Item — HN Reader

I see Facebook’s React team is in the comments. Please keep in mind that the open source aspect of React is part of Facebook’s hiring strategy. While I believe the React team are genuine in their friendliness and passion for their work, they also represent and are payed handsomely by one of the worst offenders in surveillance capitalism.

(I realize some might feel a comment like this is out of place here, but considering the recent news about enormous leaks and privacy violations, I think it would be more strange if it wasn’t brought up.)

1 comments

I decided to finally bite the bullet and learn React yesterday. Every time they mentioned "we do it like this at Facebook" in the tutorial/docs, my eagerness died a little more. Even little tongue-in-cheek things, like their shopping list app consisting of companies they've acquired (Instagram, Oculus, WhatsApp) felt like a bummer.

Hey, thanks for feedback!

Regarding "we do it like this at Facebook" -- could you point out examples where this isn't useful, and we could remove them? I wrote some of these, mostly to highlight that if something works for a massive codebase with 50,000+ components, it will probably work for yours, even if it doesn't look familiar. I don't know what's an alternative way to say it without losing the core of the message.

Regarding the tongue-in-cheek one. Well. I don't feel strongly about changing it if many people feel this way.