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Comment by SturgeonsLaw | Hacker News Reader

I suspect it's less about solving problems and more about breaking out of that web browser sandbox to siphon up more of that juicy, juicy data.

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Apologies, my computer mouse malfunctioned and I downvoted you while swapping between windows, and I felt so bad about doing so I feel compelled to comment :(

And I actually agree with you...

Well, I did not intent to vote that post, but now I upvoted it just to undo your mistake.

He agreed with him so I just upvoted his post to give him back the upvote he meant.

I have always found it surprising that someone may honestly think that upvoting and downvoting can be used to express agreement or disagreement. If you strongly agree or disagree, just reply with a post of your own; up/downvoting is there so you could express your opinion on the quality of the post rather than whether you think that what it is saying is true or false.

Paul Graham, who started HN, is one of those people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 . Generally, HN strongly discourages "me too" or "i agree" type comments. We prefer to just upvote comments in order to keep discussion threads interesting and on-topic.

It's pretty much upvote to agree, downvote if it doesn't contribute.

Of course the next highest child is then always the next most agreed upon counter argument since they should reply instead of downvote, which can make HN feel a bit contrary but full of good discourse

Isn't that the recipe for an echo chamber?

Replying to a comment removes your vote on it, so you've given an extra upvote :)

More likely it's about getting more immediate attention from push notifications.

If you only ever use chat in the browser, you only see messages when you actively check it. With the app installed, you get a giant bubble that you can't ignore for every message. FB wants to be the messenger that people respond to immediately.

For me, I actually like the messenger bubble UI, and love that it's not built as a gateway to the massive time sink of the rest of Facebook. But I think it's clear that omnipresence is the goal here, and we have no reason to believe that it won't become a funnel to the rest of Facebook in the future.

Not for much longer

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notif...

Text messaging is enormous and it is going to get a lot bigger as companies monetize it with service and retail chatbots. The competition is fierce and although Facebook has the best position, it is not written anywhere that it will remain in that position forever. It's crucial to get the experience right, and you do yourself no favors by distributing your user base and developer resources across multiple platforms.

Sadly, yes. I'd (somewhat) happily run the Messenger app if its permissions were saner. What does it really need? Internet, for sure. Storage, ok. Camera and Location are fairly reasonable. Microphone only because it goes along with Camera.

But it also has Identity, Contacts, SMS, Phone, and a host of others. Do not want.

Yep. Thank god for runtime permissions, at least.

Like those controlled in the iOS Privacy Setting page?

Yeah we now finally have them on android too in marshmallow

Heard of messenger.com ?

Facebook blocks Messenger.com for mobile browser user agents; you need to spoof your UA if you want to use it on mobile. (Some of the Facebook app wrappers can do this for you.)

Which ones? Tinfoil doesn't seem to at the moment.

I believe "Metal" does on the Android side, not sure about iOS.

If you spoof the UA, you can also use the main Facebook website on mobile. Messenger.com might be less cluttered though.

Btw: that works with mobile Firefox. (I originally used it instead of chrome, mostly because it supports ad blocking on unrooted devices.)

Interesting, Asana does that too. And I would rather not use their app...

venmo.com does the same thing.

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