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Comment by ilovecaching | Hacker News Reader

You must be either the most naieve person on the planet or a complete moron to sell your company to an advertising company and not expect them to put advertising in your product. Of course he wasn’t noble enough to turn down the money in the first place and turn his product into a big buisness by himself. WhatsApp was literally just a user grab based on a ToDo list app idea released at the right time. Guy should spend Facebooks money on some therapy and move on with his life.

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Please don't post shallow dismissals to HN, and especially not indignant rants. I realize that's what the internet seems to be for, but we're trying to do better than that here.

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

Come on dang, this is incredibly tame due to things posted on other threads constantly. Why call this particular rant out specifically?

Simply because I saw it.

We can't read all the comments that get posted here. If you see one that's worse, why not help out by flagging it, or emailing hn@ycombinator.com?

> You must be either the most naieve person on the planet or a complete moron to sell your company to an advertising company and not expect them to put advertising in your product.

I know both Acton & Koum from Yahoo!. To describe either as "naive" or "a complete moron" is ridiculous. If that is the depth of your thought, it would explain why you're writing angry comments on a message board while they are retired billionaires.

Even if you're replying to a shallow and dismissive comment, personal attacks have no place here. We have to resist this temptation if we're to have any hope of an insightful discussion.

I think "somewhat dishonest" is a better term. They aren't morons. They knew they were selling to a cutthroat advertising business. To feign surprise, after becoming a retired billionaire out of said advertising business's purse, seems disingenuous. "I was offered a lot of money and traded a material risk to our users' privacy for a lot of money, for myself and my employees" is closer to the truth.

He wrote that as a counterpoint to the idea of hypocrisy that is radiating from Acton's latest statements - "of course he wasn't noble", which is what he pointed out as the likely explanation, not naivete nor "being a moron".

I think the argument is not that they are not morons, but that they clearly "did expect" this.

Insulting someone because you either miss or choose not to see their point is not a good way to get people to trust your judgement.

I mean, there are plenty of billionaires who make ridiculous statements from time to time. Donald Trump being one of them, for example.

WhatsApp's founders are awesome! But Acton shouldn't be surprised that FB behaved as they did. He is smart and knows that publicly he should act surprised.

> I mean, there are plenty of billionaires who make ridiculous statements from time to time. Donald Trump being one of them, for example.

I think it was established during the election that he isn't a billionaire. He also makes ridiculous statements on a weekly if not hourly basis, so "from time to time" is misleading.

I think your analysis is like disagreeing about the salinity of different oceans. Either way, they're all pretty damn salty compared to potable water.

Consider that turning down the very very large offer would also have meant turning down the money for his hard working employees. Not such a simple choice.

But, as he openly acknowledges, he did sell out to a terrible company.

Facebook is no worse than any other advertising company. Social media is just an unremitting cesspool, and any company based on it has a high likelihood of encountering the wall of toxicity. But if you think Facebook is bad, Google, owner of literally every facet of your technological life, has all of the data on you that Facebook has and more. The only difference is that Google made less PR mistakes, and when people think about Google they aren't reminded of all the inane things their relatives post on their wall.

Fewer

It’s not like if he turned down the acquisition offer he would shut down the company.

They could still have done a secondary and stayed independent.

> Of course he wasn’t noble enough to turn down the money in the first place and turn his product into a big buisness by himself.

That has nothing to do with nobility.

So now Snapchat's founders are noble? They did those things you mentioned and your wording is a far cry from their reputation.

Snapchat are trying to become facebook. Whatsapps plan was to charge people money to use their service. Its amyones guess if that would have been successful, but it would have been far nobler than advertising.

Those plans were words. As long as they do not offer a legally binding commitment to their users never to track users/never to do ads in their software etc. there is no reason why one should consider this as more than some vague plan.

As they Romans said "caveat emptor" (the buyer shall beware). Or as is is written in Faust by Goethe: "Denn, was man schwarz auf weiß besitzt, Kann man getrost nach Hause tragen." ("That one can take back home, and use, What someone’s penned in black and white." (source: https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/FaustIScene... ).

And/or put more of his money into Signal to right his wrong.

https://signal.org/blog/signal-foundation/

Whatsapp was among the first inter-platform chat app. Kik was another. It didn't matter if you were on a Nokia (Symbian), iPhone, Blackberry (BBM was big at the time) or Android. They also solved for many individual phones globally that no one would go near to build their network.

For these reasons I don't see Whatsapp as a Todo app. Chat apps did exist, but there wasn't really many alternatives for inter-platform chat like there is today.

> ToDo list app idea

Have you actually ever used it?

I do remember them turning facebook down multiple times... everyone has their price though, hard to turn down winning the lottery.

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