Hacker News Reader

Comment by okuntilnow | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I don’t think we need a twitter replacement. Mastodon is nice, but ultimately suffers from the same problems but at smaller scale.

I think it’s more likely that users will move to smaller communities - Discord, Telegram & WhatsApp groups etc.

I’m surprised that Whatsapp hasn’t developed better community functions.

View on HN

There is so much potential in WhatsApp.

With a few baby steps they could move into the Discord/Slack space, Telegram channels, Twitter type interactions etc. And that’s before you get into a WeChat everything-app.

I’m not saying to add it all and change what makes WhatsApp good, but it could encompass a lot more social stuff (with small groups being the niche) and it’s absolutely ubiquitous.

It could also be a cash cow for Meta.

WeChat keeps coming up every so often. I have never used it, most certainly not in China where it seems to be intended for. How does it work? Apple as far as I see in EU does not allow an app to be an "everything app" and holds tight control even over updates being shipped. I also see iPhones are wildly popular in China.. So, how does WeChat get its everything functionality in china?

it pretty much works the same way it does on Android because Apple just doesn't really enforce its App Store rules. Chinese users heavily indicate that they'd switch to Android if WeChat would suck. So the short answer is, Tencent has enough leverage. Also iphone share still isn't that big, like 20% of the market I think.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com