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pmlnr

> I'm so disappointed in this. Whatsapp is a functional tool. It was successful since it worked.

One decade ago:

s/Whatapp/Skype/g

s/Facebook/Microsoft/g

View on HN

The niche that Whatsapp filled and which brought it to massive adoption was not the same as Skype's. In South America (and Asia, too, if I understand correctly), Whatsapp was a way to avoid SMS charges on your mobile phone. Because now it is the only way many acquaintances and businesses can be contacted, it will remain entrenched even with this hostile new privacy policy.

Skype, on the other hand, was about audio- or videoconferencing from a computer, and so it wasn’t quite as much a part of the ordinary person's life as Whatsapp.

> Skype, on the other hand, was about audio- or videoconferencing from a computer, and so it wasn’t quite as much a part of the ordinary person's life as Whatsapp.

It was very much a part of everyday life in Hungary. "let's skype" as expression existed.

Whatsapp is what people use in some countries for contacting a restaurant to reserve a table, contacting a bike shop to ask if you can bring your bike down for servicing, etc. It has essentially replaced the public telephone network. Skype was never used that universally.

> It has essentially replaced the public telephone network.

I know. And I think it's insane and horrible.

The old style phone companies have no one to blame but themselves though, because their "services" were insane and horrible. Phone calls, SMS and data were a goldmine that they were all too happy to exploit for years until (in the EU) regulators stepped in. International calls or roaming outside the EU is still expensive, even in 2021!

Not to mention that unlike Whatsapp, Facebook or Skype, on POTS/mobile phones you don't have any option to deal with spammers, call ID fraudsters and other bullshit.

Why? The "public" telephone network is still provided by a business. You can't host your own phone server for people to call.

The public telephone network is incomparably more interoperable than something like WhatsApp. You cannot self-host it, but you can keep the exact same phone number while switching providers (which is even more flexible than email), phone manufacturers and OSes, and "client" (phone modem) implementations at will.

No such thing is possible with WhatsApp. Various implementations come from the same company, do not have feature parity (e. g. phone calls are not supported on certain mobile OSes), and definitely don't allow anything in the way of integration with the outside world. A PSTN connection can be hooked up to a PBX to let you automate voice and all kinds of other things, while SMS can be synced to the computer using an app with the appropriate permissions. In short, PSTN is malleable, while WhatsApp is not.

Skype's niche in my cohort (poor college student in North America the early 2000s) was calling home to relatives without having to use an expensive telephone calling card or burning cell phone minutes. It was an important part of my life for keeping in touch without feeding the extraordinarily expensive university telephone system.

I moved all of my AT&T calling card spending to Skype once it had the ability to call telephone numbers because it was much less expensive to do so.

I still have about $3 in legacy Skype spend available. Microsoft sends me nasty emails that they don’t let you make prepaid deposits anymore that never expire. At some point I’ll finally use these credits and I’ll probably never use Skype again.

> In [country] (and [other country], too, if I understand correctly), [Skype] was a way to avoid [international call] charges

^ That's why GP was saying they're similar

> In South America (and Asia, too, if I understand correctly), Whatsapp was a way to avoid SMS charges on your mobile phone.

It was the same in the US, especially for avoiding costly international SMS/MMS charges. It basically allowed me to communicate with international family and friends, since they might not have been as technically inclined to deal with logins and spam on apps like Skype.

In addition, at that time, WhatsApp was the best way to share contacts. It’s still one of the best ways, I think, since you don’t have to worry if the other person is iOS or Android.

Yes, that's true but the keyword is "international". Domestic, within the US, use of WhatsApp was largely driven by having a multinational social network. For people primarily communicating with others within the US, SMS still dominated (or iMessages) over WhatsApp. Whereas, outside the US, WhatsApp was used even with people communicating primarily with others within the same country.

> Because now it is the only way many acquaintances and businesses can be contacted, it will remain entrenched even with this hostile new privacy policy.

“Will we ever end the MySpace monopoly?”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business....

Not comparable. MySpace was never adopted by physical retail businesses and the hospitality industry. Those didn't join social media until the Facebook era and, indeed, many people are complaining that while fewer ordinary adults are using FB, for a lot of businesses their FB page remains their sole internet presence.

Then those businesses are going to have to adapt or risk losing an increasing number of clients.

You can find a bad take on almost any issue from the Guardian. That article only exists because The Guardian doesn't like Rupert Murdoch.

WhatsApp was free SMS in South America where it was expensive.

Skype was cheap long distance and low-cost mobile in Europe where it was expensive.

Both of those things were/are stupidly expensive in those respective locations.

Skype blew up pre-smartphone explosion.

well sed

or Google Talk and Hangout

Sort of. Google Talk, yes, but only the post-2006, federation enabled version, which was XMPP - read http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-federation.html

Hangouts - no. It never was as smooth as skype or google talk.

XMPP gtalk was awesome, and killing it was foolish; my _entire_ gtalk contact list suddenly stopped appearing, and that didn't just include people in IT. Dancers, musicians, teachers, et al were using Adium/Pidgin to chat, and suddenly it didn't work.

The web chat they provided was incredibly slow on mid and low end PCs, but most of my friends didn't even get as far as trying it. Google talk stopped working in Adium and _they didn't notice_ because they were able to talk via other connected services.

Probably for the best, Google didn't end up the benevolent technocratic force for good that we hoped for at the time.

Fun fact: xmpp gtalk still works with 3rd party clients.

Well something broke it at some point where it no longer worked. There's plenty of threads going back years over years where folks are befuddled about connectivity issues.

And there's that Android users were coerced to use Hangouts, which did not have XMPP. Rather than switch to Hangouts, most of my friends kept using Whatsapp and Messenger.

Ie:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/20mz48/google_xmp...

https://www.jabawok.net/?p=70

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