For people with medium and high end devices, SPAs are mostly fine. For those with low end devices (which is a large part of the world), SPAs sometimes don't work well and this is true of many UI frameworks.
Real human beings benefit with you ship less code. And, if people are paying for data, which a lot of people still do, this matters.
Impressive to try and moralize this, but as someone born in "the large part of the world" you're aggrandizing for the typical project made in Next... I assure you that shipping a basic non-React project will be infinitely more appreciated than what RSC is enabling when combined with the style of frontend React encourages even if you do just render it down to a string.
> Real human beings benefit with you ship less code.
Real humans beings benefit from reliable and well-made applications more.
The difference between an good engineer and a truly excellent engineer is understanding how "worse" technical choices can result in a better user experience.
Junior engineers obsess over low level metrics like how many lines of code they right, but for some reason people graduate to obsessing over how many bytes of JS they shipped and don't think for a second:
- "how much of a surface area did I just open up for bugs in my chase?"
- "how much productivity spent catching up on this new paradigm would have been better spent making what my users want and need rather than tinkering with implementation details?"
- "how is adding this convoluted multifaceted multistep approach with an unstable technology going to affect the stability of my application?"
- "how much harder did I just make it to solve the bugs I do know about due to indirection?"
You're shipping less code down the pipe but you're dragging in insane amounts more code at every step of the way from compilation to the server runtime to enable it: the net result is a buggier, more complicated, less reliable application.
Of course, when you make money off people not thinking about this stuff, you don't encourage discussion of it.
> When someone else rolls it for you, they are free to decide what can and cannot exist there
I am directly stating this is a problem; I don't really think I understand your rebuttal. I agree such a platform assumes a massive amount of control over your business, but I find it highly disagreeable both that this is the way platforms behave, and that this is legally permissible.
Indeed, your analogy is as if the "mall" would allow Hooters on the property for 5 years, and then without recourse to the resident Hooters be allowed to nullify their lease & expunge their business overnight, without an authority to speak to nor legal protections against this eviction, which predictably was the entire lifeblood of the franchise as this "mall" was offering interesting web tricks like "available all over the globe with no need for redundancy".
Seems like a big problem no? By moving to the web, platforms assume even more control with far less regulation over your business than your landlord ever could dream of. Yikes.
I’m glad people are critiquing the technical parts of the post because it had me questioning everything I know about databases, which really isn’t a whole lot.
Most of her claims make a gigantic leap to conclusions. I'm asking for a source that shows, for example, a suicide that was _because_ of Facebook. Radicalization trends as another example have been on the rise in the US long before FB or social media, and there are many other countries where FB exists but radicalization is on the decline.
There is plenty wrong with FB, but this all seems like trying to pin a root cause to something b/c we need something to blame. Maybe correlation, but I don't see the causation.
In said study, Facebook acknowledges problems with the study itself as do other researchers without a dog in the fight. Let's see an independent study show the same thing.
An independent study of the effects of Social Media (instagram, FB, TikTok, whatever) needs no insider information. We're studying the effect, not the company.
Hypothesis: Instagram causes teenage girls to have a lower opinion of their bodies than they would otherwise have without Instagram.
Study: Have 2 cohorts of teenage girls rate their appearance or happiness with their bodies. The two cohorts are separated by those who use Instagram and those who don't. Run independently, of course.
This study is incredibly flawed (like the original) b/c it is self-reported happiness (incredibly subjective, ephemeral, and prone to bias) and subject to the same issues as all qualitative research. The only way to get any semblance of reliable data is with a _large_ set in each cohort. Even then, the data raises more questions than answers it provides. But, you could say after this study whether 'it seems Instagram may be harmful.'
It is also flawed for other reasons but you get the point. You don't need insider info to study the effect of something.
A magazine is not interactive. It's a unidirectional feedback flow. Magazine photos are also at a specific higher standard than the totality of Instagram pictures.
IOW, they are not equivalent. I'm sure we can glean something from those studies, but to get an answer to the question we're asking now, you'd need a better study than Facebook's own.
I agree with hermitwriter here. Currently I'm not at all convinced somebody can claim that all of these negative effects wouldn't have existed if we had a morally correct social media platform instead.
