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Comment by kinkrtyavimoodh | Hacker News Reader

What exactly is "growth hacking" in a chat app? There were no ads here, no algorithmic timeline, no perverse incentives, nothing that you could potentially consider as malicious.

What should WhatsApp have done?

Every single post about WhatsApp here has people pontificating about this and that but no one offers any suggestion of what should be done.

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What exactly is "growth hacking" in a chat app?

WhatsApp is a fairly direct clone of BBM and BBM’s growth hack for want of a better term was to make its users feel like part of an exclusive in-group.

Yes, to the extent that every chat app is a clone of every other chat app, WhatApp is a clone of BBM. Other than that, what exactly are the similarities?

The whole point of WhatsApp is having a primary key that is your phone number. And they launched on literally all kinds of OSes that developing countries were using, including Symbian as late as 2012. So please tell me, how exactly is a service where you can message each other by their phone numbers and that was probably supported on the most number of platforms for its time "exclusive" and "in-group".

Sorry but you don't seem to have any idea what you are talking about.

Sorry but you don't seem to have any idea what you are talking about.

Perhaps you are unaware that BBM and hence WhatsApp are really about their group chat features?

> Sorry but you don't seem to have any idea what you are talking about.

Personal swipes like that will get you banned here, so please don't post those. Your comment would be fine without that bit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yeah, definitely no advertising, particularly overseas, that could have contributed to WhatsApp's growth. No features added like large groups that could be used to spread disinformation. WhatsApp chats are used to influence advertising, so that goes out the window. This happened because WhatsApp provided the means for it to happen – and you can speculate all day long about whether some other app would have made it possible, and whether it would have happened, but what you're saying is speculation, and what I'm citing are facts.

None of it was intentionally malicious – but not considering the moral, ethical, political ramifications of how your product will be used is negligent. This is negligence, not malice.

Platforms aren't neutral.

Okay, but what about WhatsApp made this possible that wouldn't have been possible with plain old SMS/MMS? (Or even just the telephone? I guess no video over the telephone, but rumors and lies can certainly spread that way.) It's not like Facebook, where there's some kind of algorithmic curation. This is entirely peer-to-peer content distribution.

Sounds like the videos were very shocking and quickly forwarded - instigating a mob mentality:

“each said they’d done so after watching shocking videos on WhatsApp warning of outsiders abducting children.”

How are WhatsApp chats used to influence advertising? They are end to end encrypted.

That's partially true – but end-to-end encryption is different than zero-knowledge. I design the latter.

Although LifeHacker isn't a great source, they do a good job of pulling more credible sources together into this article: https://lifehacker.com/stop-using-whatsapp-if-you-care-about...

It's a chat application. How people can be so ignorant to abuse such a simple thing is beyond me. As much as I hate Facebook, I don't get how you can put this on WhatsApp.

From the looks of it, you could've achieved the same thing with someone printing and spreading around fliers. Doesn't mean a printing company selling printers should consider the "moral, ethical, political ramifications".

Printing creates a barrier to entry. You have to have enough conviction in your idea, and the determination to actually write the statement, lay it out, and print and distribute it. You don't just type "oh shit lxrbst should be hanged lmao," hit send, and reach 100 people.

You're basically describing why journalism is important, and still has an important place in our society.

Journalism is important, but not to the exclusion of other forms of communication. If your thrust is that barriers to entry for communication is good because it puts mass comm. powers in the hands of the few(er), I cannot agree.

Ironic to post such a comment in a platform that puts a high barrier for communication through moderation and guidelines.

The logical conclusion of this perspective is that human beings should not be allowed to freely communicate in groups. I'd rather not live in your world.

Technology can't fix broken human beings. There is a moral failure here, but it isn't Facebook's. Blaming WhatsApp at best makes the real problem harder to fix, and at worst makes excuses for the actors in this horrorshow.

Speed and reach, my friend. Lynchings happened in the US a while ago, but they weren't a universal phenomenon. A platform with the speed and reach of WhatsApp makes disinformation more potent.

Nowhere in my post did I suggest human beings shouldn't be allowed to freely communicate – what I'm suggesting is that maybe we haven't built the right tools to enable that safely, and instead, we're exacerbating the "broken human beings" side of this issue.

> we're exacerbating the "broken human beings" side of this issue.

There is no other side of this issue. This could and probably have happened with sms. This is 100% the mob's fault.

SMS costs a lot in 3rd world countries. We are probably seeing these issues now because this is the first time these people have had access to cheap and easy communication. The rest of the world was eased in to it with email and the web but these countries are being dropped in to the deep end.

Subtext: You primitives aren't mature enough to communicate in groups without supervision.

Don't you find that an offensively paternalistic thing to tell whole societies?

By that logic we should ban megaphones as well.

You know what? Just ban shouting until people build the right tools to enable that safely.

Well if you start using a megaphone to encourage killing people you will have troubles in a few minutes. With whatsapp... Not that much. Whatsapp is probably the first medium of communication that is harf to monitor in many places. It is much safer to encourage hatred and violence there because you don't need physical interaction, it scales a lot and authorities cannot intercept it.

What are the right tools?

A chat app is about as neutral as platforms get. What specifically should they have done differently?

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