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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

Whatsapp daily user here. I understand the need for them to monetize but the second they add advertising and companies into the mix, they lose the sheen of their app.

whatsapp is purely for talking to people I know. That's their selling point for me. I don't want to see companies, ads, offers, sweepstakes or curated content. Just me and my family/friends.

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The fact is that you will likely continue to use WhatsApp as long as all your friends remain on there though. The trick is to work out how much garbage can be stuffed into the app before people will abandon it en masse.

I suspect the threshold is a little lower for Whatsapp than Facebook Messenger as WhatsApp has a higher third world user base who have older, slower handsets and will see performance difficulties - hence Facebook's Lite apps for Android.

That threshold is going to be very low, at least for me. If my friends decide not to move, I'll just switch back to plain old regular SMS. I already have an SMS app that has spam filters, and that'll do just fine.

SMS can't do groups, those are a killer feature of whatsapp.

The new rcs standard solves most of the problems of sms apart from end to end encryption. It might take off if mobile carriers support it.

I was not aware of RCS until today. Looking at it I can see governments also being very keen to see it take off; since many of them are worried about end-to-end encryption hindering their ability to snoop on private conversations.

It's going to be a long process. Mobile carriers, like mine (O2 UK) don't really stand to gain anything from RCS. Until companies begin to offer additional functionality for RCS users, like branding, rich media and bespoke action buttons[0] and normal people start moaning or switching to a network that does support it, I really can't see them budging on their stance.

[0] https://www.openmarket.com/blog/rcs-to-eclipse-apps/

> SMS can't do groups

It can't? My iPhone seems to do this pretty well for SMS; what exactly is it doing to make this work?

You can send to multiple, I guess that's what you mean? When someone replies, it doesn't neccessarily get send to everyone. It's like email with a bunch of cc's vs listserv.

So, when I form an SMS group, do my recipients not get it as a group? I was not aware of this. I thought that if I formed a group with A and B, and sent a message to A, it would show up on their side as "saagarjha sent a message to the saagarjha, A, and B group".

Not sure, maybe your SMS client has a way of encoding it somewhere in the metadata, and if the recipient uses the same client, it does show up like that? The SMS 'protocol' (if it's called that) doesn't have it, AFAIK, and no SMS I ever used had such functionality.

That is probably using MMS, which never really took off (at least in IE)

I think this is of iMessage? It's probably not working if one of the user doesn't have an iPhone.

What about Signal or Telegram?

how do you SMS your friends abroad?

In some asian markets messengers are exactly the nightmare you describe and it seems to work brilliantly for them, users essentially spend all their time inside those messenger and even buy a lot of the stuff they need from there. If it's convenient enough, sadly not a lot of people will care.

China and WeChat springs to the top of my mind. You can pretty much buy anything you need using it, including giving tips, giving money to buskers etc.

No ads are coming in the messages part of Whatsapp. This is all about showing ads in the Status feature of Whatsapp. I am not sure if that will be enough for you to lose the sheen of their app..

Yet.

Call me naive, but I hope and believe there’ll be a paid opt out

At its very beginning, WhatsApp was a paid app so that wouldn't surprise me

It would surprise me. The first thing Facebook did when it bought WhatsApp was to rollback the price on iOS and to halt the Android pricing rollout. They don't want you to pay for it, it singles the remaining (ad-served) population out as being less willing to spend money. Not a good message to your advertisers.

I already paid for this app. Why should I pay again?

> I hope and believe there’ll be a paid opt out

I don’t. This isn’t how Facebook works. Paid opt outs drain the highest-earning advertisees from the pool. That removes Facebook’s ability to charge dubious ad rates.

Do you mean "user" by "advertisee"? If you do, it is like Stallman saying "used" for SAAS users.

I'd rather pay than see ads, but either way I got a better alternative waiting for a network effect (Signal).

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