
TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004) - lachm
http://web.archive.org/web/20041101143311/http://www.stanforddaily.com/tempo?page=content&id=13497&repository=0001_article
======
terminado
Jesus christ. It's so hard to believe that's only from 2004.

I feel like that era transpired 40 years ago. The period of time before
smartphones feels like it happened in the 1970's to me.

The difference between 2000 and 2015 is so absurdly radical it begs disbelief.

~~~
flashman
> It's so hard to believe that's only from 2004.

It's surprising Holt could still get away with writing "Cornell girls are
hideous" as late as 2004!

~~~
zapu
I assumed there is some sort of rivalry between Stanford and Cornell - I'm not
in US so I wouldn't know. But you would not see this kind of statement in a
paper nowadays, that's for sure.

~~~
wiredfool
Cornell had of a rivalry with Harvard (who can't play hockey).

Stanford really wasn't a concern, they're on the other coast. Though, this was
from afew years after my time.

------
wallabie
In the distant future, when they discover the endless jars of eggs and sperm
in Mark Zuckerberg's basement, somewhere, Chris Holt will be saying "I told
you so."

~~~
kowdermeister
I mean, no one in their right mind REALLY believed that Facebook needs all
that server farms, right? :)

~~~
72deluxe
They did when they ran PHP. Now they compile their PHP to C++ so it'll run
faster and with less CPU and cooling requirements.

Also, writing PHP is easier than C++ so it's beneficial in that they get a
wider pool of developers to use, and they can pay less.

Genius really.

So, now their server farms must be a cover-up, or they're using an old version
of MySQL that kept a lot of its clustering data in RAM and are afraid it'll
bomb out :-)

~~~
seattle_spring
So they can pay less? Do you have any idea how much FB pays?

~~~
72deluxe
No but I know that PHP developers get paid less than C++, typically. That's
particularly the case here in the UK.

I would wager than employing an army of C++ devs would be costlier than
employing an army of PHP devs.

------
aluminussoma
Though satire, the fake Moskovitz quote was interesting: "I don’t want to
elaborate too much on our end goal / purpose, but I will say we are not
without a plan."

I wonder at what point it became clear to Facebook that they were sitting on a
targeted advertising goldmine? Surely it was not on the minds of Zuckerberg
and Moskovitz (or anyone else!) in the company's early years.

------
the_watcher
This is not what I expected it to be.

~~~
michaelchisari
College satire is always so cringey, Ivy League especially so.

~~~
WoodenChair
Stanford is not in the Ivy League.

~~~
michaelchisari
Ivy Plus.

------
teddyh
> _Many people have told me that they are surprised that a computer science
> major from Harvard designed this people-meeting service._

Can Facebook still be considered a “people-meeting service”?

~~~
CoryG89
I don't know that Zuckerberg ever considered it a "people-meeting" service.

~~~
andrewstuart2
That's exactly the purpose a literal face book served before Facebook
implemented a digital equivalent. Granted, it's not been the sole purpose of
the site for quite a while, but originally that was the value proposition for
users.

------
donretag
Not sure why the author is so perplexed about thefacebook.com. Friendster and
Myspace were already in existence and popular. Facebook was just another
competitor with slightly different features (or lack there of (no
customizations))

~~~
navs
Not forgetting Hi5 and Bebo

~~~
ascagnel_
Or Orkut, still possibly the worst-named product Google has put out.

~~~
frik
They bought it

------
jorge_maldanado
> Al Capone used something similar in the 1930s called “themugshot.com” and
> more recently, Martha Stewart used “itsagoodthing.com” to form her “Living”
> cadre. It’s practically the oldest trick in the book.

I don't quite really understand this 'oldest trick in the book.'. Can anyone
explain what this so called scheme is? Thank you!

~~~
jpatokal
It's a joke. Facebook was new and shiny in 2004, which is why accusing Zuck of
copying (non-existent) Mafia websites from the 1930s is funny.

------
Khaine
I remember being able to look up who was in your class. Facebook was so much
more enjoyable when it was just university students, it was more fun, playful,
and I guess innocent.

Since facebook expanded outside of universities its become more generic, and
corporate and lost its "joie de vivre"

~~~
stillsut
Here's a trick that used to work in 2005:

You could search for people with a favorite movie, then filter by dorm. You'd
write on their wall, invariably the person who listed the movie would own it
on DVD, you'd walk over and borrow it.

It was such a tight-knit community you could go "I saw you on facebook, can I
have your stuff? Don't worry I'm on facebook too and will give it back"

~~~
Khaine
I also remember not wanting to join facebook because it used your real name. I
was so use to using nicknames/handles/avatars etc that the thought of using
your real name was uncomfortable to me.

I must have been one of the last people on campus to sign up

------
sova
Wow, what a hysterical compendium of excellence. You know, it's optional that
people use such services, and I think that once cooler shaz comes out people
will drop it like it's hot, to quote a contemporary philosopher.

------
crispytx
LMAO, someone bought the URL: womenwhowanttosleepwithchrisholt.com

And who ever bought it, isn't Chris Holt!

------
King-Aaron
> Perhaps “acne-ridden dork magazine” would have worked better. I kid — sort
> of. Cornell girls are hideous.

Yeah wow.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
sounds like typical college rivalry.

~~~
santaclaus
Is there Stanford vs. Cornell shade? Ivy Leaguers get touchy when Stanford
people call themselves an Ivy (hell they get touchy that Penn is an Ivy) but
is there actual direct beef?

------
dannylandau
So what ever came of Chris Holt?

~~~
GCA10
He's a senior editor at Super Evil Megacorp, the mobile-games site, according
to his LinkedIn profile.

To my astonishment,
[http://womenwhowanttosleepwithchrisholt.com/](http://womenwhowanttosleepwithchrisholt.com/)
is an unclaimed domain name. At least that's true as of 4:14 p.m. Pacific
time.

~~~
fastball
Not true anymore...

~~~
GCA10
This domain could be the current-day equivalent of the famous Red Paperclip of
a decade ago. The opportunities for "value creation" are the stuff of movies.
I'll watch with interest what happens to it.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_red_paperclip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_red_paperclip)

------
animex
I'd rather they take an organ than what they take from us today :-)

------
tabrischen
Is that why I keep getting those Asian egg donor ads on Facebook ?

------
ezequiel-garzon
Also available here [1], with a PDF version of the printed issue. It's
interesting that the archive is separate from the Stanford Daily website.

[1] [http://stanforddailyarchive.com/cgi-
bin/stanford?a=d&d=stanf...](http://stanforddailyarchive.com/cgi-
bin/stanford?a=d&d=stanford20040310-01.2.22)

------
adamson
What was CS235? I graduated 2016 and I don't remember a course with that
number ever being offered

~~~
hifigi
CS 235: Applied Robot Design for Non-Robot-Designers: How to Fix, Modify,
Design, and Build

Circa 2012-2013

~~~
pzh
I remember it used to be an advanced OS class about a decade ago. I'm not sure
why it would be considered that challenging as opposed to any other graduate-
level class (especially the theory ones)...

------
tdkl
I'll just comment on the stanforddaily website how clean it looked and loaded
fast even without any crap like AMP. Just compare it to the current site.

~~~
noway421
Pure HTML y'all. No megabytes of css, no bootstrap, no webpack with plethora
of dependencies to load, parse and execute.

We went the other route.

~~~
allover
Why the drive-by attacks on good tools? This kind of stuff is tiring and just
adds to the noise.

> No megabytes of css

Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site, apart from for ads,
which is the main problem with modern 'content sites'.

> no bootstrap

Bootstrap can be tiny, and a big win in productivity/quality, so 'no
Bootstrap' likely cost the devs in its lack of availabilty at the time. It
looks far worse and is less usable on mobile particularly (but on desktop too)
than it would be if built with Bootstrap.

> No webpack with plethora of dependencies to load, parse and execute.

Why is that even relevant? Who exactly is advocating for 'webpack with
plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?

~~~
noway421
> Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site

Bootstrap, a theme for it, app css, a couple of 3rd party vendors, and we are
over a megabyte.

> a big win in productivity/quality

Only if you are doing an SPA which mimics desktop applications. Which
journalism sites are usually not

>Why is that relevant for such a site? Who exactly is advocating for a
'plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?

Well no one, but sites still do this in the wild, while being driven by
business decisions rather than technical concerns, which is understable
surely, but look how nostalgic people are getting.

~~~
allover
>> Bootstrap, a theme for it, app css, a couple of 3rd party vendors, and we
are over a megabyte.

Who's doing that? And if they are adding dependencies without consideration of
page-speed, they're to blame, and they'll never understand performance.

Bootstrap is not the problem. Hypothetical bad devs would have been making
similar mistakes with flash prior to that, or whatever alternative CSS libs
were available, and were being cobbled together piecemeal prior to Bootstrap.

> a big win in productivity/quality

>> Only if you are doing an SPA which mimics desktop applications. Which
journalism sites are usually not

That is false. Bootstrap's primary use-case is as a CSS framework, not
something solely for SPAs. From the early days it solved cross browser issues
even for supposedly simple things like 'forms' for which there were no well-
established conventions beforehand. Go trawl through the BS1 & 2 issue threads
around form elements, and see all the things they fixed.

> Why is that relevant for such a site? Who exactly is advocating for a
> 'plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?

>> Well no one, but sites still do this in the wild [...]

So those tools don't deserve the abuse/noise.

~~~
gkya
Nobody's picking on Bootstrap anyways.

> Who's doing that?

You either don't use the web since 2008 or something or are lying: nearly all
websites start with this setup.

