Ask HN: Has Facebook always been this buggy?

6 pointsogwh4y ago6 comments

Long story short over all these years I never bothered with Facebook. It turns out some hobby groups only exist on there, so I created an account about a week ago.

I'm shocked at how buggy the Android app is for such a large tech company with so many years and so much money being thrown at engineers. I hear on HN about massive 6-7 figure salaries yet their main product barely works.

Some of the bugs I see every time I use the app are:

1) App randomly closes

2) Hiding suggested group posts says they won't show me that again... Followed by endless pages of posts from those groups

3) Closed suggested friends reappear as soon as I reopen the app

4) Pressing the back button sometimes closes the app instead of going back a screen

5) The bar to sort posts randomly appears when scrolling then disappears just as quickly with no known way to get it back

6) Tapping notifications doesn't scroll to the comment referenced, half of the time it's not even in the list

And overall just constant confusion because nothing seems to do what you expect.

It's almost as if the app is actively trying to prevent the user doing what they want.

So I wanted to know if Facebook has always been this bad at UX and execution but people just put up with it or is it a recent phenomena? Or perhaps Facebook has become so widely used that no regular user even notices, like when you take a shit but don't notice how bad it smells because your brain filters it out?

6 comments

killtimeatwork4y ago

It's the same for most of the FAANG giants. The Amazon Prime Video app for Windows is basically unusable (frequently lags, stutters, crashes). Google Drive Windows app frequently crashes (or crashed, I think they replaced it with something else recently). Apple's iTunes was always a confusing mess. Microsoft's Windows 10 is obviously a giant failure in terms of UI if nothing else (because half of the functionality uses old Win7 UI style, the other half uses the new Win10 style - and for many features, some aspects of the feature are found in the old Win7 window, while other aspects in the new Win10 window...). Uber/UberEats - what a mess (my user experience on their website showed everything that is wrong with using "eventual consistency" approach to data).

The one tech giant that is IMO delivering a product that meets minimum quality bar is Netflix. I've never seen a bug in their service. Having said that, what they do is simple compared to what other tech giants do, but then again, even a audio/video streaming service can be completely screwed up (see Windows app for Amazon Prime Video).

In general, software development is very hard and the way these companies do it - with a team of always-new engineers (few people stay on a team for more than 2-3 years and thus few people understand what's going on on a deeper level), with apparently little testing - is not conducive to quality products. [1] Also, the recent trend of microservices means basically companies have given up on delivering a cohesive, tested product - instead every team if deploying their crap to prod and hope they don't introduce bugs that break downstream consumers - and downstream consumers protect against that with failover in circuit breakers etc. It's basically as if the companies admit that they don't know how to do cross-team coordination, quality assurance etc. and every team is fending off for themselves.

[1] IIRC someone from Microsoft openly admitted that the reason for why they decided to make Win10 a Frankenstein with two different UIs stitched together was that nobody understood the Win7 code any more (relevant people changed teams/left company), so any rewrite to use Win10 widgets was out of question.

toast04y ago

> I've never seen a bug in their service. Having said that, what they do is simple compared to what other tech giants do

Setting and enforcing boundaries to keep your product apparently simple isn't easy. Frankly, neither is consistently making an apparently simple product keep working; especially when it needs to work on so many devices.

IMHO as a former WhatsApp employee, Facebook has no corporate interest in product simplicity and does not incentivize product keeps working as expected either. People respond to incentives and engineering is incentivized to launch big things, not to keep them working. Personally, I have philosophical issues with the FB way of addressing reliability, but that's a rant for another time.

BizarroLand4y ago

Netflix does have that occasional bug when you've been scrolling for something to watch for a while and the description updates fall out of sync with the title.

For reference: https://imgur.com/gallery/v5GXX

randomopining4y ago

I think they're always A/B testing stuff in a prod env, since they need the data.

fspacef4y ago

I’m afraid this is a recent development in Facebook mobile and sometimes in web applications. I think after the recent hack/ takedown it has gotten worse.

Facebook has definitely apologized for its bugs and has its best engineers working on the problem.

cblconfederate4y ago

AFAIK it s super heavy, desktop included. And keep in mind that the vast majority of people who use it use cheap, not high-end android phones. Their web isn't better either, barely usable in a low end desktop. They don't care though, the users keep returning for other reasons so there is no incentive. Only whatsapp seems to be optimized.

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