About two weeks ago, I couldn’t update my status on Facebook, like it just wouldn’t let me, showing me “Invalid Request” error messages even though my requests are totally valid DAMMIT.
And then just like that the fail stopped and I could update, inexplicably. In my humble experience, I’ve come across so many Facebook bugs I’ve given up on getting frustrated and now just hope they’ll eventually go away. I regularly just straight up don’t receive Messages and can we just talk about how the Like button just doesn’t work. Can we?
Former Facebook engineer (and current Phabricator creator) Evan Priestley has taken the opposite route; In the spirit of coding excellence, Priestly has created a Pinterest log of over 30 Facebook bugs he’s tracked since September 2011. It’s really impressive.
“Facebook is the buggiest software I use regularly, by a wide margin,” Priestley writes on Quora. But to Facebook’s credit, Priestley argues that its software doesn’t particularly have to be high quality, his most solid point being, “By paying less attention to quality, Facebook has been able to focus on other things, like making the company a fun place to work at that can attract and retain talented engineers. Facebook would probably be less fun if it cared more about quality.”
“Social networking isn’t really critical to people,” he says, which it’s why its okay to maybe not be able to update your Facebook status via web for a week, even though it is super-annoying. This kind of stuff is pretty amazing too.
Side note: I have this theory that Priestley is also behind this. It just makes sense.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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