Comment by maltalex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maltalex | Hacker News Reader

This thread is full of people suggesting to just switch everyone, including grandma, to Signal/Matrix/Telegram/XMPP.

This is naive.

First of all, I'm a big fan of Signal and Matrix, but it is hard to overstate how much more polished WhatsApp is in comparison. There's just a lot more friction for grandma. There are also considerably fewer resources behind the alternatives, so things like this [0] happen (tl;dr - it took Signal over seven months to fix a bug in the Android client that would sometimes send messages to the wrong person!!)

Second, the problem doesn't end with grandma. It's the network. There are literally billions of people on WhatsApp and there are places where WhatsApp is the default method of communication for everything. Schools and kindergartens use it for announcements and to communicate with parents. Service providers give out a WhatsApp number to contact support. Friends and family are all on WhatsApp in established groups with a long history that everyone wants to keep. Trying to switch everyone over is futile. Not being on WhatsApp isn't an option. It is that big.

[0]:https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/10247

Reading this as an argument that more resources means bugs are fixed quicker I have to disagree, [there's][0] [many][1] [examples][2] of big bucks software productions with notable long-lived bugs in production.

[0]: https://www.socmedsean.com/solved-how-do-i-clear-the-faceboo...

[1]: https://www.techradar.com/news/ios-15-beta-still-hasnt-fixed...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/beta/search?q=video+player&restrict...

Fair point. To be honest, I hope that such a bug could have remained open for 7 months because of insufficient resources. Any other explanation is even worse.

I do not think WhatsApp is very polished. It does not have a desktop client and when you use the web client you get an annoying notification on your phone which you can't dismiss. Additionally it is quite hard to find things in the preferences and there is no way that toI know of to copy a phone number from a group chat without adding that person to your contacts.

On level of polish I would say WhatsApp and Element are the same (i.e. rough) while Discord is more polished. I do not like Discord and their business but they have created one of very few polished chat clients.

> Not being on WhatsApp isn't an option.

It's an option for me!

When they were launching, and for most of their first couple of years, Whatsapp spammed the bejaysus out of me. My mummy told me never to play with spammers.

Signal and Matrix aren't ready for grandma adoption.

Out of all the non-whatsapp choises, Telegram is the least bad (yes, no E2EE, relax) and is something you can actually get your boomer-aged parents and their parents to use with very little help.

I think the adoption of Telegram versus Signal (around 10x) really goes to pretty plainly demonstrate that the average user's priorities are not the same as the average HN user's priorities.

Even ignoring the network effect, for most people the user experience is a _much_ higher priority than things like E2EE. And the trade-offs Signal makes in the way they've implemented E2EE (e.g., if you drop your old phone in a toilet, change your phone number when you get a new phone, switch between iOS and Android, etc, you just... lose your entire message history) are just not acceptable to the average person. I suspect many people would not believe how many people I've heard complain about Telegram because the _stickers_ apparently aren't as nice as things like WeChat.

I'm fairly certain that long term the push to move non-technical users to Signal is going to wind up doing more harm than good. It's being sold as "good for privacy because it's E2EE". People are going to use it, have poor experiences, and then drop it. The next time someone says "use this app because it's good for privacy and has E2EE" it's going to be a much harder sell trying to overcome "Yeah, but the last time I tried that I lost all the message history with my deceased daughter when I bought a new phone."

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