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Comment by parthdesai | Hacker News Reader

You do know that whatsapp is literally used by small businesses in 3rd world to conduct....business right?

It's a little irksome how other commentors are quick to dismiss this very valid point. SMBs in Asia aren't using WhatsApp because they've forced the platform on their consumers; it's their consumers who are using WhatsApp who've forced a choice on the SMBs. WhatsApp has very wide consumer penetration, and its use by businesses is meant as a convenience wrapper for customers.

Now, does switching from WhatsApp to some other not-very-widely-used platform cause customer engagement / retention to drop? I would wager very much so! It's a matter of priorities - people go where there is least friction, and WhatsApp otherwise provides a seamless friction-less experience.

But doesn't that mean it will be easy for the SMBs to move to any replacement service?

At the cost of losing customers, is my point :)

Uff, I see no reason to smile about it.

Maybe these business will diversify their communication mediums because WhatsApp is down - seems like a good thing for society.

Do you even know who these business owners are and what kind of life do they live? These are the guys that don't have a solid roof over their head, struggle to meet their daily needs and might have to sleep hungry if their day's sales weren't good. Diversifying is the least of the things they have to worry about. Whatsapp allowed them to reduce friction when it comes to communicating with customers, it helps their sales.

What might be a good thing for society in the first world doesn't mean it's necessarily good thing for society in the third world.

I reject this logic - it's an argument for sustaining the status quo at all costs.

Facebook is the most user-hostile tech megacorp, and they will inevitably harm these businesses you care about. The sooner the bandaid is ripped off the better.

I mean, sure, status quo can / should be changed - but you want to get to a point where a changed status quo is sustainable, and you're not going to get there by simply removing existing options. It doesn't change the incentives people have for preferring to use the platform, namely the pre-existing widespread penetration.

You want to dislodge Facebook, you need to disrupt it / curtail its monopoly.

Companies diversifying their communication platforms is the disruption.

It's very first world centric point of view. I doubt some of these commentator claiming whatsapp being down is good for the society have ever been outside of the first world and have seen how it actually helps people in need.

Have you considered that any change done is going to mean winners and losers.

If Facebook permanently goes down then those businesses would move to a different platform.

Would it suck? Probably. Would the world be a better place without Facebook? A ton of people think so. Me included.

This is the same argument people have used when we talk about health insurance in the US being scammy. If we ever decided to address it it means a good chunk of people lose their jobs but also means that the health of this country goes up. Which one is more important?

But people moving from Facebook to another social media or messaging platform is just changing the company. That new company could do whatever things you don't like that Facebook is doing. Your example seems to mean that we move to another healthcare system as in method of implementation not just moving from one company to another.

> But people moving from Facebook to another social media or messaging platform is just changing the company.

This is not necessarily true. There are social networks and messaging systems implemented as open protocols.

That's a fair point. I'm going to make an assumption here but those systems aren't moderated or controlled centrally? So I see two issues with these if they become popular. 1. This only increases misinformation since there's no censorship at all 2. What prevents people from using the service for illegal purposes (I think this becomes a problem once services become popular) 3. Finally won't it just be banned eventually? If some court in any country issues a ruling to control it and it can't be controlled that will just escalate. Especially if it's something like pedophiles.

I've been doing a pretty good job of moving my client's communications to Signal out here.

I feel bad for everyone who relies on whatsapp bots for making stuff happen, though. These are getting really common out here for a lot of things and it always worries me that it's such a linchpin. They're really handy and save a lot of bullshit phone calls from having to be something people deal with for simple stuff like pharmacy delivery. I can get food from the local place down the street that's only really open for lunch and totally off the map for uber eats, for example... if this persists a few more hours those mom and pop type shops aren't going to have as great a day.

At the start of this year I started working for an employment service company that covers the Indo-Asia-Pacific and South American markets.

I was amazed to discover how pervasive Facebook, Inc. has become in the developing world for conducting business and navigating everyday life.

For a lot of people in developing nations such as the Phillipines and Indonesia, Facebook is synonymous with the internet. This has been buoyed by their push to bundle uncapped/free data for Facebook with mobile plans in markets with high growth of mobile internet access.

It's interesting, because I'm always reading articles about how "Western teens aren't using Facebook any more", which is true, but it's also irrelevant, because they're not really a profitable market, teenagers have short attention spans and no money. Facebook's growth strategy is to become the one stop shop (in lower income nations) for everything you want and need.

In Latin American 3rd world countries, people also conduct business via Instagram.

They create Instagram accounts and post products as posts, with a caption of "DM me for price".

It also turns on every alarm on my mind, when they start calling these "Instagram pages". It blurs the line between a real website and an Instagram account (In Spanish, "website" is "página web" as well).

I've also heard: "My business went to hell because Instagram killed my account" and that's when I reply: "Have you ever thought of owning a real website?"

Maybe an event like this will spur some people into... not doing that? Yes I'm aware of the ubiquitous nature of whatsapp in many developing nations. Have also successfully got a lot of people moved onto using Signal for anything they care about.

Signal has and will go down just like facebook. Cloudflare/aws having issues affects an insanely high percentage of the internet. People still use them. Outages rarely cause anything, they happen, people move on.

El Salvador basically runs on WhatsApp. From the small food stall to CEOs and maybe even government.

> The country where I live

With your username, I think you can risk naming the country without any additional loss of privacy.

Edited :)

Unfortunately they are about to be taught a hard lesson in what "free" really means.

That'll depend on the length of the outage, other tasks they can do during it, and the uptime and market penetration of any competing services.

I don't think much of a lesson is going to occur here. It'll be a brief blip that impacts few meaningfully.

Big tech free services have WAY better uptime than commercial alternatives.

That's not what they meant by free.

Maybe that was a bit of a....mistake?

And the alternative is... ?

It's quite possible to run a business without WhatsApp. Lots of businesses have been doing it for quite a long time.

Email, SMS, good ol' phone calls, Signal, <insert local app/platform here>, your own website, etc, on top of whatever you use right now.

If you're in a country that relies a lot on Facebook or Whatsapp, that's where the main focus will be, but at least try to have alternatives just in case something goes wrong.

So 4/4 of those are platforms controlled by a single company or a few large corporations. This really isn't a win in any meaningful sense.

It should be fine for huge corporations to exist and provide services really efficiently at scale while also being forced to play nice and respond to the will of the people they serve.

If we collectively can't stop Facebook from doing bad thing and being bad stewards to their own platform then you won't be able to stop whatever would replace them either.

It was a mistake to communicate with the users on a platform that they use? Instead of trying to get them on signal, losing 90% of leads in the process and making each of your sales cost x10 much?

Don't businesses fall back to SMS/phone or e-mail? Doesn't seem like a good idea to rely on a single corporation.

Not to mention all the small businesses that rely on Instagram too. Here it's used as an e-commerce platform.

You need a contingency plan for when vendors go down even in 3rd world countries. It just so happens a lot of us would not mind this vendor failing entirely. It’s unfortunate that we have so little choice in the matter but ultimately the same advice holds true for all of us smugly throwing insults while keeping our billing in AWS.

He’s a HN 10xer. He doesn’t care about anyone outside his Palo Alto cold-press-Koffee-Klatch, despite what he virtue signals. It’s amusing seeing people here trip over each other to say some variety of “I don’t use Facebook.”

You do know that <insert-extremely-damaging-thing> is literally used by small businesses in 3rd world to conduct....business right?

Facebook doesn't care.

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