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Comment by realusername | Hacker News Reader

A better way to monetize than Ads would be to slightly follow the Telegram model, they should create a store, ability to access an API, bots... Whatsapp did not evolve much in the past 3 years, it's maybe time to make it larger than just a chat app and create a real platform. Especially when you have entire countries using the app.

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I believe whatsapp is so popular exactly because it did not evolve. People love wa as-is, why break it?

They don't necessarily need to "break it" but to evolve it a bit into a service. I'm sure you have people who would be happy to pay for bots, larger groups and business features (including myself). In some countries, WhatsApp is larger than a chat app, it's a social network but without any features, there's a gap somewhere here.

That gap is the feature, and I'm willing to pay to keep it that way. The moment bots start spamming my WA feeds/groups I'll be gone. I'll move to Signal and if my contacts don't do the same, I'll just switch back to SMS with spam filters.

When I meant "bots" I meant only manually. I can't subscribe manually to a bot right now and I can't add a bot to a group I own.

I agree with you: if the subscription has to be by the user, the subscribed entity is managed like other contacts and I never get unsubscribed messsges/requests I would surely like to subscribe to the info that actually matters to me directly (conceptually opposite to “following feeds” on twitter). Completely personalized information and without installing one more app for every subscribed entity.

Exactly same situation here wrt ads. I'm willing to pay for E2E encryption with my money. I'm not willing to pay with my time/attention/battery life/everything else ads entail.

Bots will likely mean that the end to end encryption will be gone, so WhatsApp as we know it will be broken.

Nope, it just needs a more complicated way of handling the API where you run a Docker container with the client that does the E2E encryption, and you interact with that.

https://smooch.io/whatsapp/

Or, you know, a simple library you import.

It's not a simple library if you want E2E.

Why exactly would it be the end of encryption? Bots are just like any other client.

Money is the obvious answer

It evolved hugely in its early years; it was originally a one-line status-broadcasting app, hence the name.

And after the pivot to messaging they added embedded media, voice calling and now video calling.

> create a store, ability to access an API, bots

A way to charge the spammers?

I only recently discovered WhatsApp spam when a spammer joined by a group invite link. The link had never been published publicly, and yet a spammer joined some 18 months after the group was used (the group related to a moment in time).

If this is the way WhatsApp is going I'd rather less API access for spammers.

This is more looking like what the Ads would become, unsolicited spam messages. When I mean bots, I would only like manual subscription.

Telegram is supported by some Russian rich guy who made money with Russian Facebook. The irony.

WhatsApp has a billion users, I understand that servers are not free.

Try investigating a bit more...

What's the irony in that, I don't get it?

And he tried until the end to put Telegram outside of the reach of the Russian government, even circumventing the Russian firewall.

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