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Comment by abhiminator | Hacker News Reader

I still remember the first installation of WhatsApp messenger on an old Samsung device of mine in 2012 as a high-schooler. It was incredibly liberating to finally discover an IM app that enabled me to send unlimited messages to my friends and not get hamstrung by SMS limits that existed in my country; especially one that was resource-light enough to run on my device's 866 MHz processor.

I'd largely glossed over Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp back in '14 as just another big tech company eating up a smaller 'potential future competitor,' but in hindsight it looks like it was the beginning of the end of WhatsApp as a simple, reliable and ad-free private messenger.

Super glad I quit the platform in 2017 -- never been more tranquil.

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What? If anything, WhatsApp has become a better product since its acquisition. It is currently the simplest, most reliable, ad-free messenger out there, which also supports state of the art end-to-end encryption for its millions of users.

Let's see how they deploy ads. But it would be a shame that WhatsApp shut downs because Facebook cannot monetize the application. If anything, I'm glad they're going this route instead of charging a fee to use the app.

Ads are a slippery slope. It might begin with text-only ads in 'Status' but I think it's only a matter of time before they spill over into other, more private sections of the application.

And I do not trust Facebook Inc. to put privacy over profits [0] given it's trashy record in this space.

End-to-end encryption is a valid point, but WhatsApp was not the first to pioneer it. Scale-wise it just got lucky, and Facebook just threw in a bunch of dollars from its coffers to acquire all that.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-founder-brian-act...

it does not have to be a slippery slope. Would most people complain of ads in Google or Gmail nowadays?

> end-to-end encryption

Well, they do collect and use metadata, e.g. chat history: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/01/22/whats...

There's better options regarding privacy, e.g. Signal, which does not collect metadata.

According to that article WhatsApp provided almost no data except who was in the group and who was sending messages. There is no way Signal can function without having the same data available.

Signal was once subpoenaed by the FBI to give up all stored data/metadata relating to a certain account. They responded with the account creation timestamp and the last-connected timestamp, suggesting that they do not store information about group ownerships or contacts.

Source: https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/secrecy/new-docu...

Once they become big they will be forced to keep that data. It is really difficult to force them to change the client or the protocol but not to force them to keep data they have access to on the server.

This is because Signal works differently for group chat.

In WhatsApp, the server delivers your encrypted message to each member of the group. It's an optimization called "server-side fan-out". Check the whitepaper for more deatils: https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp-Security-Whitepap...

Interestingly this is also what the Signal libraries implement. So applications making use of them will generally make use of this optimization.

For some reason, the Signal application itself was not making use of this optimization. My guess is that it had not updated its code yet when I looked. This might have changed since then.

BUT, and that's a big but, as a passive observer (and if Signal kept logs of things) you can still figure out group chat membership by looking at who sent the same kind of message (same length) to who, and at what time. Basic relationship graph stuff.

Yes, there is a way and it’s already in beta. It’s called sealed-sender and you can read about it in this signal blog post: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/

The Signal clients have this data, Signal's servers do not.

Didn't you see recently on HN they announced they now have a mechanism so that their servers aren't even aware of who sent a message? The recipient can tell who it's from but the server just sees like a stamp on the outside "This is one of the messages Bob agreed to receive from people" and it says to itself "OK, Bob said he wants these, don't care who it's from".

Do you know how they prevent people from spamming messages then? If you can't identify someone how can you rate limit them?

Users have to volunteer the tokens to friends (co-conspirators, lovers, whatever) or assert that they just love receiving garbage from strangers, so conventional "spam" is impossible.

AIUI The system can count usages of Bob's tokens and rate-limit those. If Bob's Ex Gina is sending him fifty "Fuck you, Bob" messages per day, that might mean Bob's friend Harry has to admit his identity to the server to cut through the noise. Eventually Bob blocks Gina and she's no longer able to use his token and annoy his friends. Blocking someone invalidates your old tokens.

> Let's see how they deploy ads. ... If anything, I'm glad they're going this route instead of charging a fee to use the app.

I understand why you hold this view but woe I wish it to be that more people agreed with me and held the opposite. I wish we were fine with paying money instead of "being monetized" and having ads shoved in front of us.

I don't want to see how they deploy the ads; I don't want ads, period. By their very nature, ads are a guarantee that I'm going to be tracked, sliced, analyzed, deanonymized, and attention-grabbed any time I crack open that app. I guess I'm turning more and more into the Luddite but I am tired of the ads, tired of the continual chase for my ever-decreasing number of seconds on this planet.

I don't even know that letting me pay to not have ads is a) practical (because what's to say the ads aren't being shown in a "hidden" way such that I am still tracked and followed) or b) fair (because what about the other billions of people on the planet for whom money can't be traded for time as they have more of the latter than the former yet still don't deserve to be tracked). But I still don't like ads.

I don't think you described a Luddite.

You already pay money for your mobile subscription. The whole point of WhatsApp is free messaging, if it stops being free, there is no point in having it.

I pay for many things that go through my mobile and are in addition to my mobile service. Paying is not the issue; ads are the issue.

I think the other two "mainstream" messengers I use (Telegram, KakaoTalk) are as simple or simpler and also ad-free. Kakao also has E2E encryption after a bit of a struggle, Telegram had it for a long time.

I think WA is the most widespread but I wouldn't call it the simplest or most reliable. They are all pretty similar imo

As opposed to the two you mentioned, WhatsApp has e2e by default. Kakaotalk and Telegram force you to use "secret chats" for that which are device to device only and cannot be shared among different devices with the same account.

Uh, well, both WhatsApp and Signal are single device only to begin with.

I can continue an encrypted chat in Signal from my desktop. I don't think I can do that in Telegram.

Do you need a password to do that?

Nope, scan a QR code

Telegram secret chats don't sync across devices and aren't supported in the official desktop client, which makes them pretty much useless.

There's two official desktop clients. One called "Telegram" and the other called "Telegram Desktop". Both are regularly updated etc.

The regular "Telegram" has secret chat. It is tied to device, but you can do desktop -> phone or desktop -> desktop or phone -> desktop specifically, but that depends on a bit of coordination.. but yeah definitely not synced between each combination

Telegram's security is catastrophic, it's a wonder why anybody still uses it. I'm not sure if Kakao even has end-to-end encryption.

A better product? I don't like most of the things they've added, like statuses, stickers, or invite links.

Perhaps you take the basic features for granted. For example, it works well on a wide variety of devices, especially those with low specs. What about audio quality, which has gradually improved to the point where people I know don't make "normal" calls anymore. What about latency on awful connections. Often when I'm in a place with poor reception, Whatsapp works when other apps don't. All of these aren't build-and-you're-done kind of features. You need to invest continuously to make sure you don't regress.

And the flipside is that people will look at your app and say "what have you done for me lately? What features have you added?"

I am afraid I don't know much about call quality as I don't make calls through WA, but WA has always worked well on devices with low specs, and adding more features will only make it worse, not better.

I don’t know, but didn’t whatsapp subscribe to the idea that if you build something well the first time around you won’t need to keep supporting it.

Which was the reason they could scale to their current userbase with some 50 people.

I have no idea what are these things, and I've never heard of them eventhough I use whatsApp daily. Please.

> I'm glad they're going this route instead of charging a fee to use the app.

Why is this an either/or situation? Why not give users the option to pay if they so choose?

Even if you can pay to remove ads, you can't pay to restore privacy. So long as you've got a non-paying friend, Facebook will hoover up your phone number and chat history and social graph from their end instead.

You woudln't pay $100 a year for whatsapp, would you? Because that's how much advertising can earn.

iMessage is far easier and reliable and it even falls back to SMS if your recipient doesn’t have iOS. It also doesn’t give your data to Facebook.

It also isn't available outside iOS, so it's not even in the same league.

What is easier or more reliable about iMessage?

Consider that large portions of the world (among them Germany with its extremely old population) use WhatsApp pretty much exclusively; they don't seem to have a problem using it.

Whereas something like iMessage would be a complete nonstarter with its semi-iOS exclusivity.

Can you explain to me how to get iMessage on an Android phone?

They won't shut it down after paying billions (10?) for it. If they do, an alternative could rise. Imagine paying billions again. Running costs are very cheap in comparison.

To be fair, the ad-free honeymoon that you were living in was obviously not a feasible steady state. Your messaging experience was being sponsored by VCs in the expectation of selling you to someone, in this case facebook

Yeah, how could a service like sending text messages from one device to another be free in the long term!? Think of the infrastructure and technology costs.

No, wait, most people on this forum could knock up a messaging app in a couple of days and run it on aws lambda for less than pennies per user per year.

https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/

I'm being snarky but I really don't get your point, nothing about this is expensive or difficult. Signal case in point:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103877

Signal has a few orders of magnitude fewer users and uses tens of millions of dollars per year.

Do you think Signal doesn’t cost a good amount of money per year?

> pennies per user per year

Times 1.5 billion users is at least $30m / year, where to get that?

I'm pretty sure when I joined Whatsapp you could pay to have access for a couple of years, so it had a sustainable model, especially if they just turned the dial slowly on pricing.

All we know is that it had a model. How do you know it was sustainable?

WhatsApp charged users $1 per year until January 2016, when they had somewhere between 900M and 1000M users. Not sure how many of them were paying, since it wasn't really being enforced.

In all those years, I've never been prompted to pay.

All company need to make money, it's just a matter of when and how, Facebook's resources may have even did them good, as they can stay away from predatory investment funds that otherwise would bite they hard in the end.

Messaging is infrastructure and nothing that any single company should "need to make money" off.

RCS can't come fast enough. https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-rcs-messaging/

Tell that to Tencent.

And their Wechat helped created the biggest misinformation system, the so called self-media.

I don't get the "messaging is infrastructure" argument. When in the past has this been free? Phone calls, the postal service etc. have always had a cost for the end user.

Wait, do you pay for phone calls?

For physical mail it makes sense that the cost is mostly for actually handling actual pieces of mail. But for telecoms the main cost is fixed - so it makes more sense to pay for the network and then actually using it is free, or at worst, using it only costs extra if you're such a big user that you increase those fixed costs.

I pay £7 per month for this phone service. I believe the number of calls is theoretically limited (I've never hit the limit) but the number of text messages isn't.

> Wait, do you pay for phone call? > I pay £7 per month for this phone service.

So you pay for phone calls? I don't think the message you are replying to is suggesting a cost per message. Just that it is usual for their to be a cost associated with the service (unlike WhatsApp at the moment).

I pay for service, and I'd be comfortable paying (though not very much) for my secure text message service the same way.

But I underscore that the service is what's important here and that's what I'm willing to pay for, not the calls. Imagine you find that your phone company, without you noticing, actually dropped 20% of your incoming calls. You didn't pay for those calls so who cares right? No, you pay for service, delivering other people's calls to you reliably is part of that service.

I pay for YouTube Red or whatever it's called now, same rationale. I pay, I get the service. YouTube doesn't make videos about Minecraft, TLS, US law, or whatever, but the platform I watch them on needs paying for somehow and I'm damn sure I don't want to watch adverts.

If your service doesn't charge per unit, perhaps in addition to a fixed price, you are most likely just subsidizing other people's usage.

so instead of being owned by 1 company, it's owned by various telecoms that will probably sell your metadata to advertisers and hand over everything (no e2e to law enforcement? I'd rather use centralized Signal.

Ahh, yes, telecoms will come to rescue poor users and give them free infrastructure.

Current state of messaging across the world is super messy and sucks, but believing that telecoms are the answer is just naive.

While sms allows you to communicate cross providers, the amount of money they charge, both historically and even nowadays for that is just insane. Att still charges $0.25 for international text messages, in 2018. Due to fragmentation of the market, the only way for them to stay in the game is to have something that’s shared, but boy, they do plan to make a lot money out of it.

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