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Comment by ulfw | Hacker News Reader

100% agree. Facebook completely dropped the ball in terms of what they're really offering these days. Besides some a/b testing and ad optimisation what have they added in terms of features in the last 5 years? It's basically a messenger and a newsfeed with pictures, sometimes videos and URLs to (often fake) news. Anything else kind of went nowhere after a while - whether that's their Classifieds section or Foursquare-competitor section or Games etc

I have seen a large part of my Facebook friends leave the platform (I'd estimate at least half are inactive). And our whole class joined when Stanford came onboard as the second school after Harvard way way way long ago.

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Well a couple of years ago they added a super new feature that made the messenger stop working on mobile. And then they improved it by making it stop working when you check the 'Desktop Site' box by having it delete every word you type. Quite an effort, fucking up a text input, probably required a huge effort.

And an even bigger fuckup is how they spent 19 Billion USD on buying yet another messenger and never integrating it with their first messenger, so they now run two. Why, nobody knows.

Can't forget about direct messages on Instagram, either...

Is that being used for anything but spam?

Yeah teens use Snap and Insta to communicate (and WhatsApp)

I meant instagram DM. Snap and Whatsapp are obvious but haven't seen anyone yet who's used Instagram for DM.

Yea totally not a monopoly-like move to buy out a competitor even though they can't fully integrate it because their competitor was built around privacy and they are not.

Also their codebases are beyond incompatible. Facebook uses Hack, a PHP derivative while Whatsapp is Erlang. You'd need to completely rewrite the latter to integrate it but you'd lose the incredible efficiency of Whatsapp doing so.

Are you sure about that? Is Hack / PHP powerful enough to handle billions of messages an hour? If so, i'm impressed.

But I doubt it and I'm sure you're wrong about what runs Messenger. No company, least of all the Facebook scale ones use just one language for everything.

Of course the backing service is not PHP. That would be a particularly poor choice for a high volume messaging statement. They originally wrote it in Erlang and later rewrote it in C++.

https://www.quora.com/When-did-Facebook-switch-away-from-usi...

statement -> service

sigh

Why do the codebases need to share a similar set of languages and tools? Integrating two services doesn't necessarily mean merging them into a single product; Facebook could likely allow the two to communicate without a complete product merger.

If, by "built around privacy", you're referring to end-to-end encryption, that was introduced (fully) to WhatsApp in 2016. Facebook acquired WhatsApp in February 2014. Open Whisper Systems announced their partnership with WhatsApp in November 2014. Facebook could have easily slashed that end-to-end-by-default idea if they wished to.

I think we need to give credit to Facebook where credit is due, and it sure seems like Facebook's management wanted WhatsApp to be private for some reason.

I see no indication that WhatsApp was "private" in any way before Facebook acquired it.

Whatsapp was never about apps and never about anything but messaging. Integrating any of the features that make money for FB would've driven users away. The only thing they brought to Whatsapp is Stories (apparently all apps need this now) but I don't know anyone who uses it on Whatsapp. It's always empty on whatsapp while people happily use it on Instagram.

I can't imagine how the Whatsapp acquisition will ever pay off. It doesn't need to because they make money with FB and Instagram but I don't see why they had to buy it..

I think they bought it purely to prevent it evolving into a competitor. It's got too many users to kill off as a product, and at least they are 'Facebook' users in a roundabout way, and by not adding anything anything new to WhatsApp they can keep it subjugated. Keep your enemies closer and all that.

Others have touched on this... but I bet it's also to lock down that market space. Facebook's competition is communications platforms. By preventing anyone else from dominating the secure communications space, they don't face that threat.

> Why, nobody knows.

Wait what? I thought that's obvious. Facebook and WhatsApp don't even have the same type of social graph, multi-brand approaches are probably always strategically superior and changing the fundamental concept behind high-growth apps tends to be a high-risk endeavor.

There are probably a million more reasons not to prematurely integrate. (I guess they would also need to quit their e2e encryption in the process.)

Would there be any benefit beside convenience? Honest question.

I didn’t like this attempt to get you to install the messenger app either. However, I found out you can access messages on mobile using mbasic.facebook.com

#ProTip I still have some distant friends who occasionally message me on fbook messenger.

I open a private session on mobile safari, log into fbook, then “request desktop site” and read/reply. I refuse to have fbook app installed on my phone.

However I stupidly use WhatsApp everyday...

At least WhatsApp is encrypted end-to-end. Messenger is not.

Messenger has a setting to encrypt your messages.

Not sure if it's on by default, but mine was turned on and I don't remember turning it on.

That was extremely annoying, although you can work around it by accessing mbasic.facebook.com with a mobile browser.

Also using mobile Chrome in desktop mode enables one to read messages, although it's quite awkward to use.

Facebook's push to force end users to install their messenger on mobile phones made me very suspicious. I stopped using all their regular mobile clients as well, and only use browser.

Agree- it made me suspicious as well. They wanted it a little too much.

They also wanted me to fill in profile information- which I didn't do. So they took guesses- all wrong- about my education, by job, and so on. I guess they expected that if I saw something wrong I would fix it. Nope.

They've also added a few more features cloned from competitors and most of them failed.

> Besides some a/b testing

that AB testing has SUCKED when it comes to facebook enjoyment.

Im not sure if they were looking at minutes people spent on facebook, but that must be an awful indicator.

Whatever happened, I dont use it anymore.

Very true. They 'optimised' it with the wrong parameters in mind. And sadly they dropped the ball on big picture / vision. a/b testing is wonderful if you have an almost perfect product (Google Search). It's not when you are still trying to evolve a product.

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