

Scaling the HS Hackers Facebook Group - aroman
https://medium.com/@aviromanoff/scaling-facebook-groups-d107ecabf9d9

======
Fuzzwah
Good read, but the title didn't really prepare me for what it was actually
about.

On clicking the link I thought I was going to be reading an FB'ers technical
blog post about the dramas of dealing with massive facebook groups from their
point of view.

~~~
aroman
I thought about that too, actually. I suppose it's a bit intentional, given
the audience — I was definitely trying to be a bit tongue-in-cheek about
"scaling".

Maybe I should append the subtitle "From 0 to Sam Altman and Beyond" to the
submission title?

~~~
ersii
It would have been nice to have "HS Hackers" expanded/clarified somewhere in
the beginning of the text - even as the introduction did mention "High
schoolers" multiple times.

~~~
aroman
Definitely — thanks for the feedback. That's something that I struggled with
in particular, because I wrote the post for a dual audience — both HS Hackers
itself, as well as the wider hacker community.

I'm updating some of the language in the intro section to paint a more clear
picture of what exactly HS Hackers is.

------
aroman
If anyone is interested in how those stats at the bottom were generated, it
was with a Graph API tool I wrote for the job. I would be happy to clean it up
and release it as open source if anyone else would find it valuable.

~~~
glomph
That would be neat! I had been thinking of doing a similar thing but I was
always too lazy.

~~~
aroman
I'll try to package it up into something useful then! In short, my system
basically was just a highly parallelized graph crawler in node.js, which
dumped into mongo for easy queries and analysis. I'll try to make it a bit
more agnostic though.

One issue is that the Graph API for groups is in fact broken — it's request
pagination system yields an inconsistent (and incomplete) data set. We've
reported the bug[0], but I've been seeing reports of this for months.

I've actually been beginning to suspect some sort of deliberate crippling,
though I haven't exactly been able to work out a motive :)

[0]
[https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/518983258224814/](https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/518983258224814/)

------
infinitebattery
This was awesome to read. It's incredible to see such a growth in the hacker
community- and a facebook community like this has definitely inspired a lot
more creativity among young minds.

------
tingley
The extended pregnancy metaphor is confusing and off-putting.

~~~
aroman
Sorry you felt that way — definitely was not my intention to be off-putting.
It just seemed like a natural way to partition the various stages of the
story, especially given that the group was started 9 months ago.

------
krrishd
It's amazing to think how many people this group has come to influence
(including myself) over these past months.

------
jsinger1
This is really good. Will take note.

------
benwaffle
C is best

~~~
krrishd
what's up iofel

