WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I just don't want to believe that our services have to be paid for through proxy by giving huge cut to 3rd parties. The quality goes down both as UX and as core content, our attention span is destroyed, our privacy is violated and our political power is being stolen as content gets curated by those who extract money by giving us the "free" services.
It's simply very inefficient. IMHO we should go back to pay for what you use, this can't go on forever. There must be way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy.
Rounded to the nearest meaningful number - 0%
There must be some some number that makes it viable to have free users and paid users. For games, the free users are usually those who provide the "content".
People usually demonize freemium games but IMHO its much more benign than extracting huge sums by artificially making it worse and sell attention.
they are just there for the captive network effect, which will take a hit the second or becomes a freemium or ad ridden service.
those are literal public forums people go to expose themselves. you don't have a very good point.
If I understand it correctly, people use it mainly because MMS was a dumpster fire and WA was the first platform which got critical mass in most countries, which it achieved by being both pretty good overall and by being cross-platform.
The encryption is a nice bonus that everybody likes, but you can't prove that is a primary or even major reason why plumbers in India, tour guides in Dubai, and school parent groups in the US all choose to communicate with it, personally and professionally. If anything, I feel like Signal must have by now poached a good number of the people whose main concern is "How encrypted is it?"
Also, Gmail is not a public forum and people don't mind that it's 'ad-ridden' either.
i don't think people join because it's encrypted, but they wouldn't use when it's not. it too can became the dumpsterfire that sms was/is.
Are you talking for direct, by credit card payments that somehow you can't cancel? Can you explain a bit?
As for the darkest of dark patterns - give Adobe some money and see what happens.
Think gyms where you refuse to cancel even when you are physically there in person with someone to yell at and imagine trying to do the same online where there's not a phone number, or a phone number with a 1 hour wait and a CSR paid based on if they can successfully not give you what you want
The problem is Whatsapp is a closed ecosystem so unlike email we can't just buy a provider.
And I do pay for youtube. The experience is well worth it and I'm thankful I can afford it (it's not a lot but many can't).
In my opinion, it’s rarely about “can’t” when we’re talking about 12 bucks a month or whatever. It’s about the psychology: when a free tier exists, people reframe it in their heads that paying for that thing is an extravagance. Relatedly, removing the free tier altogether also has dangerous effects, as people immediately jump to “I can’t believe you’re taking away the free thing I used to have” outrage, while nobody complains about not having free access to say, HBO.
FB does - “Meta Verified” for $16/month (presumably different depending on locale), but the benefits aren’t very good. (A verified badge, Increased account protection, Enhanced support, Upgraded profile features, Bonus stars and stickers)
You can pay FB to serve your ads too. We're not talking about those things.
I'm guessing most people didn't pay though, since they scraped the fee (even before FB bought them). I guess it was just too little money to be worth the effort.
So I think I got that...
That's nothing at this scale of users and speaks volumes for the ingenuity of their staff.
The only ones driving even leaner than that are StackOverflow with just nine servers [2].
[1] https://highscalability.com/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-...
The fee wasn't enforced in many developing countries, and some users elsewhere will have been jumping through the delete-and-reinstall hoops (which was painful because it lost chat history) to avoid paying.
But with 1bn active users at the time the fee was dropped, it would still have been bringing in more than enough revenue to have sustained Whatsapp as an independent business if they had chosen not to sell to FB.
The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many people in the “a fee instead of ads” crowd consumes YT for hours a day, but so far I’ve only met one person (not counting myself) who actually pays for YT Premium.
And yes, a major chunk of the people I talked about this with were FAANG engineers, so it isn’t like they cannot afford it. But it felt like they were more interested in complaining about the ad-funded-services landscape and muse on their stances around it, as opposed to actually putting their money where their mouth is.
All I can say is, I am not paying for YT Premium out of some ideological standpoint or love for Google (not even close). It has genuinely been just worth it for me many times over in the exact practical ways I was expecting it to.
It's probably at least irresponsible to not block ads for an elderly parent who's starting to experience cognitive decline.
Literally on the first link I clicked on on cbs the advertiser somehow figured out how to make my browser redirect to some super-sketchy site saying I was the 5 billionth google search and won blah blah blah.
Browsing without adblock is an unacceptable security risk so long as google et all refuse to audit and comprehensively secure the code they demand to run on my laptop.
Which is why many of them say things like "skip these ads if you like Im not getting any of it" or "Im here primarily for exposure, I make my money elsewhere".
That's because micropayments are still fucking annoying to do on both sides of any transaction:
- credit cards: cheap-ish at scale (2-5%), but users don't want to give random apps their CC details and integrating with Stripe/Paypal/whatever has the cost of UX flow break due to account details and 2FA compliance bullshit. In addition, every service paid-for by CC has the problem that only people with a CC can pay for it (so people in countries like Europe where "classic" bank accounts prevail are out of luck, and so are people in countries deemed too poor and/or fraud-affiliated are locked out entirely), and you gotta deal with tax and other regulatory compliance around handling payments as well. Oh and people will try to use your service to validate stolen payment credentials because a 1$ charge (especially for a well known service like Whatsapp) is most likely to be ignored by the accountholder even if fraudulent in nature, which in turn will lead to issues with chargebacks or, worst case, getting dropped entirely by the payment processor.
- in-app purchases: expensive (30% cut for the platform provider), serious headache to do when a significant chunk of the user base doesn't run phones with properly licensed Google Play Store (e.g. Huawei who aren't allowed to embed Play Store on their phones)
- bank transfer: possible, but restricted to the economic zones where there's enough customer base to justify the expenses of setting up a local company with a bank account (i.e. US, EU, India, possibly China), and transaction fees from the banks may end up being >>50% of the transaction's face value at such low amounts
- crxptxcurrency: even more of a hassle for customers to acquire, questionable legality / KYC issues, no realtime authorization due to mandatory waiting time for mining to confirm transactions
- pay by phone bill, premium numbers: possible, but need bureaucracy in each country, fraud / "my kid did it" complaints will run rampant, premium number calls are by default blocked in most if not all modern phone contracts ever since the early '00s and "dialer" fraud malware, difficult to associate with customer's phone number in the backend
In the end, if you truly want to capture a global audience with microtransaction payments, be prepared to deal with a loooooooooooooooooot of bullshit just to get started.
Long story short, we desperately need a global government effort to standardize payments at low fees. There's absolutely zero reason why banks and other intermediaries should be allowed to skim off more than 5% of any kind of transaction. ZERO.
Europe though, yeah they’re killing it.
I'm German, so I'm basing my statement on almost 34 years of living here. In case you want some more details from an actual bank, read this [1].
Basically, we don't need credit cards, not even for renting cars, because we have robust regulation and our own national cashless payment schemes plus SEPA. Direct debit is just fine for us.
Yes, but not necessarily MasterCard/Visa debit cards. Germany's Girocard for example is a national debit card scheme that does not use any of the American grifters. Unfortunately, it's being phased out in favor of MC/Visa because the EU fee cap on national schemes is much lower than for MC/Visa and so banks can make more money off of you.
We're just standing by and watch our dependence on American grifter megacompanies larger every day.
I also see more people paying with their phone/smartwatch than any physical card these days.
I have never encountered even that. My debit card also works great for in-person payments in the US, with the only exception perhaps being rentals.
This is not true.
International payments are a huge huge goddamn mess and I do not envy anyone who has to deal with their peculiarities.
And even for those who have credit cards, they are "pay in full at the end of each month" cards, not American-style revolving credit cards. And stuff like the "cashback" cards of Americans, that's also not very common here since the "cashbacks" are actually paid for by the merchant on top of the interchange fee - but there's an EU law that places a hard cap of IIRC 1% on the merchant fees, so there is barely any way for banks to incentivise people to use credit cards.
And on the bank side, here in Europe we also don't really have that "debt holders can just sell off defaulted debts" thing, so banks can't offload the risk of defaults to someone else. And if that's not enough, we also got very strict laws on who can get approved for a credit card and for which limits - stuff like 20 year olds with 20, 30k of credit card debt are truly rare unless the parents of said young people are rich enough to back such a massive CC limit.
Strong disagree, being able to withdraw cash at corner stores or pay with cards directly beats having to guess how much cash you need to exchange beforehand. And a number German banks have offered free credit or debit cards for decades.
> And even for those who have credit cards, they are "pay in full at the end of each month" cards, not American-style revolving credit cards. And stuff like the "cashback" cards of Americans, that's also not very common here since the "cashbacks" are actually paid for by the merchant on top of the interchange fee - but there's an EU law that places a hard cap of IIRC 1% on the merchant fees, so there is barely any way for banks to incentivise people to use credit cards.
True but that doesn't affect their usefulness as payment methods - EU customers can largely pay with "credit" cards just fine.
o_O
Depends on the price.
I'm guessing lots of folks are paying $1/month to Apple to upgrade from the free 5GB tier of iCloud storage to get to the 50GB tier.
WhatsApp charged people $1 per year before being acquired by Facebook:
* https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/
Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time. Even if they went to $1 per month, that'd be fairly cheap (and WhatsApp ran fairly lean, personnel-wise: fifty FTEs).
What I was talking about was paying by being exposed to ads vs. paying directly, and increased iCloud storage has no former option.
(I worked for WhatsApp from 2011-2019)
From that article, user count was about 900 Million when the fee was ended; user count was about 450 M in Feb 2014 when the acquisition was announced [1]. Either way, it is a mistake to think everyone was paying.
A) Some people still had lifetime accounts from when the app was $1 for iPhone, or from the typical late December limited time free for iPhone promotions. Windows Phone got marked as lifetime for a while due to a bug/oversight that took a while to get noticed.
B) Enforcement was limited. A lot of users wouldn't have had a payment method that WhatsApp could accept; demanding payment when there's no way to pay isn't good for anybody. For a long time, we didn't even implement payment enforcement; we'd go through and extend subscriptions for a year, initially by manual script, then through automation. When we did build payment enforcement, I think we only set it on for Spain and maybe the US. Everywhere else would get the reminders that the account was going to expire, and then on the day of, it would silently extend the account and not bug you again for a while. Even where payment enforcement was on, it would only lock you out for I think a week, then your account would be extended and maybe you'd pay next time.
Adding on, for a lot of users, the hassle of paying $1 is a bigger deal than the actual $1; but so for people in lower income countries, it's both --- a) it's hard to pay $1 to a US country for a large number of people, b) there are countries with significant number of people living on a dollar a day; I don't think it's reasonable to ask them to forgo a days worth of living to pay for a messenger.
I don't remember numbers, and there's not a lot of financial reporting, because WhatsApp numbers are so small compared to the rest of FB/Meta, but there's a first half 2014 report [2] that shows revenue of $15M. Assuming payments are even over the year (probably not a good assumption, but we don't have good numbers), that'd be maybe 30 Million paying users (some users bought multiple years though), or less than 10%.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-26266689
[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...
Huh, is that what it was... I had a Windows Phone 2012-2013 and I think I signed up for WhatsApp on it and I remember chatting with a friend on it and he was talking about the $1 per year thing and I went to check, and it said I have lifetime and I was confused how I ended up with that, but was using it so lightly that I didn't bother to look into why. I figured maybe there was a promotion the day I signed up or something.
IIRC, you had to have signed up with windows phone, switching phones to windows phone wouldn't grant you lifetime (switching to iPhone while the app was paid on iOS would; a delay on that was added to avoid abuse of borrow your friend's iPhone, re-register and then switch back).
One day the app asked me to pay. It was less than 1 Euro per year, I think. I never associated a credit card to the app store (Android) so I did not pay and waited to see what would happen.
It kept asking for money for a few days but it kept working, so I thought they were not serious about it. Then it stopped asking. It started asking for money again after a few months but I remembered what happened before so I waited again. It kept working and eventually stopped asking for money. This pattern repeated a few times until maybe the time FB bought it.
I believe that if it stopped working people would have switched en masse to another app, maybe Telegram? We also had Viber and probably FB messenger too.
Switches happened many times in the 90s and early 2000s. I remember AIM, ICQ, MSN, then Skype. Whole networks of people moved to the next one or used more than one to message different friends. WhatsApp never had a chance to earn money directly from its users IMHO.
Can I ask why Spain specifically?
The US never had a high user count, but it was chosen because US tech journalism sets the narrative. If you want people to pay around the world, convince US tech journalists that payment enforcement is on, and the knowledge that you need to pay filters through the world in a way that it doesn't by just enforcing payment in Spain.
See also: the invisibility of Nokia phones when they pissed off US carriers with SIP clients and left the US market; despite being the top selling phone manufacture of both feature phones and smart phones, there were no media stories about them.
Youtube is also moving into that direction.
Such a strange business model, making the free version below acceptable.
That's because the core product is not anywhere near worth what they charge for it. The youtube interface is a nightmare for users and creators alike. I have very little controls over what I do and don't see, how I can filter or search for content, or how I can search for new content. History of both videos and comments are effectively non existent and impossible to reasonably search or archive.
It's not a service so much as it is a copyright clearinghouse.
If they had an actual experience with worthwhile features to offer then they wouldn't have to artificially degrade the free experience to convince you.
Youtube music is fine-ish. Search is pretty weak and prefers recommendations over results. The controls for playlist Play, Play with Shuffle, and Play with Autoadd are fairly confusing especially between the app and the desktop version. Creating and managing multiple playlists is a frustrating experience and not thought out at all. It constantly feeling the need to change the album art on my playlists.
You pay to not be annoyed. You're not paying for a "premium" product in any way.
I believe they are rolling out audio ads.
Whats the point of paid, premium service like Spotify if I keep being served those stupid, dishonest and bordeline illegally deceiving Shopify ads every 15 minutes.
The idea of paid, premium service with ads is ridiculous.
Are you willing to pay more for your subscription so that Spotify can also pay podcasters? Because that's what you are asking, it won't ever be able to dilute even more the royalties pot, you'd need to pay more for your subscription so that podcasters can also be paid.
Absolute bullshit.
Hacker news has 5 million monthly unique users [1].
Given how hacker news constantly complain about google’s decline and the constant virtue signaling on the need to pay for software, you would expect a sizable chunk of the users (the vocal ones, at least) here pay for Kagi. And yet we are here. GP is absolutely right about it being all-talk.
So the alternative seems to be "free, with ads" or "paid, with ads"
I love paying for ad-removal. Take. My. Money.
What I mean is that, IMO, ads by themselves are only a small part of the puzzle. Paying for YT premium doesn't sound enticing if it only gets rid of the ad part and not the surveillance machinery.
I do pay for my email that does no tracking and has good UX. I allow ads on duckduckgo because they actually respect my privacy and don't try to trick me all the time. I also pay for Spotify premium and have donated to Signal and Mozilla, but I won't support the likes of Google and Meta.
1. Users are spread around the world. This isn't a site with 70% US visitors.
2. The majority of users run ad block, and this continues to rise.
3. Ad rates plummet each year. I earn about 5x less on the site now, than in the past, with the same number of active users, and 3x as many advertisements.
I've tried all the major advertising networks. I setup header bidding and signed direct deals with large networks, such as AppNexus, Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, etc. At the end of the day, ads do not pay well for my audience.
Users can pay $3/mo to remove advertising. Yes, I'm aware that's $36/yr, when the average registered user is generating less than $0.50/yr in ad revenue. About 30% of paying users choose to pay higher than $3/mo for no additional benefit (they can pay any amount they wish). I also have some individuals that have paid thousands of dollars.
What would happen if I offered a $1/yr plan for an ad free experience, so it's more inline with ad revenues? I honestly don't know, but I would guess I would lose a few of the $3/mo paying users, and gain less than 100 users paying $1/yr, so it would likely be net negative.
With the fee to remove advertising, you'd need to use all the price discrimination tricks to maximize revenue. E.g., have sales, have discount codes, etc., and it would still not be close to the price discrimination possible via ads.
I also wonder what the income of OP's bubble was when they were not paying for WhatsApp.
And honestly, what you could make from users through ads is not what I care about. You are making zero from me through ads because I block them everywhere and that is not negotiable. A reasonable price would be costs + modest margin not how much you could grab out of my pocket.
I pay for email and some other services. Some other services, not so much. I find it hard to support some companies financially because I don't agree with their basic modus operandi. It's not the money; it's who it goes to.
If only we could convince large crowds to choose more free alternatives.
While I don't love my money going to Google, I find YouTube's overall quality astronomically higher than Instagram/Twitter/TikTok/etc. and the amount of censorship/"moderation"/controversy has been relatively limited. When I find something I really want to keep I have always been able to download it without much trouble.
Now whether someone who is putting out an opinion should care about getting paid is another thing, but it kills your video traffic usually too.
Yup, and, for those who don't know, you can toggle an option in your Google account settings to do the same for your recommendations in search and for any Google-served ads you will see on all websites.
Disclaimer: I tried that with the ads, and ended up reverting that setting after a few days. Even if my personalized ads were hit or miss, non-personalized ads were just nightmare fuel of the most random things ever that I absolutely had no interest in and felt actually annoyed upon seeing.
If YouTube was subscription only, hypothetically, I would just not use it, and my life would be same as it is now.
There are a great many services that are nice to have, but very few I would bother paying for out of my wallet. Given the choice of paying for them or not using them, I would just walk away from most of them.
That being said, lately YT has way too many ads for my liking; thus I am using Reddit more and more for these things.
But for the most part - probably nothing. For everything else, it'd just be either some other free option, or like going back to the internet of the early 2000s, which would be good and bad in its own ways.
As for content, it depends what you're looking for. For me, I'm mostly into maths and physics and there are so many channels and lecture series that were immensely helpful. For example, I recently went through this playlist on Lie Groups [0].
[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN_4R2IuNuuRgJb00X2J53Iq9...
It is though. Videos with "limited ads" (as it's technically called in YouTube Studio) applied to them still get paid out of Premium views.
I'd bet the ratio of time I have spent legit learning something useful vs just using it as distraction/entertainment ("educational" channels are often just entertainment for nerds like us)/background, it has to be something like 1000 to 1. I wouldn't need to replace the 999 at all. I guess I would read books a bit more, probably get a lot more done on personal projects, go out a bit more etc.
Not clear at all my life would be worse off except in that pinch where I need to know how to disassemble & fix the thing, right now.
People are curious creatures indeed.
The truth is that Youtube is a parasite. They don't create free content, they have inserted themselves between regular people creating free videos and you and are demanding that you pay them for access to what would have existed without them.
From the viewers' side, there was no place to go and browse videos, you were limited to short embedded clips or had to download the entire file first.
Youtube was a game changer when it first appeared and Google hadn't yet acquired it.
It's more money. Why would they refuse more money? It's so fucking frustrating too.
I want to pay the small fee, through a simple to use portal, that makes it obvious how to cancel, and if I'm being obligated to a multi month term or not. I also want my payment card details to be perfectly secure and for none of my private information or usage to be sold to third parties.
> who actually pays for YT Premium.
Have you ever asked them "why don't you?" Or "what would it take to get you to pay?" Or even, "would you take a free month to see if it's worth it?"
Point being I don't think the problem is nearly as black and white as you've apparently surmised.
I would rather pay a fee than watch ads, but as long as “do neither of those” is an option I’ll be picking that. If they remove that as an option I’ll either pay or not watch YouTube.
Probably not watch.
I pay for email, and was paying for search until something about the way kagi integrates with safari annoyed me. I’ve been paying more for a seedbox than Netflix costs for longer than Netflix has existed. That’s part for ad avoidance as in it initially replaced free to air tv but ad avoidance is just one factor in the best experience for my time and money trade off I’m trying to make. So i know I’m willing to both pay for things i can get ad supported from Google and also pay for a better media experience.
When it comes to that best experience for my time and money trade off though, even with money being set at zero, the vast majority of the YouTube i watch is already in the negative. Most things i watch on there, i regret the cost of just the time it took to watch the content before ads or money even gets in to it.
Which i think is a big part of the issue with ad supported internet going fee based. YouTube and so many ad supported sites and games are already just super low value and derive most of their consumption not from people making intentional lifestyle choices of “i want to be the kind of person who watches garbage all day while playing crap” but rather people making bad short term vs long term trade offs and falling in to holes of recommendations and fun looking thumbnails.
Paying for something leads to asking yourself “is this worth $x?” And i know that for at least myself $x is a large negative number. I’d pay more than the current cost of YouTube premium to definitely NOT be able to watch YouTube.
They don’t create nor curate much content.
I am curious about the poster who has learned so much from YouTube — I have tried learning many topics from science to programming to home repairs, and finding a quality program can be very challenging, and there are a lot of programs which are actually elaborate sales pitches.
Little did we know how far YouTube would go for them.
Learning on YouTube 10 yrs ago meant supplementing your guitar skills cuz you didn't have a teacher. Or learning how a compressor works so you can use it yourself in music. It was always supplemental tidbits from numerous creators that helped me hone skills. Learned a ton about tools and woodworking too, but it was always me working for awhile then going back to get more information. Much more difficult to do in like, biology(probably don't have a bio lab) or a high risk repair like plumbing.
Pretty much any computer skill is going to have a cache of resources where filtering out trash is going to be the harder part. There are fantastic coding and modeling guides from very experienced people. Most financial things you should be very wary of except top professionals with proven credentials.
Asking a community who their favorite creators are can be a good place to start.
I bought one 14 part video course and the resources/assets it had were more valuable than the info. I exercise caution with that stuff now.
And I entirely agree YouTube asks too much for premium.
Of course, as a "free" customer I'm already subject to their whims whenever they decide to add another advertising layer.
I think they are carefully riding the balance between being free for the masses with ads while milking those who have the funds to get rid of ads.
I reckon they will continue to increase their subscriber base where other streaming services are plateuing.
Certainly, YouTube Premium has been worth it for me. A big quality of life improver.
https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/20-years-125-million-sub...
I block all ads and wish commercial ads would cease to exist even though it would mean I couldn't use somethings anymore without payment.
Or do you mean how Google implemented its ads?
Additionally, a related negative side effect is consumerism.
But since I have the option to not pay, I don't. If it was paywalled I'd be willing to pay probably 3-5x what a normal streaming service charges though.
There's no desktop app for YouTube Music for starters.
I can't think of a single reason I'd want/need a standalone app over having the Chrome version of the app, which to all intents and purposes appears as a standalone app anyway.
So I'm curious, what's the use-case for a Desktop App to stream music? Even with the webapp you can download music for offline play.
FYI you can also do this with Spotify[0].
Local files work fine if you're always playing music on devices you own and that have local storage. But if you're using media devices like a Chromecast (unless you're casting directly from a device that has access to the local files), or on machines where you don’t have sync privileges—like a work computer—YouTube Music will work, but Spotify won’t.
I dont like that while the ad revenue barely extracts a dollar from me, my subscription suddenly expects $10-30 per month regardless of my usage.
Thats not "we need to charge you to continue our services", thats "we need to charge you and then 20x times again just because we can".
So I don't think solving such complex problems within a welfare system is a solved problem at all.
In Sweden we pride ourselves in health care for everyone. But we are quite bad at buying software systems for our welfare institutions.
Ads mean each user 'pays' you according to their spending power
Kinda socialist when you think about it! From each according from his ability...
[1] Obviously companies try to get around this with price discrimination, but it's hard especially for a network effect platform
I’m pretty convinced I’d pay 10x or more than that amount for a completely ad free version but I can’t be sure.
So, those numbers reflect a capital inflow to the US market rather than (as many people think) absurdly high conversion US users.
Meta stopped reporting user numbers/CPMs by geography after the market freaked out when user growth plateaued in the US (because they'd acquired basically everyone).
But the capital inflow is also because there is a lot of consumer spending in the US to convert.
But yeah, ML models do in fact work better in Indonesia and Bangladesh, but as you noted they have less money to spend.
Part of me thinks the reason why they don’t offer that paid ad-free version of Facebook (which they built to try and appease the EU regulators) in the US is because their ARPU is so high that people would laugh at the price “Facebook/IG Premium” would have to cost.
Also, don’t forget that at least for now, paid subscriptions to social media apps would need to pay a 30% rent to the platform owner duopoly. This means that the price it would be it would cost would need to be 42% above than its ad ARPU just to break even.
The ad-free one doesn’t have to cost more than the ad-supported ARPU. There’s a pretty reasonable argument to be made that social media services with near-ubiquitous uptake should be regulated as utilities, and regulators could reasonably place the price at cost + a marginal profit margin as determined to be reasonable, like they do for other utilities that are privately-owned.
> Also, don’t forget that at least for now, paid subscriptions to social media apps would need to pay a 30% rent to the platform owner duopoly.
They don’t have to offer paid subscriptions via IAP.
I'll state up front that I'm not much of a socialist, so I realize opinions will vary, but it seems crazy to regulate something so frivolous as a social media site to the point of setting its prices. If people don't like Facebook, their ads, or their pricing, simply not using it is not a life-crippling suggestion the way "don't use the Internet" is.
So I'd support you on regulating broadband ISPs waaaaay before setting the prices X or FB can charge for meme-related services.
The problem isn't access to memes, it's that for various categories of services/interactions, Meta (and presumably WeChat and/or others in other locales) properties effectively are the internet. I've seen all of the following use social media services as their sole method of communication or online presence: amateur sports teams/leagues, gyms, local governments, government agencies, parent/school groups, local service providers (barbers, farmers' markets, restaurants, etc.), online classifieds, community food boxes.
The fact that Meta has intermingled its meme factory with its hosting of the informational/communication platforms for a wide array of local groups/organizations/businesses is something they chose to do, and I'm not willing to accept the excuse of "we make a lot of money from our ad-serving brainrot algorithms so we couldn't possibly charge less than that amount of money for access to the non-algorithmic features on which we've gotten people hooked."
I would argue that it's those people (citizens/companies/orgs) who did the important choosing here, not Meta. It's more cheap and accessible than ever to make a website that isn't dependent on social media, and there are tons of alternatives for connecting groups.
The elephant in the room, I think, is that most people actually feel that Whatsapp, Facebook Groups, etc. have no important downsides. I can't prove it, but I suspect that more than half the people who are involved in such network-effect communication (let's say, all the categories you described, the non-1:1 communication that takes place hosted on Meta platforms) find it to be very convenient, not least because they're already on those platforms by choice for recreation.
THAT is why it's so hard for the minority who philosophically hate ideas like targeted ads are unable to convince the masses to all move to Mastodon, or to one of the hundreds of lesser-known platforms that don't have all the same baggage (in their eyes). It isn't for lack of options. It's because at least a plurality of people are fine with it.
So the argument to effectively nationalize Meta, simply as punishment for getting normies to like their apps so much, because a minority of people just think it's wrong to be good at targeting ads, seems extreme to me.
I don’t find this to be a good representation of my argument - what I’d call for is very much not punishment, it’s a targeted response to fix no more than the identified problem. (The problem being, people aren’t being afforded a reasonable option to function in society that doesn’t involve a large wealth transfer to facebook.)
I don’t think “effectively nationalize Meta” is a fair reading of my position either - there are plenty of autonomous private companies are non-nationalized and that operate in areas where there’s regulation around pricing.
There are so many people out there functioning in society just fine without Facebook. And Facebook tried to have an ad-free Facebook product for EU where people could just pay money for the services they apparently depend on -- a perfectly fair transaction, and the EU fined them for that, now mandating that Facebook has to offer a product to EU users for €0 but is only allowed to monetize it with ads that no advertiser would buy because untargeted ads are a waste of money. See the banner ads of the late 90s. Or I suppose the EU regulators would also be satisfied if FB just provided the services to Europeans as a charity.
I don't have a personal dog in the race, and don't own any shares of Meta, but I think the regulators don't know what they're doing, and as such, would prefer that they don't go too far in the area of social media, advertising and tracking until they figure it out.
Nebula, the answer to the tyranny of Youtube (who works for advertisers), has a <1% conversion rate despite tons of huge Youtubers pushing it. Vid.me, the previous answer to youtubes tyranny, went bankrupt because people hate ads and also hate subscriptions, nor do they donate.
I could write pages about this, but I wish I could violently shake all the children (many who are now in their 40's) that so deeply feel entitled to free content on the internet, and scream "If you are not paying directly for the product, you have no right to complain about the product".
In reality the ad model is not going anywhere. Given the choice, people overwhelmingly chose to let the advertisers steer the ship if it means "free" entry.
YouTube have many competitors and some of them are enormous, such as Netflix and cable TV. Production companies are popping up all the time and are making some of the world's highest quality material. The same for individuals who are making videos.
Or do you mean that YouTube needs a competitor that does exactly the same thing as YouTube?
Essentially, youtube adds more video every single day than the entirety of every other streaming service offers combined.
Youtube is in it's own category, and it's unsurprising no else wants to touch it.
But everybody has to start somewhere. Would it be impossible for Netflix to start adding for example 100 000 hours of user generated video per day?
Providers would be more than happy to sell Netflix the build out
The scales of the two models are very different. Ingesting content is more complicated with user generated content because there's few guarantees about formats (encoding, color, file formats). Serving the content is also more complicated because it's not as friendly to edge caches as studio content. Part of the expense of YouTube is the long tail of content. Popular content might live in edge caches but YouTube serves up old unpopular stuff too.
But I feel a better example of paying for convenience is the Twitch subscriber system. They make it work in a way that others fail at by tying it in to various things like emotes and channel points and the general sense of supporting the creators. I know YT memberships exist, but I don't know how widely those are used and they just don't seem to get pushed as much.
(I think? I'm not very well-versed in Twitch stuff)
I'm someone willing to shell out for SaaS and I don't see nebula being significantly better than just paying for youtube premium (which I do). They have some exclusive content but paying to watch a subset of content ad-free is just not going to work out (on a large scale, I know they're worth like $200m but that's much less than $1t)
It will make people accept anything and everything that they would never otherwise accept. They will line up for hours, they will accept hostile and toxic messages being screamed into their faces, they will humiliate themselves, they will spend sleepless nights, they will willingly enslave themselves, they will wither away in sickness, they will murder millions in the most cruel way imaginable.
All for "free".
Societies in our history were not arranged in the same way around money, because probably there was some knowledge of the two-sided curse of avarice and stinginess. I'm talking about medieval and post-medieval society, where most people didn't use or have money in their everyday life. Instead they had duties.
But paying a fair price for a service which has actual value for you is not "unchecked". That's sieving flies and swallowing camels.
I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it. This is coming from SMS costing €0.25 per message (text only!) and also coming from people who would gladly pay €3 for a Coke at a bar that they’d piss down the toilet an hour later. It didn’t matter if it only took 3 or 4 messages to make Whatsapp pay off for itself, as they were sending dozens if not hundreds of messages per day, either images, videos and whatnot (MMSs were much more expensive).
At that moment I realised many (most?) people would never pay for software. Either because it’s not something physical or because they’re stuck in the pre-Internet (or maybe music) mentality where copying something is not “stealing” as it’s digital data (but they don’t realise running Whatsapp servers, bandwidth etc cost very real money). And I guess this is why some of the biggest digital services are ad-funded.
In contrast, literally never someone has voiced privacy concerns, they simply find ads annoying and they’ve asked for a way to get rid of them (without paying, of course).
I should say, I’m from one of the European countries with the highest levels of piracy.
To be fair, that was in era when pirating was such a normal thing. Everybody at least knew about it. Cheap pirated DVD's were super common (I received them as gifts even) and everyone knew someone selling them. With people accustomed to paying for Netflix, music streaming, Office 365, etc. maybe a subscription version of WhatsApp would be more palatable. The problem is nobody will pay as long as the tech behemoths are offering the same thing for free.
I cannot overstate how unexpected this was and is to me, we talk about people in their mid-twenties with jobs - maybe (video) streaming / subscriptions services actually overplayed their hand in the current economic climate.
Doesn't make me super optimistic in this regard.
[1] even if most of it is void in my jurisdiction anyway
I think the other factor is a bit of anchoring. I know this impacts me anyways. If there is a "free" alternative, then that's where I'm anchored at. I can watch youtube for free so paying for it seems like a bad deal. Where as there is no free alternative to Coke that still gets your Coke (as opposed to say water).
Flight comparators don't show "avaliable legroom" in their metrics.
As far as I know some companies charge more for seats near entrances where there's more space, so people are willing to pay more.
In my anecdotal experience, the people complaining about leg room are precisely those who are not paying for additional leg room. (Similar to how people who compare modern air travel with service in the 1960s aren't purchasing the inflation-adjusted equivalent ticket, which would almost always be a lay-flat seat today if not Wheels Up.)
Unfortunately those prices are usually not even close to proportional to the additional space (and even that would ignore that seating space is only part of the service).
How to you qualify the comfort of a seat with 20cm of legroom vs 30cm? Until we have a quality metric for flights that's also a single number we can't.
Strangely, some of my colleagues have 'paid' (work's money, their time) extra to avoid Ryanair, when Ryanair has the only direct connection. This I find strange.
Given the choice, I've long paid a little more if it means an Airbus plane, as I think the cabin is quieter. However, that's rarely shown on flight booking sites.
Meanwhile, I get half a day free in Gdansk or Budapest or wherever while my colleague wanders around Munich Airport.
Even then the second most profitable line of business for airlines are credit cards and the banks who buy miles in bulk for their customers. Of course this is a US perspective.
This is true. One thing I note is that with the same dollar amount, you get even less legroom, luggage, etc. today than you used to back 10-15 years ago on traditional airlines. Granted the airline costs rose over time, but it's hard to imagine they went up to the scale traditional airfare has increased at equivalent service levels... Also the fact that things that used to be included are now considered "extra" looks like a good excuse for folks to complain about.
Now the credit card company knows what service I am buying; I would get endless marketing emails from the service for buying additional things; my info as a person willing to pay for such a service would get sold to other companies; my credit card info would get leaked/stolen, ...
If the whole experience was literally as simple as handing someone a $1 bill, I promise I would pay for many many internet services.
I don't know. Paying for streaming services seems very natural nowadays.
Incidentally, this is also the reason, as much as I would like to, for not donating to public/non-profit organizations. Anybody who has donated to a political party or an organization like ACLU would know what I am talking about...
It's the friction of paying for something at all. There is no free sandwich, so people don't generally expect it, on the other hand there's plenty of free software.
But then to book directly and get the "guaranteed cheapest!" price, I have to sort through even more options than on an aggregator, I have to create an account, and now I'm getting spammed from ANOTHER entity I never plan to do business with again. At least with the aggregators I have one company whose privacy settings I've already dealt with.
What's your secret? Even the hotel in privacy-conscious Austria I stayed with once four years ago spams me.
> booking with the hotel lets me select options not available on booking sites like king vs 2 queen bed options, ADA compliant rooms and even floor options
If their booking system works. Usually faster and more reliable to send a message on booking.com.
> if you have AAA or some other memberships, those codes can easily beat discount sites like Booking.com
Maybe if your time is worthless.
Very noticeable when using custom domain and emails where I might sign up to the same service several times.
I usually do that and it works for a lot of things, but small hotels are one of the things that seems to slip through. And even when it works, I still resent having to do it at all, and would rather book via a big aggregator where I've already done the unsubscribe years ago.
In these cases they get a dedicated email rule and anything they send goes straight to the bin.
Interestingly, WhatsApp put up paid plans to slow down user acquisition [0].
On Androids, in some countries, WhatsApp continued to work even if you didn't pay the $1/year fee.
I don't know any Android users who paid back then, only iPhone owners did.
I mostly share your conclusion, but I think there is a specific twist: most people will pay for on the spot transactions.
We see it in spades for games: in-app purchases and season passes have a lower barrier of acceptance. I assume buying stones to unlock a character must be thought at the same level as buying coffee, as just a one-time purchase that doesn't require further calculations.
the urge to buy goes down if the subscription is cheap enough ($.99 songs versus $12 a spotify subsscription) but having been through my fair share of attempting contract cancellations this isn't surprising.
My understanding is games with microtransactions optimise for "whales", people who spend inordinate amounts of money. While the majority of users don't pay anything, or at most very little.
My mental image of it is looking at Apple when the iPhone was 2 or 3 years old, and today's Apple: its current size dwarfs the Apple of back in the days, but it wasn't some small also-ran company, it's impact on the whole industry was still pretty big.
AppsFlyer's data on this was interesting, while not straightforward to interpret from our angle.
https://www.appsflyer.com/resources/reports/app-marketing-mo...
If somebody has never purchased an app, setting up payments in the app might be seen as “too much work, especially just for this one app”. But once you get the payments in there, each subsequent 0.99 payment is painless
I think it's just if you're empire building - and Zuck is insanely good at this, one of the best - then it'll never be optimal to charge vs. grow massively and then monetize the larger attention base.
Zuck is also in a trench warfare competition with other social media players, it's far from a monopoly. He's historically been more inclined to do things that were worse for growth, but better for users when they had more of a dominant position - but he can't do that anymore.
Somewhat relatedly Apple really missed an opportunity with iMessage. Had they timed it right they could have had a dominant cross platform chat. Instead they're going to be stuck with the modern equivalent of BBM while Zuck and Meta erase their only remaining stronghold in the US as iPhone users continue to move to WhatsApp.
This would not be true most places outside of the USA and maybe Canada. In a few countries/regions it might be a different third-party messaging app.
Growth like that happens slowly and then quickly. I’m using WhatsApp more now and I didn’t use it before, so empirically I’ve seen the expansion personally.
New drama club my youngest has joined only sends messages out on Facebook, which is even worse.
Went to South Africa on vacation last year. United lost our luggage on the first leg of the trip, which then became South African Airways responsibility to sort out because they handled our final leg.
I communicated directly with the SAA baggage agent over WhatsApp. Then communicated over WhatsApp with the courier delivering our bags . Best customer service ever.
> Somewhat relatedly Apple really missed an opportunity with iMessage. Had they timed it right they could have had a dominant cross platform chat.
Google also had the opportunity to do this. Around the same time iMessage launched, Google made Hangouts the default SMS app on Android with a similar capability to upgrade to Internet-based messaging when all parties to a conversation had it. Hangouts was cross-platform. Rumor has it carriers whined and Google caved.
I'm kind of glad Google doesn't have a dominant messaging service, but it's only true due to their own lack of commitment.
Whereas Whatsapp was simple - only phone numbers to sign up, only text and images, only mobile phones. That simplicity meant my parents could onboard smoothly and operate it without having to navigate a maze of UX. I literally saw Whatsapp winning in real time vs Hangouts and other alternatives.
I used Hangouts for a while and had a bunch of contacts on it when it was Android's default SMS app. Many of them were not particularly technical, including one of my parents whom I don't recall telling to use it. If you were using an Android phone, you were probably already logged in to a Google account. iPhone users had to work a little harder for it (install the app and remember the password to the Gmail account they probably already had).
I don't recall the UX on the mobile client having extra complexity over other messaging apps if I didn't go digging in the settings, but it's been a while.
There are many people I run across who bypassed the whole Gmail and Google Workspace ecosystems and have rolled along merrily with me.com and other email providers.
It's not a given that users will have bothered to register for a Google account unless they grew up in the Bay Area after a certain time period.
Wind back the clock to when Google tried to roll out Hangouts and the Gmail penetration rate was even lower among the non-Android users out there.
This is all anecdotal of course. Maybe it wouldn't have worked, but how quickly they gave up was weird.
Hangouts UX sucked big time. I remember lots of frustrating sessions with my parents about why video calls weren't going through, or how can some random family member join our family thread when they don't have a Gmail account etc.
You definitely had a rougher experience with it than I did, but my main point is Google launched it, didn't seriously iterate on it, and gave up its strongest distribution channel at the first sign of pressure from carriers. Since they keep launching messaging products, I must conclude they want to be in that space and it was foolish of them to squander their best opportunity.
Funny because now it doesn't. It routinely fails to surface emails that exist.
couldn’t believe they had fallen for an April fools.
But that was a limited time window when gmail massively outweighed the 10-20mbit of things like hotmail with effectively unlimited storage.
Sure. But is it the same Google account that your relatives email you on, or a different one that only that phone is using? When you drop this phone are you going to sign into that same Google account or make a new one? The answers for non-technical users are non-obvious.
But then again I would likely opt out of Hangouts, so it’s not a problem.
(And to be honest, things were working much smoother for me when I was on microG [0].)
[0]: https://microg.org/
There's no way they actually earned $500M/year. Even if Whatsapp had 100 employees making $200k/year on average, that's $20M on salaries. Add an another very generous $80M on infra/admin etc costs and they'd have been making $400M profit. With that much profit achieved within such a short period, in the QE funny money era they could have IPO'd at $50-100 billion easily.
The average company would rather charge that 1 cent and still show adverts. We see that time and again.
Here in europe every club/association/group has a whatsapp group chat. For instance here since the official app provided by the government has a super clunky UX most people get information from primary school through a whatsapp group chat managed by the parent's representative who has exclusive access to teaching group.
As a counter to your question I've never used whatsapp and never saw a reason. What group chats? Are they groups of personal friends or mostly things you would 'follow' like a football club?
Additionally whenever there is a social event a group chat is created so that people can discuss the organization, and after the event share their sentiments, pictures, videos.
It is never mandatory to participates in all those group chats but a lot of info go through them and they are usually useful. And the family group chats are great when you only get the chance to meet them more than a couple times a year.
Glad to hear they aren't mandatory, that would be my fear for certain things.
I see this and not see this.
See this = friend wants to check out app but it costs $1-$3. I'm like, that's less than a coffee or a candy bar that you consume disposably. Why not just try it and if it's sucks throw it away, the same way you might with a new food item? That argument doesn't work on them for some reason.
not see = Steam
If everything goes the way of ads and (for lack of a better term) enshittification, could consumer attitudes change?
Now, this market probably isn’t going to put you in the Fortune 500, but is enough to run a profitable business.
Open source doesn’t solve the problem “I need to be able to search the entire internet for a document.” Even “I want to safely receive email” is a challenge to do with open source software. At some point I need to use software as a service, and at that point I’d prefer to give money to the service directly than having the service target advertising at me.
Even mediocre food is still functional, and usually still enjoyable.
Quite a lot of paid software does not meet that bar. It's far more likely to both cost you money and waste a few hours (much longer than that food demanded, unless you got food poisoning).
I generally agree it's far out of balance, but I do think it's broadly understandable.
That's not even remotely close to being true. Plenty of people would order a $25 dish at a place and not like it. Not finishing the dish, or throwing a way a half eaten candy bar or bad-tasting-$6-cup of coffee is very normal. Plenty of (if most) food is meh or not enjoyable. It just serves a purpose and fills you and you move on.
It’s not even a blanket statement on software. gamers have shown they are willing to pay, though their money comes with strings attached. Mac users are more willing to pay than Windows users who are more willing to pay than Linux users.
And software often requires you to enter payment info into who know what system (plus your phone number (plus make an account (plus opt into receiving spam from them until the universe dies))), if you're not using google play / the iOS app store. In a restaurant you put your card into the thing and you're done.
Also this:
>It just serves a purpose and fills you and you move on.
Is something many pieces of software I've used cannot even dream of achieving. They solely wasted my time.
It's why I think it's a shame that demos are a dying breed.
But the difference is that food elicits cravings - you buy it because you imagine how good it'll be if it's done right this time and your body pressures you to buy it. Apps don't do that.
> Plenty of university students around me who will order a $8 boba tea
I can't speak to anywhere else, but these[0][1] are near Columbia University and $8 is pretty normal there, AFAICT. Presumably YMMV depending on where you are.
[0] https://order.gongchausa.com/
[1] https://www.trycaviar.com/store/tea-magic-new-york-841338/11...
And the purchasing power in America is about 3-4 times as high. Also, you don't really get poor students there. If you're poor in America you just don't get to go to college.
> And the purchasing power in America is about 3-4 times as high.
> If you're poor in America you just don't get to go to college.
I genuinely do not know how to get a refund from the google play store or the apple equivalent.
(The downside of the Steam policy is it makes Steam unviable for games that can be played in full very quickly. Develops can also game the system by dragging out early game so the player is over the refundable time by the time they reach the rough parts. But this is for another discussion.)
This was over a decade ago, so may be very outdated. I don’t even think in-app purchases were yet a thing. I wasn’t trying to abuse the apps (I pay for software) and was in fact trying to use the refund policy to allow me to buy more apps because I could test without the fear of paying for duds. Their policy had the opposite effect and I basically stopped buying on the App Store.
Source? I always thought this was a general Steam policy, as it's available pretty much anywhere.
I think it’s actually worldwide?
[0]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2011/83/oj#art_9.tit_1
As for EU consumer rights, look at Article 16 (m) in the link you posted:
> Exceptions from the right of withdrawal
> Member States shall not provide for the right of withdrawal set out in Articles 9 to 15 in respect of distance and off-premises contracts as regards the following:
> [...]
> (m) the supply of digital content which is not supplied on a tangible medium if the performance has begun with the consumer’s prior express consent and his acknowledgment that he thereby loses his right of withdrawal.
a) out of the kindness of their heart (i.e. good public image), or
b) just not to deal with complexity of introducing different refund schemas per region.
Probably a mixture of both.
c) to preempt additional regulation in more jurisdictions
Steams refund policies are still fairly weak IMO. For many games, two hours doesn't really tell you much about the quality of the game and Steam also knows that many users will not get around to even trying games they pick up within the two weeks that they grant refunds for.
Imagine you went to a physical store and bought something that turned out to be broken after a couple hours of use and the Store just said too bad. Absolutely unacceptable there but Steam reserves the right to and does often refuse refunds that are not within their stated limits.
You also don't have as much leverage with Steam as you do with some random store. If a merchant fucks you over you are supposed to be able to reverse the transaction but with Steam trying that with even one game will get you banned from the store completely - and with Steam being a not-quite monopoly that means many games will literally be unavailable to you.
AFAIK you also still cant refund Steam wallet "cash" into real money so if you bought a Steam wallet card in order to buy a Game and then want to refund that game you can effectively only exchange it for other Steam products which is not a real refund.
IMO Steam gets a lot of undue credit just for not being quite as terrible as the competition.
* https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million... (not currently loading for me)
* https://archive.is/9mE7i#selection-4964.0-4978.0 (archive of the above)
> The Court held that the terms and conditions in the Steam subscriber agreements, and Steam’s refund policies, included false or misleading representations about consumers’ rights to obtain a refund for games if they were not of acceptable quality.
> In determining the appropriate penalty to impose on Valve, Justice Edelman noted that “even if a very small percentage of Valve’s consumers had read the misrepresentations then this might have involved hundreds, possibly thousands, of consumers being affected”.
> Justice Edelman also took into account “Valve’s culture of compliance [which] was, and is, very poor”. Valve’s evidence was ‘disturbing’ to the Court because Valve ‘formed a view …that it was not subject to Australian law…and with the view that even if advice had been obtained that Valve was required to comply with the Australian law the advice might have been ignored”. He also noted that Valve had ‘contested liability on almost every imaginable point’.
Valve's notice to consumers is archived here, and no longer on their live website: https://web.archive.org/web/20180427063845/https://store.ste...
I can find news articles saying that the court action began in late Aug/early Sep 2014.
https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/steamowner-v...
Here's an old reddit comment discussing how Valve failed to implement AUD and KRW pricing on schedule, and speculates that at least in Australia's case, it's because of local compliance reasons.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/38dlvd/the_real_reas...
But I can't find anything that definitively ties the rollout of refund policies to an attempt to get the ACCC off their back. The comments on the above reddit post show that GOG and Origin had active refund policies at this time.
The explicit rule is you can get a refund on any game for any reason if both of these are true:
* You have played for less than two hours.
* You bought it in the past two weeks.
The idea of trading something valuable for an abstract piece of software or paper is still not really natural to us, and is a learned behavior.
It's the case for messaging apps and for almost any other kind of app. It's hard to beat the price point of a free app, even if it might include tracking, advertising, spying inside their package.
If WhatsApp would start asking for money hundreds of millions of people would switch to something else in a few days, even to a free app created overnight to capitalize on the opportunity.
I still see a lot of people who are afraid of purchasing on the internet and give out their card number. My mother in law ask her daughters to call her a uber when she needs one because she is afraid of installing the app and giving her credit card number[1]. Yet she has all the social medias installed on her smartphone.
[1] The irony is she apparently don't care the her own daughters would have to take that risk for her.
That's not a fair assessment. Maybe she simply thinks heir daughter will be better at not getting scammed and she could very well be right about that.
Steam experience is closer to the feel of ownership because: - Most games don't just randomly upgrade. They are stable. - Steam is cross platform enough that you can use the software on different devices as if you were copying it. - Your steam account isn't the center of your digital life, it's access isn't subject to many associated risks.
Apps (“software”) and games are fundamentally different in the public’s perception. Look at the App Store, it has two different tabs for games and Apple is even making a separate app for them.
The App Store—which, by the way, I was thinking of the one on the Mac—was merely an example to represent how companies understand and separate games from other software. I could’ve also made the point of games being seen as entertainment rather than software by pointing out Netflix has movies, TV shows, and games, but not other apps.
Apps and the internet in general, for most people, is considered almost weightless and zero cost. In the race for market dominance meant dropping the price as low as possible to drive out competition.
Personal take on it: that's all just preparing children for the inevitable fact that everything from education over employment and housing to dating is mostly depending on luck...
Unfortunately that would still exclude plenty of good apps. There are a ton which are “free” with limited options and then have a one-time in-app purchase to unlock the full thing.
In this case the service started as free (and thereby training people that it costs nothing) and and only later tried to pull the rug out under people after locking them in via network effects. It's perfectly reasonable to refuse to financially reward such tactics.
It's also that people already pay ridiculous amounts of money for their own internet connection. There is no reason why with A paying for internet and B paying for internet that A and B should pay again just to be able to talk to each other. Of course the technical reality is different but that's at least partially due to how WhatsApp designed their system.
I wouldn’t pay Meta or similar companies for messaging services. And especially not for siloed messaging networks.
Sure, it’s easy to get some 20 or 30-something year old with a cushy 6 figure salary to pay 20 USD or similar per month for some digital service (esp. when they are building some digital service themselves, so they know what it entails). For someone strugling to make ends meet, there’s many higher priority things than some digital service when there’s free alternatives, let alone email.
And your privacy concerns? In my experience, absolutely non-existent in the real world. Actually I only ever hear about them in HN, not even my software development coworkers. Just the other day there was some raffle where there was some weekend trip to somewhere as a prize, but you had to give all your personal details, there was a big queue, they would’ve given their blood type details (if not literally a few ccs of their blood) and told them all about their kinkiest fantasy if they’d asked for it. Literally, I’m not joking.
Some of us actually paid for WhatsApp! I think it was about $1 a year when it launched. At the time it was providing significant value, especially in areas where cross-border communication was common.
I'm sure $1 isn't enough to cover costs anymore but someone could make a nice living charging $5-10 a month for something similar. The problem is people will always sell out to investors and fuck over their users. It's inevitable.
Internet is a paid service.
When I first accessed the internet in the 1980s, the only paid "service" necessary to use it was internet service. There was not the plethora of VC-funded third parties trying to act as intermediaries. The term "internet" amongst younger generations usually means only www sites, maybe app "endpoints" and _nothing else_. This is such a waste of potential.
Today's internet is more useful than the 1980s internet. But I do not attribute that to third party intermediaries that only seek to profit from other peoples' use of it. I attribute the increased utility to technological improvements in hardware, including networking equipment. I do not attribute the increased utility to "improvements" in software, and certainly not the proliferation of software distributed for free as a Trojan Horse for those seeking to profit from data collection, surveillance and advertising services.
The idea of paying for what these intermediaries try to call "services" makes no sense to me. Certainly, paying these intermediaries will not prevent them from data collection and surveillance for commercial purposes. (There are already examples.) It only subsidises this activity. Perhaps people believe these intermediaries engage in data collection, surveillance and ad services because "no one will pay for their software" instead of considering that they do so because they can, because there are few laws to prevent them. It was unregulated activity and is stilll grossly underregulated activity. It is more profitable than software licensing.
I use StreamFab + Plex for most providers these days precisely because it offers a better experience than their own native apps. Just the other day, I tried to watch a show on Amazon only to discover that subtitles were skewed because someone messed up cutting out the ad breaks - it'd shift the subtitles by ~10s for each cut. Plex not only has the ability to adjust offsets, but it can actually analyze the audio and perform autocorrection (which works flawlessly, I must add). Of course, this also means that this show is now permanently in my video library, even if I drop my Amazon subscription. And no, I don't feel bad about that.
Probably not many. OTOH, I pay for Fastmail and NextDNS (both for at least 5 years at this point).
People give strange looks when I mention paying for e-mail, even people "in the know."
SAAS offerings for individuals don't have a lot of market share (streaming services aside). The exception might be iCloud/GMail harassing people about running out of storage, and people just eventually going "sure, here's 3 bucks a month."
I used to... like some app, paid for a "PRO" version to get additonal features. Everything was ok.
Then 6 months went by, and they added a cloud feature, to upload some stuff and configs and sync between devices, and it turned from one time payment to a subscription plan. Then built-in features got moved into the cloud, and previously working stuff didn't work without subscriptions anymore. Then they added ads. PRO has maybe 2 more features than a free version and no nag screen at the start, and that's it.
Even some quasi opensource software is no better... OsmAnd (openstreetmaps for android app) had a paid "OsmAnd+" version (that i bought), and then they decided they need a "pro" version too, 2.99/month, to get 3d relief and "colored routes".
Ads money is larger than user buying subscription they don't want you to buy software lol
Do you use any free (as in no money comes out of your wallet) services today? If so, which ones?
1. I think folks would be naturally more skeptical of the government than they are of big tech, ideally leading to E2EE for email that's usable by the masses.
2. Phishing and scams could have a dedicated law enforcement arm (Postal Inspectors).
3. We'd reduce the amount of email-based personal data being mined and turned into entirely unregulated ad-tech nightmares.
That is so weird to me. "Institutions that exist for the sole purpose of serving the people might end up having some power, so let's instead give it all to the literal oligarchs."
Ideally you shouldn't just to just blindly trust them.
They also issue bonds which is another fun way to collect money.
Just because you're paying for a service doesn't mean your data won't get sold and monetized, nor does it protect you from ads getting shoved down your throat. ISPs and mobile phone service providers both sell your data. It's a common practice for services to keep raising prices and introduce ad-supported tiers in order to squeeze pay-piggies as much as possible.
Any time someone has tried starting a service that competed with big tech it either gets bought out or ripped off. And big tech's infinitely deep pockets means they can run at a loss for years until all the competition has disappeared.
I think in order to truly solve these problems it will require legislation and breaking up big tech into smaller companies. We also need legislation to require tech companies to stop creating walled gardens that cannot integrate with other platforms.
This would cost $350M/year to Europe [1] -- which is a drop of the ocean in their budget -- in exchange for control of information.
Sounds like a no-brainer to me.
[1] assuming the initial business model of whatsapp was cash neutral, which I think it was
Gmail's promise of 1GB free storage was an incredible offer at those times, where many people used "paid" mailers. Paid as part of the Internet subscription with a worse Webmailer and less storage than Google provided.
It is especially complicated with Mail, where Anti-Spam measures make operating an own server work (on one side for filtering incoming mail, on the other side to prevent being blocked for spamming)
Why are you using that as an example, and not asking how many people pay for their cellular data plan?
* phone
* whatsapp, because others use it
* signal, because it's actually good
* telegram, because that one group is on it
* my todo list app
* duolingo
* a good mapping app without ads
... and so on. And the same for my kids. And before you blink, you suddenly pay several hundred dollars per month.
Aka the slippery slope.
One of the problems seems to be that everything comes with transaction costs, so for example Signal cannot easily charge me a single dollar per month, which I suspect is a price point that would work for both me and them (if every one of their users paid it).
Ads also solve the price stratification problem: wealthy users pay with their valuable time, and poor users pay with their less valuable time.
Can this corporate propaganda stop? Premises:
1. That we (the corporation) offer a free service is because people don’t wanna pay
2. Those freeloaders are costing us money
3. Eventually we have to introduce ads, shrugs we hate to do it but the freeloaders force our hands
Instead:
1. The strategy IS to be free to use
2. INVEST money in building the network effect
3. When a critical mass has been reached: MONETIZE
Where is the user’s preference in this? Nowhere. Why assume anything else? Why?
It is patently irrational for all parties to spend money (“pay for what you use”) on a buergoning social media platform:
- Business: why add any friction at all to a social media platform that you are supposed to grow?
- ... and why concede any talking points to the naive people who think that paid service equals no ads or monetized “attention” if you do both?
- Just monetize people instead
- User: why would anyone on God’s Green Earth pay to use a social media platform that was pay-to-use on day zero when there are no users?
In what alternate universe?
Even if your technical architecture supports scale and federation, these are just some threats off the top of my head:
- spam, fraud and Sybil attacks, deteriorating the experience for everyone
- infighting, forking among maintainers of core libs and protocols
- maintainers get poached by mega corps
- hostile takeovers of foundations, trademarks and auxiliary institutions
- a single entity within federation gets too large and imposes their own changes that can’t be rejected without losing majority of users or forking (see infighting)
- VC/deep-pocket subsidized competition offering free service (say eg video calls) and unlimited marketing, OEM pre-installs etc, to poach critical mass of users
I love the idea of federated systems. But I think some of us nerds think too much about tech and too little about the social and economic dynamics of the real world.
Why hypothetical? Matrix already works sufficiently well.
Introducing ads in Threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44297875
Just got an email about it today from Meta, inviting us to bid on the new platform.
I don't have high hopes either but people did stop using Messenger in favor of WhatsApp, so they can absolutely stop using WhatsApp too.
The "mistake" (if you're evil) those apps make is that they use your phone number as unique identifier, not a login. So if you switch app, you still have the phone number of all your friends.
Those were simpler times. :')
Network effects are much much smaller for messaging apps vis-a-vis social networks because there is no problem in incrementally moving your DMs from one place to another.
In order to switch, you also need to convince your acquaintances to switch.
Good luck with that.
I'm not switching apps to send the same message to 50% of people and then again to 100% resulting in some switchers getting it twice.
And lets be honest, people dont walk around recommending chat apps to each other. It hasn't been 2010 for at least five years.
Rather: you have to to convince yourself to be willing to make it a little bit harder, if necessary, for these acquaintances to contact you. :-)
I'm not sure how or why it fizzled out.
https://business.whatsapp.com/products/platform-pricing?coun...
See also here
>With marketing messages, you pay for each message that is delivered to a receiver you chose within five days of being sent.
https://faq.whatsapp.com/178447635241069?cms_id=178447635241...
Go to India. Way more than just a handful of companies using it
Lets wave a magic wand and presume 50% of the user base thought it was also worth $1 a year and it grew just as well as it did (It was growing very well in the UK before the takeover just by word of mouth). That's still just a messaging app that would be raking in $1.5B per year today, and that's before you bolt on any paid cosmetics or upgrades (small things that users don't mind dropping a few more bucks on).
Point being, I agree with you, it was getting that adoption anyways, even with the fees. And within months, I was hearing this from so many others.
How do I remember? I moved back to US in Feb 2013, so it had to be before that, just can not recall the exact year and month.
Not really. They claimed they'd charge this but then kept giving away free time to huge numbers of people because this wasn't an actual business model, they did it just to slow their growth down when they were running out of server capacity. It's discussed in some interview with the founder, iirc.
I have a couple of friends that I message via Signal and even convinced my dad to use it a while back, but here in Brazil WhatsApp is _everything_, and I doubt most people care about this at all. In my case, I'd love to just go over to Signal fully but then I couldn't talk to family, friends, and probably couldn't even book a haircut or pay my taxes (my accountant messages me on WhatsApp).
It's one of those where unless just about everyone were to go over to Signal, most people won't, because keeping track of messages in two apps is quite hard.
That leaves me stuck in this ecosystem, which is quite sad.
Businesses put WhatsApp numbers on their stores, and it’s often the only way to get a hold of a person. I would bet it’s more used than email, especially for young people. If WhatsApp went down for a week, it would seriously impede normal societal functions. It’s pretty much de-facto standard and arguably critical infrastructure.
Americans tend to believe everyone is trying very hard to be like them (when they think about the rest of the world at all).
I have never seen an iMessage.
I've lived in the US all my life, and I didn't even know there was a norm at all, so that's not much of a threshold.
It sounds petty, but not very abnormal for growing up in America.
I certainly didn't say it was the only outcome. I switched schools three times in my youth, and each place I went had different kids but the same materialist obsessions. Some people did mock the Apple users, for what little it did to get them into the iMessage chats. Every school I went to had an 'iPhone in group' though, and if you didn't have the right phone you didn't get to chat, period.
My larger point, which you really don't need to extrapolate for, is that Apple knew they were making a FOMO-based service that would predate on kids and adults with maligned priorities. They understood the social clusterfuck that they engineered, and marketed the hell out of it; because it worked, bragging about iMessage does sell iPhones.
Excessive privilege really fucks with people's worldview.
> If they are actually your friends
this just takes the cake to a different dimension altogether!
This approach seems unnecessarily confrontational and might end up being quite counterproductive.
ETA: there is no way to really uninstall Whatsapp around here because so much of society runs on it, the most I can do is move all of my private existence elsewhere and hope that decreased traffic will do something
Please allow me to be devil's advocate here (and FYI, this comes from someone living in a country where government officials use [official state institution]@gmail.com to ask you to send passports and other info, and tell you they'll whatsapp you your papers when they're ready).
I have not yet been in a situation where you CANNOT skip WhatsApp - since having someone be your one-time intermediary is almost always possible. Can it be an incovenience ? Yes.
How much would this inconvenience compare to what my grandfather's grandfather would consider an inconvenience? Probably not much. (You mean, I had to twiddle my thumbs for twice as many minutes!? How difficult)
So in the end, you're asking people to experience what they consider to be a major hassle (having 2 apps) just for you, when you're not willing to go through the pain of having just one app. It feels unbalanced.
So please consider that people might be complaining that you're being too much of a Don Quixote, but actually, the reason it's not working is because you're not playing the Don Quixote card hard enough
I bet you're gonna be happier for it. In my experience, people that were friends stay friends, a messaging app won't change that (imagine if it did!).
The unfortunate reality is that most people won’t follow you. Not because they don’t respect you or your concerns, but because the cost—in effort, friction, or just breaking habitual patterns—is too high. Social coordination is fragile, and it leans heavily on lowest-common-denominator tools. WhatsApp has become that denominator.
What’s likely to happen is this: group chats will move on without you. Events will get planned. Conversations will unfold. People aren’t going to message you separately to accommodate your principled stand—not out of malice, but out of convenience and momentum. You’ll be increasingly left out, not because anyone wants to isolate you, but because ecosystems don't fracture easily.
After a few months of being disconnected and missing out, there’s a strong chance you’ll reinstall WhatsApp—not because you’ve changed your mind, but because opting out of a near-universal platform means opting out of modern social participation.
This isn’t a defeat of principle—it’s a reflection of how network effects work. The only way to realistically challenge something like WhatsApp is if a critical mass moves at once. Individual protest, while noble, often just leads to isolation unless it becomes collective action.
I've seen a number of group chats move platforms because "we need to add X but he's not on imessage, let's use snap instead" etc. I have all sorts of group chats and contacts on various platforms and they move around all the time. A group being beholden to a single messaging platform sounds.. inflexible, and probably not the kind of people I'd want to associate with in the first place.
But you could also turn your argument around if you wanted to - what kind of friend refuses to talk to you unless you sign up for whatever new app they found.
This isn't the only way. The other option is a legally enforced (with real teeth) requirement for interoperability. That we can require device makers to support USB-C charging but can't require social media companies to play nice with others is absurd.
I suppose there's little guarantee Signal won't be sold, but an ultra popular app with no profit, owned by a single bloke (WhatsApp) was the last thing I expected to be a sustainable platform for my communications. Same reason I've never looked at Telegram.
In my opinion, the goal is not to find "the perfect monopoly". The goal is to be versatile. Right now, Signal is better than WhatsApp (be it just because it does not belong to Meta), and using Signal is absolutely trivial (it can even be used in parallel to WhatsApp).
I use Signal today, if in 2 years Signal goes into surveillance capitalism and ads, well I'll move to the next one. And then the next one. It's not like it requires a PhD to use a clone of a messaging app.
In the case of "business requirements", push back on businesses. You are actually the customer.
I get it though. The best might be a compromise where you try to limit the contacts on whatsapp to only those you have no choice.
> I'd love to just go over to Signal fully but then I couldn't talk to family, friends, and probably couldn't even book a haircut or pay my taxes (my accountant messages me on WhatsApp)
Comments like these make me think it's probably more a problem of inertia. Of course they can still talk to family (visit/call/email/sms/fax/mail,...), and of course they can still do their taxes, they might just have to get a different accountant that does business outside of WhatsApp. This all would take more energy than living in this beautifully convenient platform that Meta set up for them.
Android has 88% market share in Brazil, so it sounds like terrible advice.
I do agree that just accepting this is not the way to go, and also that slowly making changes is a valid approach.
I do want to qualify though, for those who aren't in a WhatsApp-heavy country, how things work.
I looked at my latest messages and beyond all my friends and all my family, I have my accountant, my landlord, my barber, HOA, groups for birthday party invites (where you're asked to confirm attendance), a painter, etc. In many restaurants, if you want a reservation, WhatsApp is the only way. For people who work in Brazil (I work remotely for a company abroad), a lot of work communication happens on WhatsApp.
Again, this is not to say that not dong anything is the way to go! But I think abroad some people don't understand the extent to which WhatsApp is used here. Someone mentioned iMessage for instance and I don't think I know a single person who uses it. Most Brazilians have Android phones too.
But what would prevent people from using WhatsApp to talk to businesses and Signal to talk to friends? I have been using multiple channels with friends forever: phone call, mail, email, MSN Messenger, Facebook, IRC, ICQ, WhatsApp, Threema, Signal, Slack, Discord, Matrix, ... What sucks is when I can't reach a friend. But I never saw it as a problem that I had too many choices to talk to them :-).
I don't really understand this "It has to have 100% of the market" stance. I don't want monopolies, I don't really understand why someone would say "this monopoly sucks, but I really want a monopoly so I won't ever change unless it is for a better monopoly".
FWIW, as far as I ever could tell, Facebook did this correctly: the only real thing is letting a business have an account without a phone number; they then provide the software you can run on your server to be a WhatsApp client, so all of your user's messages are then end-to-end encrypted to your business. Yes: later on they decided they'd get in the business of offering a "hosted client"--which meant that, technically, if you used that service, they could see the messages, which caused a change to their terms of service, as a blanket statement that Facebook can't ever see messages isn't technically true anymore, which Signal threw a ton of FUD at :/--but anyone could have offered that service before (and could right now also for Signal).
Where it breaks down is for group conversations. If Person A won't use Signal and Person B won't use WhatsApp, you can't easily have group communications. And it only gets worse as the number of people in the group goes up.
That's the appeal of software like Beeper&Co.
More extreme, a friend of mine one day eliminated his cellphone entirely but kept Skype on his laptop. So now it's email or nothing with him and sadly it's been nothing for some time now.
Sure, we have email, but the MS/Google duopoloy has effectively unfederated that, with their inscrutable block lists and nonexistent appeals processes, allegedly in order to protect you from spam.
Sure, XMPP is a thing, which has been mostly dead for well over a decade.
Sure, Matrix is a thing, but every time I look at it, all I see is criticism of its specifications and poor interoperability between implementations?
What would it take to sort out this mess? More money for Matrix or XMPP? Someone with enough clout to promote them? I'm sure organizations like the UN or the EU would, in theory, be in favour of an effective global communicator. But those same organizations would like rail against encryption and decentralisation.
But messaging apps are especially tricky to take off, because the most important feature of the messaging app is how many friends already using it. So I don't really believe in independent open-source apps becoming popular. It's always startups, funded with billions, pouring those billions into marketing.
I don't think it's too late as iOS finally supports RCS. But so far Google hasn't shown willingness to let unsanctioned clients connect to Jibe.
In practice, RCS is run by carriers in most of the world. They connect to hubs, the same way SMS hubs work and also have Universal Profiles.
Jibe is not small, but it hardly runs the worlds RCS. Maybe you're conflating the US with the world?
The US was actually the only market where a federated RCS was tried at scale for a few years (the CCMI) but all carriers eventually gave in as the UX was poor and unreliable.
To my knowledge there are only two other non-Jibe RCS "islands": China (that runs RCS solutions from national providers like ZTE) and +Message in Japan. +Message is on its way out, as carriers are now pushing subscribers to Google Messages and Jibe, anticipating the iOS support.
And Apple is in on it: MNOs don't have a choice here, they now need formal agreements with Google (Jibe is paid through RBM revenue share) and IMS configuration and (de)provisioning workflows that are sanctioned by Apple and de facto tested only against Jibe.
Apple's communication around E2EE in UP 3.0 is also directly following Google's work on replacing their ad-hoc Signal implementation by MLS.
That’s what makes Telegram and WhatsApp great
XMPP installed on the handset by default should be fine.
Not sure what you're talking about. Everything is working fine for me, and they even conduct a whole conference about it annually: https://2024.matrix.org/
With a large number of clients and servers and the lack of a walled garden (like with Signal), you will always find something non-interoperable. It doesn't mean that you have to use it.
When I looked into writing my own implementation, the protocol seemed underspecified to me. "Do what synapse does" seemed to be the concensus.
This was a few years ago, so maybe things have improved. But given that no new feature complete servers have appeared, I doubt it.
> "Do what synapse does" seemed to be the concensus.
What's wrong with that?
We have to get to the point where progress in messaging is incremental, not revolutionary.
How do you tell that an open standard is "dead"? There are zillions of XMPP servers around with lots of people quietly using them. For a standard to be "alive" does there have to be a large revenue stream associated with it? Does it need a large commercial entity promoting it?
No need to reinvent the wheel. But who are we kidding, of course we will
It's great for direct chats and very small groups.
While effectively unlimited plans do exist as carriers have stopped caring in multiple countries, this kind of friction pushed everyone to WhatsApp 15 years ago and most people won't bother checking what's included in their plan. Remember they're very cheap compared to the US, I know people paying 5€/month.
Additionally there's also the immigrant population that need to communicate with their relatives back home on other continents.
No wonder Google eventually took the RCS matter in their own hands, there was way too little incentive otherwise.
It's really not.
I've had a good experience moving close contacts to Snikket, which uses XMPP. Text, voice, and video chat work great across platforms.
Previously I tried Jami, which seemed promising, but message delivery was too unreliable due to it being fully P2P.
How much of a problem is personal (!) email being dropped for reasons other than the recipient account not existing realistically?
If you’re not on WhatsApp, no updates or news from your kids school, your sports team, your family, your car dealership etc. for you.
But since January the trust in Meta has not only plummeted but it's become a mainstream enough talking point that I now receive invites to join Signal groups from--for want of a better term--normal people. Two of the local parenting groups I'm on are on Signal and no one ever mentions it or questions it, it's just "here's the group link" and the expectation that everyone has it installed.
I switched phones and lost all my history. Now I’m fairly careful with these things, and make backups, but even I wasn’t able to get it back. Couldn’t recommend it to anyone since.
There’s a line between being secure and being useful, and they’re slightly unbalanced in Signal.
I've had a 90-day message retention policy set in WhatsApp ever since the feature became available. Not because I doubt my ability to manage secure backups, but because I don't expect my contacts to act equally careful.
I wish Signal supported a 90-day retention period. Four weeks (Signal max) is often too short for my contacts, which leads people to disable it altogether.
I also find it frustrating that Signal only applies your message retention policy to the conversation when you initiate the conversation, not when others do. As a result, more of my conversations end up being ephemeral on WhatsApp than on Signal, which feels a bit ironic.
I'm also not a social media user.
How many people have been caught out over shit they've said decades ago that is now not fashionable to say?
What parts of your old chat histories can get you in trouble if the police got hold of your phone?
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=NL&q=%2Fm%2F012...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_group...
NL clearly has some background interest in signal however, unlike the UK, which spikes on this story alone:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=GB&q=%2Fm%2F012...
But I manage without WhatsApp (it’s also a privileged position to do so). Not having WhatsApp also helps avoid seeing all the junk and misinformation that people forward on it without any thought. There’s actually a name for this in India: “WhatsApp University”, which is a derogatory term for how people believe anything they read on WhatsApp and share it around without any analysis or thought or skepticism whatsoever.
But tbh if they keep the ads out of messages I don’t see it an affecting people much.
Isn't this because Facebook is paying telcos to keep its services free? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org
The app itself is 100% ad free and runs on credits. You get credits through se other portal by logging in to watch ads whenever it’s convenient for you.
Good app experience for the user, and potentially better experiences for the advertisers because they get the target audience when they are most open to ads (and not annoyed by them).
And if you want add something that makes sure the user is paying attention, then you have seen this advertising mode: it's basically the second ever Black Mirror episode.
Most users would probably pay, but some people really don’t want to/can’t and this gives them an option.
Maybe, but not being in WhatsApp is also a signal.
I've given up on trying to get my non-tech network to use some other messenger, it's just too exhausting and wasted time.
Ads are one thing, but now WhatsApp is letting businesses message you in Europe, only with opt out. This is pretty frustrating. I suspect some users will seek alternatives.
Credit where credit is due, Microsoft needed more than a decade to kill skype. It was so resilient and entrenched.
Even banks et cetera are making it the first class communication medium especially for OTP (which technically is safer than SMS but a glaring lock into a desk-less foreign company and at the same time the “OTP” can literally be the single point to take over someone’s almost entire life - including almost every single paisa). Every other day I am shown a sneaky lightning popup or two asking me to consent to send everything or something on WhatsApp. Sometimes the popup is about something entirely else but there’s an already checked checkbox with WhatsApp consent. Calling it bizarre will be an understatement.
This sort of analysis is very surface-level I think. My impression is WhatsApp offered that by running on VC money and had no plan to run an actual business. That's not a question of focus. It's an unsustainable, please monetise me later land grab.
[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...
Even for years after they were acquired by Meta, Jan refused to allow advertising and kept pushing the $1 dollar per user subscription fee. Sheryl nixed it b/c it was "not scalable."
VC's may have the mindset that the founders will eventually acquiesce to ads, but also they didn't really care b/c all they wanted was an exit, which they got.
The founders, however, were never interested in an ad business and hold that POV to this day.
Fair enough, but the founders don't necessarily make these decisions. I wasn't particularly referring to them. If they got VC money (I don't know if they did or not) then the VCs must've had something in mind to get a decent return on their risk.
Actions speak louder. He did acquiesce - he sold to an ad-financed company.
> and hold that POV to this day.
You can hold any POV when nothing depends on it.
Zuck Says Ads Aren’t The Way To Monetize Messaging, WhatsApp Will Prioritize Growth Not Subscriptions
"Monetization was the big topic on today’s analyst call after Facebook announced it acquired WhatsApp for a jaw-dropping total of $19 billion. That’s $4 billion in cash and $12 billion in stock, and it reserved $3 billion in restricted stock units to retain the startup’s employees. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, CFO David Ebersman, and WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum all said that won’t be a priority for the next few years. And when the time does come to monetize aggressively, it won’t be through ads"
> In April 2011, Sequoia Capital invested about $8 million for more than 15% of the company, after months of negotiation by Sequoia partner Jim Goetz.[63][64][65]
> By February 2013, WhatsApp had about 200 million active users and 50 staff members. Sequoia invested another $50 million, and WhatsApp was valued at $1.5 billion.[26] Some time in 2013[66] WhatsApp acquired Santa Clara–based startup SkyMobius, the developers of Vtok,[67] a video and voice calling app.[68]
> In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users used the service each month.[69] The year 2013 ended with $148 million in expenses, of which $138 million in losses.
I mean, when Facebook bought WhatsApp for billions, what did people expect? How else were they going to monetize?
A $3 one-time payment (which I'm guessing is about $2.75 after BlackBerry app store fees) is not sustainable for lifetime access and updates on a service that needs 4-5 nines of service availability and data integrity.
(In another news Signal still has focus on crytpo. Is this Firefox+Pocket level of stickiness and “we are right!”?).
But yeah, I might agree that the third party clients thing is a bigger issue. Especially when the official client insists on not officially supporting Linux on ARM64 and not playing nice with Wayland. (Seriously, Signal on Linux is so blurry!)
Now part of the problem with LibreSignal was the trademark violation of using the name Signal. But Moxie is clearly against any third party using their servers, as we can see in this comment: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
IMO that's an unforgivable stance towards third party clients.
I have read (well, skimmed) through their terms of service and haven't seen anything against using their servers from third party software, yet they'll evidently shut down third party software for interacting with their servers. If you're gonna have policies like that, at least outline them in your ToS.
I think my perception has changed in the last ≈ 10 years, to be more leaning in moxie's direction. It's hard enough to design something secure and usable, having to try and support all different implementations under the sun makes most federated approaches never reach any mass adoption.
Even though it's not a one-to-one analog I also think e.g the lack of crypto agility in Wireshark was a very good decision, the same with QUIC having explicit anti-ossification (e.g encrypted headers). Giving enterprise middle boxes the chance to meddle in things is just setting things to hurt for everyone else.
I don't even think they have to officially support third party clients or provide a stable API. I'd have no problem if they just occasionally made API changes which broke unofficial clients until their developers updated them.
But I really don't like that they're so openly hostile to the idea of other people "using their servers for free", with the threat of technical blocks and legal action which that implies. Especially not when their official client is as bad as it is. (Again, it's fucking blurry!)
It isn't, or wasn't, optional. They used to MITM crypto into your Twitter feed after decrypting the SSL. There's also the famous Tom Scott controversy where they were pretending to be him and collecting donations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736888
I uninstalled it in 2017 or 2018 when they started this crap and haven't looked back.
Maybe financial pressure will push Signal to promote its crypto more in future.
Signal is a non-profit. Donate to make sure that they can support themselves.
(And yes, my comments history has me extensively promote XMPP, no big secret here.)
<Your wife> 30m ago: Honey, buy me new Tampax Eraser Pro Black Night
<You> 1m ago: There are only Day version, should I buy it?
<Your wife> 0m ago: What? What are you buying?
<Your wife>. 0m ago: I didn't write this...Firefox bought Pocket. It's not a third party product.
End-to-end encryption was added by Meta, they reused (part of) the Signal app code for this.
This was a big topic for years, I am surprised by this oversight.
A massive oversight on the authors part and completely missing the point of early WhatsApp as first status update application and then SMS replacement.
Almost 13 years to the day!
I find it really frustrating that I am not able to avoid using whatsapp due to how popular it is to the point that it’s become the go-to communication channel for most things :/
The principles they enlisted
> Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club
> Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought.
> Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.
---
That said, building a product and selling it for 19 Billion dollars in 2012 was essentially a success of capitalism over those principles. There shouldn't be any complaints, since FB didn't kill it, and the number of users kept increasing.
- on one side there is the increasing number of features in WhatsApp that nobody asked for and that make the experience worse and worse, I agree. Yet, on the other side of the world a 1B people in China use WeChat for so many things beside communicating, so I understand Meta's appetite to become the West WeChat. Still I hate it. - on the other side there is the business model of WhatsApp. Or the complete lack of it. It's 100% unrealistic that a global, always on, high availability, high security service is free. These things are expensive and they need to be monetized.
It's either ads, either fees on extra services they are providing through the app, either a monthly subscription. Now, I think nobody would pay for WhatsApp and they would lose their market immediately if they went that route (for many good reasons). They tried hard to position WhatsApp as WeChat, failing at that (for many good reasons). Ads is the only thing that is left IMO.
What about Signal? It seems like they run on donations, don't they?
But this it different from a highly profitable service. Let's keep in mind that Meta payed 19B for WhatsApp in 2014. They need a juicy ROI.
I wonder how it scales. It is an order of magnitude smaller but it's not exactly "small": I read it had 70M users in 2024. If you can relay messages between 70M messages without storing metadata, it feels like it shouldn't be too hard to scale, right?
Not sure if they get enough donations, but assuming they do: with 10x the number of users, if they get 10x the donations, it feels like it may work.
> Meta payed 19B for WhatsApp in 2014. They need a juicy ROI.
I think they paid for the metadata (I know that back then it wasn't E2EE but they moved to the Signal protocol in 2016), and now they are just enshittifying.
I have seen criticisms of Signal's crypto stuff (which I just disabled) and trademark, but I don't get it. It's okay to not use the crypto stuff (I personally don't like it) as long as it doesn't clutter the UI. Sponsored content says "for those who like this feature, they will now see ads". It's pretty different from saying "if you don't like the feature, don't use it", IMHO.
Revolut will probably get there first
>It's 100% unrealistic that a global, always on, high availability, high security service is free. These things are expensive and they need to be monetized.
Do you have any information how much whatsapp costs per user per month? Threema seems to be doing fine with just one 5$ forever.
WhatsApp gave Meta a huge social graph: who writes to whom and when. That they used for their other services. Surely that already brought value.
Once you internalize the how and why (such as "forks are good" and "the more publicly auditable code the better"), there's really no going back and for the rest of your life you prefer FOSS even when you can't use it.
That's why I think that for some future generation there will be a FOSS equivalent of the waves of democracy that spread across the world starting in the 18th century. Once a country becomes democratic and people understand the benefits, they never really want to roll that change back. Our current generation is probably not going to double down on the "right to fork," but once an individual gets it they get it for good, so I feel it's just a matter time before a sea change occurs, even if we're all dead when it happens.
There was some wild change they wanted to push some time ago, users started mass migration away from it forcing them to abandon their insane plans.
These companies only learn when the problem hits their pocket.
I still have my social media accounts coz otherwise, hobbies and alike gets impossible to track. But I only access them via PC browser/mobile browser on my GrapheneOS phone.
Instagram only allows video upload via their app which I can understand (compression and etc), GrapheneOS allows me to lock everything so I only use it to upload videos. Man, it is a complete mess, Sponsored, Threads posts that takes you to install apps and ADs is everywhere and I mean everywhere.
On my phone/PC, nothing of the above exist. It is just one post after another with, no Ads, no sponsored, no apps, nothing. Facebook follows suit, I have not used their app in years now, mobile browser only.
WhatsApp is gonna become exactly the same, a complete mess. People accepted Instagram changes so....
You can upload videos from the web now; even Reels.
Any tech company who must say, "we don't harvest your information", is a tech company that harvests your information.
> We can't read your messages or listen to your calls, and no one else can either.
Should we be suspicious of Signal as well?
More to the point, I thought the principle was "Any man who must say, "I am the King", is no true king."? That seems to leave no room for hedging, like only distrusting "global data gathering conglomerate" or whatever. If you're have to do a holistic assessment of an organization's governance structure and incentives, you're basically admitting that witty one-liners like the above are pointless, which was my point.
What does that mean?
What's preventing them from serving a backdoored version? xz was open source as well, that didn't stop the backdoor. There might be reproducible builds on android, but you can't even inspect the executable on iOS without jailbreaking.
This is a false meme spread because the Signal founder (who is no longer with the company) didn’t like people making forks without changing the API server URL and running their own servers.
Open source software doesn’t work like that, however.
As you say, I do remember them issuing some threats about it, so it would be interesting to know if they’ve changed their stance on this.
(Discord, as an example, has banned users for using alternative clients.)
Also, separately, the idea that you can only use a service with a certain client is dumb.
Imagine if a website said you can only use a certain browser, or they ban you. It’s ridiculous.
Here’s one such example, which is also an interesting technical deep dive: https://signal.org/blog/building-faster-oram/
Messages from businesses are absolutely not private.
Sounds like SMS.
Was it a client thing or a protocol thing?
Whatsapp felt so responsive back in the day. I'd be pinging my family in real time halfway across the globe on mobile in 2009. For Free. That was a killer app...
Why did MMS fail where Whatsapp succeeded?
RCS has replaced MMS as a protocol back in 2008 and it's only now gaining traction. Many carriers have shut down their RCS infrastructure half a decade ago, though, so they're not exactly jumping on the chance to turn it back on.
But yea MMS sucks, would be nice with some common cross-platform alternative that worked well.
What does this mean exactly?
See the image here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_list
Popular format on Youtube, reddit, etc.
It should be a law of nature that whatever Meta/Facebook acquires will surely be ad-riddled & 'spyware' infested regardless of the "we won't" promises they swear to abide by.
But I do wonder if this is just the first step, and like other platforms, ads might slowly spread into more parts of the app over time.
With it being Meta I can be sure I will pay and still have my data and privacy violated.
WhatsApp was great because it didn’t have ads and kept things private. Once they start changing that, it usually doesn’t stop with just one small change.
Is that a bad thing? It's a useful dedicated tool. Paperclips have been feature stagnant since the 19th century, and they're fine
I think the op did not mean that. Whatsapp has been adding many new features and tweaks recently(maybe 6months-1yr).Before that they were not that keen on changing.
Just 30 minutes ago: I got an official message from WhatsApp asking for my email address "for improved security just in case you lose your account"...
Current networks have way more lock in than back in the day.
Ads will make more people Signal-curious, or even drive people back to text messages. The average person who switches will convince a non-zero number of their contacts to come with them. The shift will start gradually. Think of Skype, which at one point everyone I knew was on. That network didn't protect them from being replaced by competitors.
People are also increasingly worried about retaliation from the government for their supposedly free speech, which has already driven a few people I know to secure alternatives that aren't operated by Trump allies.
It's really hard to clean up media. You have to go into every single chat and from there go about deleting stuff. At least they finally added a "select all" option in there recently.
So the size of it just grows and grows and grows until it's using all the space on your phone. Not a good fit for non-technical types.
Secondly, no web view. There is the desktop app yes, which is flaky, slow and wants to update every day or two.
I just can't see average people putting up with those inconveniences and that's just a couple of them.
To be fair I've met plenty of non-techie types whose phones were "full" of stuff from WhatsApp or photos that had already been backed up, because the idea they could clear their local storage would never cross their minds. I've seen people buy new phones instead of clearing their cache.
The slightly longer version of the story is that my wife, travelling alone, had some trouble with an iPhone update (it hung for hours), and so she took it to the nearest Genius Bar; they eventually got the update to apply, but then did a factory reset “just to be safe”. Of course, everything except her Signal message history was restored from the automatic iCloud backups. She was devastated, and refuses to touch it now.
Please do not reply to say this was the fault of the Apple Store employee. It was, but at the same time, it also very much wasn't.
What is the alternative though? A private chat app, mobile + desktop, syncing, with enough ease of setup and use for normies to adopt? I don't see it.
iMessage, if you only use Apple devices or are willing/able to hack around the Apple-device requirement.
People behind Signal have a very corporate approach to their app where a permanent "no" doesn't exist when it comes to user choice - all what you have is "not now".
Then there's linking devices; it's not permanent but temporary and devices are removed automatically after 30 days. You can't even log into your account with tablet any more - that was replaced with linking. Cross-platform synchronization - didn't work for me at all despite being a loudly announced success.
This is at least an improvement over WhatsApp, which removes core functionality (e.g. creating groups) when this access is refused
If Signal could address these concerns I'd be happy to move away from Whatsapp.
With this news I'll likely need to reassess my use of Whatsapp again.
It’s frustrating that it’s basically only Telegram and WhatsApp that take desktop platforms seriously.
An additional layer of security would be installing it in a Work profile in Android (maybe the new profiles feature works for this, I'm not sure), and only activating that profile when you need to use it.
With the recent news about the Facebook and Instagram tracking via WebRTC[1], we can only assume that they're doing it with WhatsApp as well.
Apps should not have free access to all contacts but anything else is currently highly impractical to the point of being unusable. (Android work profile is a good idea, unfortunately that profile is usually take up by… work)
I've tried it in the past and all that could be done was due to the platform not having e2e encryption on standard chats.
Onlyfans girls channels.
- much much better performance - a good desktop client - open source message clients - scheduling messages - better search - many small gestures/UX features that feel thoughtfully implemented - better channels - message threads - chat folders - very easily programmable & deployable bots for moderation or implementation into your work flow - a lot of customisable settings
Telegram is so much further in performance and feature than it's counterparts it's laughable. Almost all of the new features in Whatsapp/Signal were first implemented in Telegram.
Some of them, as you said, are feasible because of the non-e2ee chats, but a lot of them are just plain universal.
I think one point not raised here is that Telegram is an attempt to create a global Asian style messenger with quick, sleek and maybe too animated (to my taste) design and vibrant ecosystem.
Whatsapp cannot be fast - otherwise Grandmas will not be using it, so Meta always has to compromise, while Telegram can just adapt WeChat/Line features for years with WA limping behind.
Signal is cool for people that consider privacy paramount. If I get it right, they are also on a mission of creating safe communication for the most vulnerable. They are just different; I could never make myself start using TikTok, and can completely relate to someone saying Signal has just the right amount of features one needs.
How long until "Updates" gets a red badge despite no updates only to show you an ad? Also, I find the language used in their announcement deeply offensive.
> Helping you Find More Channels and Businesses on WhatsApp
> support your favorite channel
> help you discover
> find a new business and easily start a conversation with them
> help admins, organizations, and businesses grow
> Internet.org [1] is providing free internet to millions of people who didn't have it 5 years ago.
vs
> Free WhatsApp is harming market efficiency.
I'm guessing a lot of people are reluctant to spend a lot of effort on the later point.
literal chat dialog tree with 4 options that is not connected to anything for around 250k/year.
I had been voluntold to be on the ads team, because I had sent a list of things that needed to be done to make ads doable and not terrible. Of course, none of my ideas were deemed feasible at the time, including figuring our the ToS stuff, because no use building a product you can't launch and ToS changes aren't easy.
Don't sell yourself short ... they did all the things to make ads doable it was just not feasible to make them not terrible.
In my mind, early focus on ToS could have possibly gotten the change more palletable/directed the project towards more palletable choices or perhaps more likely gotten to the cancellation decision faster and people could work on different things.
Any ads are in addition to this, not instead of.
I assume one would need a Java disassembler at least. On desktop, something like recaf works and allows changing things in classes without the full recompilation.
Is there something like this for android?
I say halfway because some apps have a fallback, built-in, ad when it can't reach the server, other serve the ads from their own servers so no way to block them. Most only leave a blank space.
I use the hosts file from there, and edit it manually via "adb root" (lineageos. root only via adb)
From a 2018 interview of Brian Acton after he left Facebook ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive... ):
" "An SMS has just come in from his local Honda dealer saying “payment received.” He points to it on his phone.
“This is what I wanted people to do with WhatsApp,” he says of the world’s biggest messaging service, "
A company representative adds that it has "no plans to place ads in chats and personal messages." Plans, of course, could change in the future.
As many here have noted, WhatsApp is the dominant communication platform for many people, and many businesses, particularly outside the US. In the short run, almost none of them will be able to leave the platform. In the longer term, so many of them are upset about the introduction of intrusive ads that it could well become "the beginning of the end" for the platform.
Social media platforms can rise and fall.
I don't know if it'll manage with another 15% loss.
Time for a new messenger, and I don’t mean Signal, but the creation of some kind of old Skype, with a peer to peer protocol. It was very good before Microsoft bought it. Of course, if the code is open and does not require a proprietary server part.
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha and then after I catch my breath, a bit more hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Seriously, who expected anything different? Like.. in which universe does anything think "Facebook/Meta is going to do the right thing"(?)
Zuckerberg is ruthless and cutthroat and Whatsapp was less a "savvy acquisition" (I mean, yeah, get rid of competition) than a "I want this, I need to own it"
But to be fair, competitors like Telegram also do not allow registering an account from desktop app, only from a smartphone. This seems to be the new trend: you cannot sign up for Gmail and Vk without a smartphone too: for Gmail, you need to scan the QR code, and for Vk you need to install a mobile app.
I just wish there was something else with such far reach and capability. We can only hope for interoperability with other chat apps.
At least the ads are in Updates, where I never bother looking at
“No ads! No games! No gimmicks!”
I wonder how the early founders feel about what Whatsapp has become with random junk and gimmicks in the UI.
As for status updates… that’s something many people seem to actually use, so ads in there may have an effect.
Delete your WhatsApp and Instagram and Facebook. Delete the apps from your devices.
Every time you launch the app you vote willingly for more abuse and surveillance and censorship.
There is a cult understanding that Instagram ads are highly relevant and quite useful at times and WhatsApp ads have the same possibility. But the messaging is quite poor.
Signal is a cool 2nd alternative to WhatsApp, but their desktop client is absolute garbage, their videocall echo cancelling is non-existent and sending media over slow connections absolutely sucks (it keeps on resending and resending the files)
I was honestly expecting it, after recently seeing on a friend's phone that it already essentially turned to social media on Android. They can't yet push it on the higher income iPhone users (lest they switch to other messenger apps), but change is coming rather inevitably since it's nothing but untapped advertising dollars potential in the eyes of the behemoth that is Meta.
I don't think there's a sustainable solution here except to self-host a Matrix server for family and friends if you have the time, money and technical expertise.
Unique but I believe fundamentally incorrect take on the Internet...
Yes, truly WhatsApp was the first of its kind. It's all the communication of sending a letter through the mail, except delivered electronically - one wonders why they didn't call it "electronic mail", or perhaps "e-mail" for short.
The group chats it offers are another huge innovation - for the first time, people were able to chat with each other by relaying their messages across the internet. Truly a marvel.
Personally, I divide the internet into two eras - "before Whatsapp", when there was simply no primary convenience of any sort to be found upon the internet and all users were deeply encumbered by bounds; and "after Whatsapp", when I and others can communicate, conveniently, via the internet, because of WhatsApp, boundlessly.
In my country, there was no universal messenger app circa 2010s except WhatsApp.
Not everybody had a Facebook account to use Facebook Messenger, adults did but children and elderly didn't. Not everybody had an Apple device to use iMessage.
Nobody knew each other's email outside of work and business - the digital revolution came much later than the US to many parts of the world, and email was a tool for personal communication only very briefly, and only if you already knew that person's email, which most likely you didn't.
The reason WhatsApp took off is because it didn't require anything other than a person's phone number - which was usually the only type of digital pointer you had about a person.
SMS was not an option - it was expensive and limited (to this day still is, unlike the US!), only used as a last resort.
I'm sure many countries around the world would share the same sentiment, though maybe not most. Esp. Europe and South America, probably.
Everything seems to have either adds or subscription modes now, from Sudoku apps to flight tracking (yes Flighty, talking about you).
Naturally the only ones that show up are thirst trap profiles masquerading as "uwu just sharing my life" channels.
It's unclear that Signal/Telegram/etc have a shot, though.
Is that 1.5 billion people engaging with it, or 1.5 billion people seeing it because it's the first tab and then immediately switching to "Chats", the only useful tab in the app?
please create a new messenger.
Is it? Most software developers I know prefer having a job to not having a job. You don't want to implement ads? You're fired.
Blaming the users is also the wrong thing to do, of course. The blame lies squarely with Meta. And with regulators. Any communications platform that has as much market penetration as Whatsapp should be open to use by third parties, just like the telephone system.
You know as well as I do that Meta software developers can get jobs elsewhere. It's a choice.
We all hate ads, but what did we expect ? That some rando will pay for all those server and personnel bills out of the goodness of his "heart" ? Please. I wish the culture of Silicon valley wasn't so full of bullshit that this'd have become obvious a long time back.
(For a more egregious eg. of ads, look at LINE which is all the rage in Japan. Or indeed Google, whose entire Android/Chrome business is made to subtly feed data back into its ads business).
finally people will start to move out of whatsbook!
....i hope
Wouldn't mind doing it again.
Unfortunately now they're owned by a Silicon Valley company so I guess 0.99 is too little for them, they'll charge the price of a SV latte... how much is that? 59.99? 99.99?
I mean, my messages are encrypted, the thing Just Works, UX is great, calls are free despite what I assume is substantial bandwidth and server cost, and so on. Why did they give this away to 2b people for 10 years? Could they really cover the all cost and then some just with those WhatsApp Business API call charges? I mean I love it but I can't say I get it. Thanks for all the freebies Mark!
- I am pretty sure NO ONE asked to hear about more topics and organizations across whatsapp.
The simplest explanation is that they want more revenue, and WhatsApp users were an obvious source they weren't exploiting enough.
We're one of only a few countries[1] who call the game Chinese Whispers.
Is this what the kids say now? Am I getting old?
So we should avoid doing this, "Telephone" is a perfectly good name for this idea, and it's not racist. There are lots of small changes we can make, which make the world slightly better for everybody.
Words can change meaning a lot in a lifetime. Not too long ago, someone here called me out for saying "transvestite", which was a surprise given one of my favourite comedians called themselves an "executive transvestite": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dress_to_Kill_(Eddie_Izzard)
And my mum, when her Alzheimer's was already bad but not quite bad enough she couldn't live in her own home, referred to the cupboard as a "glory hole" — I'd never been aware of meaning #9 until she used it so, "(Scotland and Northern England) A deep built-in cupboard under the eaves or stairs of a house used for general storage, particularly of unrelated or unwanted items stored in some disorder": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glory_hole
Still, could be worse, as I found out when my grandmother used the word "Irish" in the derogatory sense: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Irish#Adjective
Why don't they just come out and say "because, profit!" or some good ol' fashioned BS about "value-creation" or some other American thing like that ...)
I get it though, no one wants to pay for 100s of little free marginally useful things we use every day, but if you look back at what whatsapp did in the beginning, the £3 a year they were asking is so worth it
That way a user in Europe could "subsidize" 4-10 users in the developing world. Maybe that's a little to social democratic for a corporation.
In order to truly solve this problem there has to be some kind of federation and cross-platform standards so that alternatives are able to rise up and compete with big tech.
I've always hated WhatsApp but use it due to network effect: in my country you pretty much can't have a normal social life without it (and even things like customer service often use it as well).
When they started threatening with charging money, it felt like a punch to the gut. So I'm using this product I hate because I'm pretty much forced, as I'd rather be using Telegram or various others that I strongly prefer, and now that they've captured entire societies and communities with their free app, they're going to make ME pay?
My feeling is that capitalism is just not a good model for messaging apps with network effects. Regulation is sorely needed, at the very least for interoperability (like the phone network), and maybe more.
It is extremely unlikely that you used WhatsApp "before they started threatening with charging money" but would have preferred Telegram at the time.
Why?
1. Because WhatsApp was a paid app from the beginning ($0.99 after the first year of using it)
2. Because WhatsApp was bought by FB in early 2014, who made it free.
3. Because Telegram was founded in late 2013
I also distinctly remember that I didn't pay by the deadline (although I planned to cave in later) but finally the threat didn't materialize and I didn't lose access (or maybe I did, but for a day or two). Some people did pay and didn't get any advantage over those of us who didn't.
This was in Spain, so maybe the issue is that the specifics vary per country. In particular, I think your point 1 wasn't really true here. WhatsApp monopolized messaging (including even elderly population) because it was free. You wouldn't convince most people here (and especially the elderly) to pay for an app, it would be dead on arrival. Perhaps the charge after the first year you mention was somewhere in the official small print, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure everyone was using it under the assumption that it was free. They only tried charging a fee that single time I'm mentioning, and they backtracked fast.
Corporate advocates love to whine about cost yet seem to be blind to the context of the situation.
Meta captures enough of the entire global spend on ad revenue to be considered the biggest player in ads, yet we should spare sympathy for the poor servers of whatsapp - famously optimised to scale to 1B users with 50 engineers - which are now compelled to resort to inserting ads in order to cover the costs to run operations and keep the lights on.
These users just don't want to pay for anything, shame on them for using free services subsidised by massive corporations that undercut the market with the explicit aim of expanding the audience and clawing it back later. It's not Meta / Whatsapp's fault that they're exploiting this situation they've shrewdly developed over years, it's the individual moral failing of each user of the service.
Meanwhile ragebait / propaganda / angry racist uncle news is free on Facebook and shared in various forms, and meaningful news + journalism is locked behind various paywalls and other costs. Why won't these people just pay???
In all fairness, no one uses SMS, and no one uses iMessage (outside of the US maybe?).
WhatsApp is omnipresent in Singapore. For example, every business, every support channel, every delivery company uses WhatsApp. WhatsApp QR codes are everywhere (similar to QQ/wechat in CN).
Most iPhone users I know in Singapore never even set up their iMessage (which is also only available on iOS and is a total pain to get to work if you're dabbling in various sim cards, as is very common in SEA). So yes, there's a very good reason WhatsApp is very popular in some parts of the world (similar to BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) until quite recently in Indonesia). It's become too big to fail and took over a very very big portion of (private/business) communication in many parts of the world. And it 100% needs more regulation.
I do get that I'm probably in one of the few areas outside the US where iMessage is pretty big, but even then SMS (probably RCS now) is how you communicate with Android users.
It also doesn't chance the fact that it make no sense for me to pay for e.g. WhatsApp, when I have the SMS available at no additional cost.
I've found the process to be very buggy and rarely works.
If you talk about that stuff, people will dilly-dally with the usual "well I already have too many apps, I'm not sure I want to install one more"
I tell people that the video calls are better (which was true in my experience, back when I still used WA). Instant install
I keep 'lean' devices, the apps that I actually use, battery lasts from days to weeks (phone, tablet respectively) and NoRoot Firewall (on Android) makes sure that my phone stays 'silent' to the apps and target IP-addresses of my choosing.
This is wildly untrue on iOS. Perhaps people have 100+ apps. But the rest, not so much.
Because normal people just never close apps. Are they silently shut down/paused after a while?
Yes. This has been the case since 2008 when the first version of iOS supporting third-party apps was released. Background refresh allows some quanta of work do be done when an app is not in the foreground, but only limited things.
Over time such verification "decays". People buy a new phone, that sort of thing, but it was a healthy boost in one inexplicable moment.
It's like: should we all go to a vegan restaurant instead of the usual steakhouse because you decided you want to "try" being vegan this Friday night, of all nights. Just try it out another day and let us have our fun, Fred.
If you were not on WhatsApp at all, then it becomes a balance of : tiny per-person inconvenience versus 100% clear-cut decision on your part. Oh you've converted to whatever religion and can't have pork anymore? Now we have a choice between not inviting you at all, or trying the restaurant next door.
That would actually be marginally better. No everyone is on f-ing Snapchat. I'm in Denmark, which like the US is pretty big on iMessage, so originally we where using that. Then my sister got an Android phone, and the group chat obviously broken, because no RCS back then.
Everyone has SMS, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger and Instagram (except me for Meta products). So no one is really keen on adding a fifth app, where for me it would remove Snapchat, bringing me down to just SMS and Signal.
Anyone new who wants to message me, I simply say "I'm on Signal" and if it's important enough, they go and install it; it's been fairly frictionless, after all how hard is it to download an app and go through the fairly minimal registration process; and for someone already using WhatsApp, "one more account" probably isn't a major concern.
I tried various steps in the past to retain access to WhatsApp for a couple of people who didn't move, by having a work account on my phone, with a second SIM, but a one-click mistake one time gave WhatsApp my entire contact list from the "Personal" sandbox account, and I've decided not to even bother again.
And I don't want to go to signal because it's only marginally better. It's still American and still a walled garden (no third party apps allowed, no federation). It's a slightly less smelly walled garden.
> And I don't want to go to signal because it's only marginally better. It's still American and still a walled garden (no third party apps allowed, no federation). It's a slightly less smelly walled garden.
This, to me, is downright irrational. "Less smelly" is better, especially if it takes zero effort (you don't even need to create an account with a password, it just sends you an SMS).
If there was a non-American alternative to Signal, surely I would go for it. But there isn't. In the meantime, Signal is by far the best alternative to WhatsApp in terms of privacy.
Not to mention that there is actually a valid reason to not allow third party apps (spoiler: security). Last time I heard a fork of Signal making the news, it was pretty bad.
6 methods to just keep up with work. I also have at least three ways to reach required documents and meeting notes. I really don't want to jump like a platformer character from point to point to be able to communicate and get things done.
In my personal life, I prefer "1 task, 1 application" model. Communications, one application. Personal information storage? Everything in one place, etc.
Application hopping has a very big mental overhead, and kills my flow. Many colleagues are in the same boat.
It's not Signal, it's any app, account, for any reason.
Sounds like a perfect way to ghost people. “You send the update on Matrix? Oh, yeah I was stuck arguing with people in Slack all day, I must have missed it.”
One thing that's nice about matrix is that you can select keywords to trigger notifications. Most of the other apps don't have that. So I tell people to say PRIO or PRORITY if their message is really important, so they can force a notification. Any other messages just get looked at when I get around to it and don't notify. If they abuse the priority I simply remove their right to do that.
But none of the other apps seems to be able to do these keywords or (even better) have an option to mark a message as urgent or something.
To the point where sometimes I can't remember on which app I was having which discussion.
But it's exactly because I already have to deal with too many of them that I don't want to add more.
Also I don't like moxie's attitude but that's more of a personal concern that won't apply to most. Like not allowing third party clients or federation and shooting many suggestions down on github. It's his right to do that but it's also mine to not want to use it. For a "just a little bit better" experience I'm not moving to that.
I use matrix a lot and I think this is by far the best and most open option but most people don't know it. I bridge all the other apps through it now. Also, arathorn is a much nicer person who responds much better to criticism.
> If there was a non-American alternative to Signal, surely I would go for it. But there isn't. In the meantime, Signal is by far the best alternative to WhatsApp in terms of privacy.
But I wouldn't be able to actually move. It would just be yet another one. Not even much better in any way than whatsapp.
> Not to mention that there is actually a valid reason to not allow third party apps (spoiler: security). Last time I heard a fork of Signal making the news, it was pretty bad.
I don't care so much about that (and I work in cybersec). What matters more to me is being in control of my data. Being able to export them wherever I want etc.
I had an issue recently with whatsapp where they locked my account because of "spam". I wasn't spamming but they probably thought my matrix bridge was suspicious. However because of that bridge I could still access my chat data. I couldn't in whatsapp itself. Signal could do the same to me. So I would only use it bridged to Matrix anyway, like I do whatsapp.
And in terms of security: I don't believe neither WhatsApp nor Signal is good enough to prevent a state actor from reading my messages. Even if they can't get in the app they can compromise an endpoint. And even a bad third-party app will be sufficient to prevent drive-by hackers with a pineapple from reading my messages. So I don't see much difference there.
> But I wouldn't be able to actually move. It would just be yet another one.
Just don't keep a backup WhatsApp account around, because then people will use it.
It's really not worth the hassle for me especially since signal is only marginally better.
I understand the latter, but for the former... it's probably faster to install Signal than to answer to a message on HN.
If everybody just installed Signal (because it's better, even if marginally), then eventually everybody would be on Signal and it would be easy to switch.
But the hassle is dealing with all these different apps and their separate notifications. I have real app fatigue lately and turn them off for mostly everything.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Signal fanatic. I'm just quick at moving to better alternatives. If a better alternative than Signal gets announced in 10min, I'll be on it in 11min and I'll be telling you to try it in 12min :-).
The fact is that Signal is probably the best messaging app we have right now. I get the app fatigue, I don't get why the result of it should be to fight precisely the better alternative. "I hate that we're locked in WhatsApp, but I am actively fighting for keeping us locked in".
If everyone starts using signal I'll go along. But they won't so they're isn't any point. I'll still need WhatsApp so they'll keep tracking me. Signal also has poorer group chats (no subtopics for example) which I use a lot.
And if they get big quickly they'll run out of funds and will have to make similar decisions. They're not going to continue being funded by big tech bros like Brian Acton's 50M$ if their costs balloon. For me to actively promote it and use it without a big userbase, it will have to be so open that I can run my own server, like email. I do run matrix for that reason. I like ownership of my services and I'd rather contribute to the network than donating.
Ps: if he really wanted to help accessible safe communications he shouldn't have sold WhatsApp.
I see more in solutions to thwart their tracking. Such as using a matrix bridge, which I do. I do the same with search, I use a meta-search engine to remove tracking and ads. I can also customise it to my wishes that way.
Well moving from WhatsApp to Signal was one move in the last 10 years. I wouldn't call that "constantly moving". We'd be lucky if there was an alternative worth moving every year, but that's by far not the case.
> I'll still need WhatsApp so they'll keep tracking me.
... you say you're in cybersec, so I would expect you to do better than that. What does WhatsApp track? Metadata. Who writes to whom, when. If you move half of your conversations away from WhatsApp, they lost the metadata from half those conversations. So they effectively track you less. It's not "all or nothing".
> They're not going to continue being funded by big tech bros like Brian Acton's 50M$
Are you sure they've been running on 50M in the last 10 years? They take donations, I would expect this helps quite a bit. 50M doesn't really sound like a lot of money when you have 70 millions active users.
> I do run matrix for that reason.
Matrix is inferior to Signal in many ways, though. And it's not like Matrix is super diverse: most people use Element, right? Federation sounds good, but power laws etc.
> Ps: if he really wanted to help accessible safe communications he shouldn't have sold WhatsApp.
Can you imagine anyone in the world who would not sell WhatsApp for 19 Billions? :-)
> Such as using a matrix bridge
How is that reducing the metadata?
No but the last year I've been asked to go to:
- Telegram for a group chat
- Discord for a support community
- Snapchat by someone who wanted to share pics with me
- Instagram chat by a tattoo artist
- RCS / Google Messages by a friend in America who wants to use iMessage with me (I don't use Apple)
- Signal by a family member
- One person keeps chatting to me on LinkedIn and is annoyed I only reply once a month or so when I happen to log in to it (I have all notifications off and don't use the app of course)
All by different people. I keep saying no more more keep cropping up. Signal isn't the only one. I'm honestly very tired of all that crap. If I promote something new it should not be the same thing, slightly less flawed. It should be a real way forward.
I bridge to matrix now and if a network is not supported there then I won't use it. But I don't actually care about those chat networks. The bridges are just a way to forget they exist. Also, I'm not rolling out a bridge just for one person who wants to talk to me on a new network.
> ... you say you're in cybersec, so I would expect you to do better than that. What does WhatsApp track? Metadata. Who writes to whom, when. If you move half of your conversations away from WhatsApp, they lost the metadata from half those conversations. So they effectively track you less. It's not "all or nothing".
I am but privacy and security issues are very different things. The metadata is not really something I care about. My phone provider knows who I call and what I say, my mail provider knows who I email and what I say. Whatsapp was an improvement over those. It's not ideal but metadata is not a dealbreaker for me. And the thing is, I can't do without Whatsapp. I don't like it, but I'm stuck with it. I do shield it from my phone by using matrix so there is little the app itself can collect.
By the way at work the situation is much worse. My employer uses Microsoft 365 where all our data is on Microsoft servers (sharepoint et al) and they can access literally everything. Every document, every email, every chat, even the ones I deleted. It's all there and not end to end encrypted so Microsoft can see it too. Of course they sign legalese that they won't look at it but we all know how much that means post-Snowden. My employer is a company that's supposedly cybersecurity-aware. Clearly not enough. I don't have input in such strategic decisions. Still, a whole team of cybersec specialists is OK with this situation. I'm not, which is one of the reasons I don't like my job :) We spend time on stupid little things while freely giving up our entire data.
> Matrix is inferior to Signal in many ways, though.
I don't agree, it is superior for me. I can use whatever client I want, I can use it on any PC or web or mobile device, 20 of them if I want, I can set up my own home server, I can run my own integrations and bots (like a transcription bot running on a local whisper instance, nothing leaked to the cloud). I don't need a phone number to sign up so I can make different accounts for different purposes, just like email addresses on my domain. It is this flexibility I need. I don't want my chats to be locked up in someone else's server. My chats are my data and I should be able to do with it what I want.
Signal doesn't let me sign up without a phone number. It doesn't even have a web version, I have to install their desktop client (which isn't available on BSD). Also Signal misses so much functionality especially for group chats and integrations/bots.
Anyway, we're not going to agree here. I'm not going to help promote Signal and I don't think it's a train worth riding. That's my opinion. It's not the direction I want to move into, I'm truly sick of these walled gardens.
> Are you sure they've been running on 50M in the last 10 years? They take donations, I would expect this helps quite a bit. 50M doesn't really sound like a lot of money when you have 70 millions active users.
No but it is by far the biggest donation they've had. Most people are not going to pay for it, and if they grow the "normies" will rapidly outgrow the evangelists who would be inclined to donate. They'll end up having to get capital, which will come with strings attached, and the enshittification will start.
The thing is that with something federated that can't really happen. If the main matrix instances enshittify, I'll just run my own (and in my case this is exactly what I do anyway). Or someone else might start one. Having an open network is the only way I see out of the enshittification spiral.
To be clear, I'm not installing those things either. Everybody has WhatsApp, so that's my fallback, it's a common denominator. Signal is superior, so that's my preference. For personal conversations, I don't use anything else.
Then for work, I have to use the tools we get (be it Slack or Discord or Teams). And when a community is on Slack or Discord or IRC or discourse or whatever they use, well I have to go there to talk to them.
> My employer uses Microsoft 365 where all our data is on Microsoft servers
Yes I agree, that's a problem. Slack, Discord, same thing everywhere. Companies should self-host e.g. a matrix server, or at least use a provider from their own country. But I believe that self-hosted Matrix would be better than Slack for companies.
> I don't agree, [Matrix] is superior for me.
Out of curiosity, why not Telegram then, if you don't care about privacy and encryption?
> if they grow the "normies" will rapidly outgrow the evangelists who would be inclined to donate
They currently have 70M active users. Those are not evangelists.
> If the main matrix instances enshittify, I'll just run my own
Which is more complicated for approximately everybody than "if Signal enshittify, I'll move back to WhatsApp or to the next alternative to Signal".
Matrix brings its lot of issues. For instance, startups obviously wouldn't care, but corporations would never accept "any Matrix client" to connect. So they would somehow want to make sure that their employees use approved clients. I don't think this is currently a thing in Matrix. But even if it was, it means that corporations wouldn't benefit from "I can use any client I want", and chances are that they would self-host and not federate. Better than giving their data to third-parties, but still not the dream of federation or freedom.
For personal use? Normies use the main Matrix server, it's not really federated. And Matrix servers collect a lot of metadata. Wasn't there also security issues, where a Matrix server could inject ghost users into rooms?
All that to say, Matrix does not solve the problems that Signal solves. Matrix solves other problems (well, mostly "I want to self-host a chat and I want something cooler than IRC"), but then it makes sense that Matrix is not a replacement for Signal and Signal is not a replacement for those Matrix use-cases.
Bridging is a weird hack. I have only been confronted to Matrix bridges to IRC channels, and it was making everything worse for IRC users (essentially forcing the IRC users to either move to Matrix or ban the bridges).
> Yes I agree, that's a problem. Slack, Discord, same thing everywhere. Companies should self-host e.g. a matrix server, or at least use a provider from their own country. But I believe that self-hosted Matrix would be better than Slack for companies.
Yes or at least use something that's verifiably E2EE. It's totally possible to use someone else's cloud without giving them any way to read the information stored on it. It's just not really offered by the big names. I think part of the reason is that they love running analysis. Especially Microsoft loves "data-driven" everything.
> For personal use? Normies use the main Matrix server, it's not really federated. And Matrix servers collect a lot of metadata. Wasn't there also security issues, where a Matrix server could inject ghost users into rooms?
Yes but those can be resolved. It's still being developed. And once it gets big there will be more servers, I'm sure. Popular sites and services can host their own and direct their existing users to it.
> Bridging is a weird hack. I have only been confronted to Matrix bridges to IRC channels, and it was making everything worse for IRC users (essentially forcing the IRC users to either move to Matrix or ban the bridges).
Well that's for IRC channels, that bridge multiple users on both sides, yes. But this is for 2 reasons: IRC is more limited than matrix so some stuff has to be crammed in a text field somehow, and many IRC servers don't allow full bridging where the bridge can pretend to be multiple users. Libera is an example, they had some personal conflicts with the matrix team and turned it off. Since then it's difficult because the bot puts the username of the matrix user in the body of each message instead of making it appear to come from the username.
If you bridge 1:1 chats or things like whatsapp groups with one user on the matrix side (which is the case for personal bridges), there is no issue. The whatsapp users don't see anything different. Your messages just show up under your regular name. On the matrix side everyone also shows up as a matrix user, the bridge creates a user for everyone in the group chat (called a 'puppet'). It's quite good. The only thing is that if I run a transcribe bot, its output gets bridged back to the other party I'm talking to, so I redirect those to a separate chat. It would be nice if there was a "don't bridge" flag for messages. Whatsapp has transcribe functionality now, but it only works on the phone, not web. And the quality is awful. Whisper-large which I run a server for, blows it out of the water.
The biggest issue with the whatsapp bridge is that it doesn't do voice or video calls. The telegram bridge works even better because it uses the regular telegram protocol (whatsapp doesn't support third-party clients or bots so it uses a hack through whatsapp web).
Like you seem to care about your messages not being entirely public ("And even a bad third-party app will be sufficient to prevent drive-by hackers with a pineapple from reading my messages") but at the same time you're fine with Telegram not being E2EE.
And then you seem to consider that a state actor being able to read the messages in transit is the same as them hacking into the phones?
And it all suggests that somehow the only reasonable threat model is "not caring about a state actor targetting oneself specifically and not caring about anything more than 'drive-by hackers with a pineapple'"?
I think third-party signal apps are just too thin a target for anyone intermediate to bother. Signal itself hardly is. Also, most of the stuff I discuss on these is just banter and stupid memes that people send me.
A European alternative would be excellent (I'm in the UK), but no such thing exists, that said, Signal's server and clients are open-source and can be self-hosted, or even deployed at scale by a European government/entity if they so wish.
I work in the "secure comms" space, and I have reviewed every line of code in the open-source server (as of the revision I last worked on), and built products on it, and though I can't prove they run the same code they publish, I'm "happy enough" with what I see that I'd use it over anything owned by Meta any day.
In an ideal world, I'd host it myself for everyone I communicate with to use, but without federation that's not a possibility, so given a choice between Signal and WhatsApp, the decision is hands-down Signal.
If that's the only choice, maybe yes. Though the installed base of whatsapp is so big I could not leave it right now anyway. So Signal would only be extra.
But for me to voluntarily promote an app it has to be a lot more open than Signal. Even if other people around me start using it I'll probably be the last to move.
Genuinely curious. I am in WhatsApp groups for my kids soccer teams (who will be there at the game, can my kid drive together with you to the match), my kids school classes (Johnny lost his headphones did anyone see them), my work teams "social chat" (happy birthday, I am at conference XYZ) etc. etc. In your situation, which of the three scenarios applies?
1 - You are not in such groups
2 - You were in such groups, and the entire group moved over to Signal
3 - You were in such groups, but the entire group did not move over to Signal and now you are not in these groups anymore
EDIT: re: Work, my colleagues are all on Signal, we have lots of Signal groups to communicate.
Expect this to scale, in my experience you can move your family over to another service. Groups of families your kid is somehow in contact with, not so much...
That's my household, my parents, my grandparents, my parents-in-law, my sibling(s), cousins, aunts/uncles, sibling(s)-in-law, friends, and my colleagues.
Some of my children's' friends' parents who I'm friendly enough with also began using Signal so we can communicate. Those who are school friends but not outside-of-school-friends, we can communicate with via the school's app.
Almost anyone I could want to communicate with is on Signal, all of the family is directly or indirectly because of me, and friends and colleagues has been a combination.
Anyone I don't know well enough to have a conversation about privacy and Meta being the antithesis of it, is not likely someone I need to communicate with.
All in, my wife, on WhatsApp, isn't really "keep[ing] me in the loop", unless we're messaging a trades-person or similar, but that's infrequent enough to not be an issue.
I finally had to install WhatsApp on a trip recently for group coordination, but ensured it didn't get things like contact access, and removed it afterwards.
Kids school may well be an outlier (US), but they send formal communication by email (with an SMS notification or call for emergencies), and the parent group is all on iMessage.
People on Signal tend to have much less volume of overall messages and groups. For someone on WhatsApp to forward you the invite is a hassle for them, sure, but it is an infinitesimal unnoticeable increment on how many in/out messages they deal with in a day.
As I mention in another thread, people will complain that they "have too many apps" if you pitch Signal as a privacy app. They would install it instantly if you told them the emojis are funnier or whatever. Because they already installed 300+ apps and one more is actually .3% increment ; whereas for your typical GrapheneOS F-droid person, adding whatsapp would be a +15% increase of apps on their homepage.
It's kind of the same with those WhatsApp groups. There will be 1,000 messages in the group this week/month. 3 of those are the actual invite you need, and if you have actual human connections with folks, someone will send you those.
With some people it worked though and we are using Signal for some time now. Maybe it is too much to expect a 100% success rate for switching.
The moment they start placing calls to action and distraction in that view is the moment people will move - telegram is a drop in replacement with more features, I won’t argue it’s the ideal choice but at least it keeps meta on their toes as a potential competitor.
And I fully expected to be contradicted by people telling me that they can't live without WhatApp because their contacts use it. I've never installed WhatsApp and my contacts can either contact me on any non-spyware app they choose, or by SMS. It actually works, telling people that you don't have WhatsApp.
But I have a bunch of close (to hearth) and very far (geographically) friends who arent techies and who couldn't care less about ads or privacy related stuff. So, Whatsapp is unfortunately still needed.
That was in response to this.
"Meta’s ad business is “in as strong a position now as it’s ever been,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst and founder of the consulting firm Madison and Wall. The company’s share of the global digital ad business is around 15 percent, he said. Last year, almost all of Meta’s $164 billion in revenue came from advertising."
TL;dr: Advertising business injects more advertising.
No offence to the product team, i know that this is how it works in tech. It's the same for engineering and design teams in every single b2b/b2c business. There is no concept of feature completeness anymore, every single service has to copy from others or be something instead of 10 other services.
everything else is just noise.
Would you like to hear more about topics, teams, and organizations? If no, please explain using at least 1000 characters (required)
[ ] yes [ ] no
As a a result, imessage doesnt support any other mobile platforms properly, and even discriminates against users that dont have an iphone. The world outside of the US doesnt have 80% iphone penetration.
How you can say that imessage is any “better” is a complete mystery to me.
Both apps (whatsapp and imessage) are just here to serve their big tech overlords in their own bigger picture.
We’re literally in a thread about being served ads in WhatsApp.
...oh wait
Especially given that Trump already helped so many people move away from Meta, I see the whatsapp monopoly coming to an end pretty soon.
Our initial use case -- why we're building this -- is parents who are currently using text groups in Apple Messages or WhatsApp to share photos/videos of their kiddos with friends/family and want something less interruptive and more casual, but for whom social media is so toxic and untrusted as to be a non-starter.