Scaling the HS Hackers Facebook Group

https://medium.com/@aviromanoff/scaling-facebook-groups-d107ecabf9d9

by aroman • 12 years ago

34 14 12 years ago

aroman5• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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

aroman5• 12 years ago

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/

jsinger1• 12 years ago

This is really good. Will take note.

infinitebattery• 12 years ago

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.

Fuzzwah• 12 years ago

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.

aroman5• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

krrishd2• 12 years ago

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

tingley• 12 years ago

The extended pregnancy metaphor is confusing and off-putting.

aroman5• 12 years ago

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.

benwaffle• 12 years ago

C is best

krrishd2• 12 years ago

what's up iofel

Scaling the HS Hackers Facebook Group

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