other prototypes / small communities before CH existed — so I think the early engineers were leveraging what they had already, vs starting out from zero. (I think this is why they were able to find fit with CH - ability to move fast and try different things.)
2) I built an app with RN at a previous company and it was a reasonable experience, but custom UI / transitions / etc was pretty much out the window. I don't think it's an obvious choice by any means to go with RN, especially for a media-heavy app. Also, expanding that particular RN app I had built to Android was no easy task — the UI mostly "just worked" when we built the Android container, but many of our third party libraries didn't work at all on Android, and managing app navigation was a huge hassle between the two platforms. We ended up shelving the android effort altogether and shut the whole project down a bit later. :)
The job of the cofounder is to create a thing that people want, which has nothing to do with performance. The first goal is capturing lightning in a bottle with social products. Performance doesn’t matter until the lightning is there, and 99%+ of the time you never have to worry about performance, because you don’t get the lightning. So, probably the correct choice is leveraging the tech stack that gives you the best shot at capturing the lightning. Django seemed to help!