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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

> Amazon delivers things to your house. Google helps you find things online. Apple sells actual objects. Facebook … helps you get into fights? Delivers your old classmates’ political opinions to your brain?

Strawman. The article's writer can do better than view Facebook as a one trick pony. It is an internet behemoth. Instagram aside, there is so much media sharing on WhatsApp alone that it might blow away most of the other internet properties away. WhatsApp with VoIP now has the mobile network operators by their balls. No one is logging out of that, by far.

> Some empires fall because they’re invaded from the outside or rot from within. Zuckerberg’s could be the first in history to collapse simply because its citizens logged out.

Couldn't be further from the truth. People might get dis-interested in Facebook, over time... but existence of Facebook is more than folks just logging out.

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Left Facebook about 8 years ago. I block all their domains on my internal DNS. I mean they are not getting any metrics from me. Period. I used WhatsApp but dumped it for privacy reason, Facebook is not trusted.

Google is the next company that will come under heavy scrutiny. They are aggressively trying to circumvent ad-blockers with their recent usage of semi-random domains.

You can’t abuse ordinary people’s privacy and shove ads in people’s face for too long time.

This is something that I would like to do. Do you have resources you could share that could help me? Specifically interested in how to find the list of all FB domains that need blocking

I cut&pasted this into my /etc/hosts: https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...

I've setup a DigitalOcean instance of PiHole [1] VPN where I have added all the Facebook domains[2] and other add blockers. This helps me block these domains on all my devices including the phone. I don't see any ads in any apps.

I also use this list to temporarily add HN when I want to focus. This setup works well for me.

Some of my family members and friends use WhatsApp and that's something I regret (tiny bit) not using. But I don't miss Facebook, Instagram, etc. at all.

[1] https://pi-hole.net/ [2] https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...

If people stop using Facebook, is anyone around to like its posts?

I stopped using Facebook (though still use Instagram and Whatsapp) and my life is much the same as it was before.

And here's the secret - I'm not even loyal to Instagram or Whatsapp, more to the network.

If friends fall off Facebook, then there's even less reason to go. In fact, Instagram has entirely replaced it for me.

And if Photos on iOS had a public sharing feature, I'd probably just use that, and then fall off Instagram too.

> And if Photos on iOS had a public sharing feature, I'd probably just use that, and then fall off Instagram too.

It kinda does. You can make an album public and it generates a link that you can share.

You are right. People often associate facebook with "just that website" when in fact there is much more to it: ads on facebook, commercial groups, fb pages, whatsapp, insta.

Not to mention their open source projects; we use fb prophet a lot for our ML

WhatsApp? Is this so difficult to program? Just VOIP and messaging? The Chinese WeChat hat much for features (e.g. send money, pay etc.)

And even my mother has installed Threema on her phone because a friend of her asked for it. This tells you something. It is hard to come up with another social network like facebook. But a chatting client on the phone? The tide can change very fast there.

Threema gets used more in Europe than in the states. But even a US buddy recently suggested we switch to threema. It is closed source but claims to offer more privacy.

https://threema.ch/en

Chat apps also have network effects.

People use Whatsapp because that's what everyone else uses. I would prefer Signal but no one I know uses it.

Everyone I know uses Whatsapp.

So I use Whatsapp.

Clearly anecdotal.

Nobody I know uses WhatsApp. So I don’t use WhatsApp.

See how that works?

If you count the number of anecdotes on the WhatsApp side vs. Signal or other similar networks, you will find that a massive quantitative difference. There are about 1,000 WhatsApp users for every 1 Telegram or Signal user.

The anecdote is supposed to show why one can't just write their own app. It doesn't work that way.

No, it does. I am not going to post the same story on five different social networks. But I can easily have 5 different chatting clients on my phone.

How many people do you know who are happy to have 5 different chatting apps on their phone and remember which one to use to talk to which person?

Consider that you're a distant outlier.

I use 4, and it's not difficult to remember, for anyone worth chatting to.

You just naturally remember, like you would remember where your friends live. I guess if you are constantly dealing with "contacts" rather then friends it would get confusing.

Most people in the US don't look past iMessage. WeChat / WhatsApp abroad. Network effects are real.

Maybe for your group , but imessage certainly isn't the standard across the US. Does nobody you know own an android?

Most people have facebook and instagramm on their phone which could be already seen as "chatting apps". I don't use them for chatting.

I use

1. WeChat

2. WhatsApp

3. Threema

4. Frozenchat, a Jabber client with OTR support

Don't have signal yet.

Ah, and I can "chat" via Text message too :-)

1. no one uses this outside of china,they failed in their push to even india

2. global leader right now

3. as compromised as whatsapp,has data compliance with multiple countries

4. no name fork of a no name

1. Clearly anecdotal evidence

2. correct

3. Multiple countries? You would need a court order from Switzerland. I am not even sure they can access your messages if they wanted to.

4. Irrelevant because it is a client to an open protocol. Which client you use does not matter. I just named mine.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-rcs-messaging/

How can you trust them wwhen the code isn't open? I'll stick to signal

> WhatsApp? Is this so difficult to program? Just VOIP and messaging?

Yes, it actually is that difficult to program. To scale to WhatsApp's level, you can't just base all your message-delivery off a Kafka cluster and be done with it. Amazon Chime still hasn't been deployed outside of us-east-1 and seems nowhere close to a global deployment.

The engineering effort to provide low-latency communications, at geographic and user scale, is very much non-trivial.

>WhatsApp with VoIP now has the mobile network operators by their balls. No one is logging out of that, by far.

Interesting - when did you last evaluate / buy a phone based on voice quality capabilities?

It is because it is free to call any distance, not the quality.

All operators in the US offer unlimited free long distance within the US for several years.

A very large percentage of the country never makes international calls.

The reason for Whatsapp's success is because of the lack of borders in communication. It's not only free in the US, it's free worldwide.

See other comments but literally inside the US calls are not what I am talking about. WhatsApp is used internationally.

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