I deleted WhatsApp for a year | Hacker News Reader

I deleted WhatsApp for a year

theguardian.com

15 pointsadamflanagan23 comments

Is WhatsApp more of a European thing? I don't believe I've ever seen anyone use it (in the northeast US). I usually don't even remember what it is when I see stories about it. I've certainly never considered signing up for it.

Maybe I'm too old.

Meanwhile my wife tried to quit Facebook, and did alright, but you definitely miss out on stuff. Especially since my town has a "Chats" group that it seems the whole town is in, sharing news and bitching at each other (it's better than it sounds).

In some parts of Europe it is huge. I remember friends in Romania and Hungary using it in the same way that friends in the US use Facebook Messenger, for example: the default messaging application to be sure to be able to contact everyone they need to speak to. Here in France I get the feeling it is used less but it is still a popular option, and major events I have been to have included a WhatsApp contact for sponsors and exhibitors to get a quick hold of organisers/help.

At least here in the Netherlands it is what SMS (texting) used to be and then some. Even the help desks of many companies can be directly reached over Whatsapp. I think I know only a handful of people (mostly elderly) that don't use it. It is the standard. Personally I'm trying to get people to use Signal. I'm using it with some friends now, but non-techy people are all Whatsapp.

In Spain they use the groups feature a lot.

Here in Singapore it's what everyone uses.

It's huge here in Italy. Even businesses use it as an officiale channel for contacting their customers.

In France, I kind of missed the bandwagon. Maybe I just meet with my friends too often for it to be useful?

Mail, phone and text (SMS/MMS) are more than enough. And grandma still doesn't own a smartphone anyway.

Most people in Latin America, and India have it. I also have plenty of African friends that use it. Not sure about Europe, China uses WeChat.

The reason is that cellphone carriers used to charge you by the message (I speak from experience in Mexico), this was expensive compared to the average wage. Cheaper to just connect to WiFi, and send as many messages as you want.

Also, WhatsApp was one of the first popular and reliable messaging systems for cellphones. If offline or with poor signal, your messages where enqueued, and sent when you had signal. Facebook nor Skype had this back a few years ago.

US is a rich country, SMS has been cheap since I've lived in the us (4 years). 3 hours of minimum wage, $30, for unlimited everything, data, SMS, calls. WhatsApp didn't really solve a problem.

It's quite popular in Europe and extremely so in Israel (IIRC they have >85% penetration there) so it doesn't seem unreliable infrastructure or expensive SMS would be the main factors in every place. Though at least in my experience, in europe it seems mostly used for small-ish "trusted" group chats to shoot the shit or prepare/synchronise stuff.

I think factors that play a role everywhere are features (attachments and the like), and quite possibly the way it's tied to your phone. And all of it being as reliable as sms means there are no real downsides.

US is a rich country, SMS has been cheap since I've lived in the us

SMS is free in most/all of Europe as well, yet people use WhatsApp. So it's not just price.

I don't have to worry about where the other person is; I can send WhatsApp messages to my family back in the US, or to friends here in the Netherlands, but it doesn't cost me anything. SMS to local numbers is free, but it's not free to send an SMS to the US

It's not free for me, granted you can get unlimited texting plans very cheap. But why bother for a service that won't even let you send a picture?

In Brazil it is the main form of communication, My 80 years old mother and my 12 year old son use it. Has practically 100% of market penetration. I just know 1 person who deleted it.

The main reason was the overly priced SMS messages.

WhatsApp is extremely popular in Germany (And judging from the other comments it's generally popular in continental Europe.)

I'm in NYC, and pretty much anyone I know in my personal life uses it. At work, no one uses it.

I literally learned nothing from this article. Why is it even here?

Same here. This article has zero value.

From the guidelines:

Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. [...] If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

It's definitely an India and Pakistan thing: my co-workers from there use it for wifi calling and messaging, as do all of my co-workers from Argentina versus people from the US preferring Signal, Telegram or Google Hangouts.

Finally a story I can say something to. Granted, the article isn't very informative, but to me it is a nicely written depiction of what happens when you drop WhatsApp. I can imagine the decision is not a dramatic one when living in a region in which WhatsApp is less used. Where I live however (central Europe), presenting the thought of not using WhatsApp purposely gives you weird stares.

As the author states, there are no real alternatives. In theory, WhatsApp can be replaced by lots of other applications. I settled for Wire, as I would choose an application that makes use of the Signal protocol while also having an open source client + server over WhatsApp any time of the day. In practice, few want to even consider using something that is not WhatsApp. I managed to convince some close friends to install Wire alongside WhatsApp (can't have unencrypted SMS as my only communications channel), but it took some convincing and privacy aware ethics rambling (if that makes sense) to achieve that. I can't imagine any somewhat sane person wanting to bother with so much trouble when branching out to alternative solutions. This particular sentiment from the article especially couldn't ring any more true:

"At the beginning, I often felt isolated and as if I had abandoned friends. Some contacts ebbed away, while I had to withstand the odd awkward look of disbelief and discontent from others when I explained that I did not use WhatsApp."

I can understand the convenience gain by using WhatsApp over regular SMS. That convenience is hardly unparalled nowadays though, the one thing that keeps people chained to WhatsApp is it's ubiquity, in the sense that every person you meet will quite likely have WhatsApp installed (do note that I'm saying this as part of a somewhat younger demographic).

I find this quite sad. My motivation for switching was simple, I didn't want to take part in any business Facebook sticks their fingers in. Whether Facebook uses all the metadata they get through WhatsApp, and for which (possibly nefarious) purposes is irrelevant, they've been shown to make unscrupulous use of data that should be private in order to conduct social experiments and whatnot a long time ago [1]. Am I in the wrong for trying to be mindful about the usage of my, very personal, data? I really hope I am not.

First time poster here, sorry if this sort of anecdotal evidence doesn't fit the type of content that is usually posted on here.

Also, what a funny way to send an article off.

[1] http://veekaybee.github.io/2017/02/01/facebook-is-collecting...

I've never even installed it.

I did the same and I'm not really regretting it. It's somehow sad, that I'm now missing the conversations and plannings of my family and somebody always has to send me something on another way, but I'm okay with it.

I'm feeling much better, since my phone stopped distracting me all the time and I lost the permanent need to look at my phone. Of course I'm using Telegram as an alternative, but the app is not running in the background and I have to open it myself if I want to check messages.

So in the end, I've exchanged communication to productivity and I don't regret it.

I don't like the open end of the article. It does not point out, if the author thinks to use WhatsApp again. It just talks about how we sell our data to use a service.

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