WhatsApp after that Facebook acquisition has simply become worse.
More buggy, more clunky, lists of useless features like "communities", Facebook like pages.
I will soon be leaving it and being exclusively on signal.
More buggy, more clunky, lists of useless features like "communities", Facebook like pages.
I will soon be leaving it and being exclusively on signal.
Minuses: "communities", business spam, "channels"
I'd say meta did pretty well.
The acquisition was 10-years ago (2014). Which is an insanely long time in tech.
The "stories" feature is just plain stupid. It doesn't make any sense.
Also the "business" thing is you with an AI chatbot that just offers a crappy answer and you'll need to contact a human anyway.
One of the worst cases of software enshittification.
When one is judged on 'impact', but not judged on 'postive impact'... Having a lot of people interact with your feature and hate it counts.
I remember how it used to be impossible to migrate chat history from Android back to iOS.
It looks like the feature was only implemented some time this year (!):
https://www.androidauthority.com/whatsapp-chat-transfer-cros...
Integrating Meta AI was actually genius. I use it all of the time.
Had an idea to add tracking to my alt-az telescope, asked Meta AI what I need to understand and it explains right ascension and declination and even provides the coordinate transformations needed (and even in a language that I specify). I can audit the code and have it write some unit tests that I also check, flesh it out a bit and I'm done.
That kind of thing.
For AI and search (50% use it for queries I'd otherwise previously used Google for) I use GPT... that is my AI / AI I use.
I do use Meta AI yet only through my Meta Ray Bans which are handy.
I cannot understand why they have such a notification when I don't want notifications.
Am I costing them money for not having notifications on?
One alternative is to switch to some open source protocol, like matrix.
It does, however have a mission to bring secure communication to a large audience. That means it will add features it expects will expand the audience. I don't like stories in general (they're FOMO-driven engagement bait), but Signal having them doesn't meaningfully impact my ability to use it to message and call people.
Signal has no shareholders and is a nonprofit, precisely so they don't have the wrong incentives.
Stories were added two years ago. There have been no "unwanted features" since, provided stories is an unwanted feature in the first place.
How do you do this if all your friends are on WA?
It won't be hard to convince 5 people.
If I badly need to reach out, I will just make a normal phone call or text.