Comment by b0a04gl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by b0a04gl | Hacker News Reader

everyone saw this coming the day facebook bought it, but the real issue isn't ads in status . it's that the platform is now locked into meta's attention monetization engine. the founders explicitly said no ads. now not only ads, but paid channels, algorithmic exposure, and user segmentation creeping in. most people won't switch because of network effects, so meta can keep tightening the screws. this isn't about revenue, it's about control. they’re reshaping a private messaging tool into a broadcast platform with tracking hooks. and most users won’t even notice until it’s too embedded to undo

It's been 11 years. If they hadn't been bought they'd have found a different monetization model long ago

WhatsApp make billions of dollars but Meta wants it to make hundreds of billions. There's no way to appease the dragon.

Curious how whatsapp makes any money besides the handful of companies that use it as a customer support portal

WhatsApp integrates into the rest of Meta ads machine so it distribute leads from facebook and instagram directly to whatsapp. It also makes money with spam.

WhatsApp makes absolutely no money with spam. There isn't a per-message cost or however you think that would work

There absolutely is a per-conversation cost for marketing messages.

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...

You are wrong.

> handful of companies

Go to India. Way more than just a handful of companies using it

On a global level it's completely pervasive.

How many of the people posting here that criticize this move are owners of Meta stock? The number is certainly above 50%, at least for those in the US, since most people with a retirement plan will own Meta in some form. It's the need to satisfy shareholders with new earnings.

So you’re blaming me because Fidelity bought some Meta for my 401K without me directly knowing?

Well, I'm saying we should be hesitant to immediately throw out blame for pursuing profit, because it's not just more money for Zuckerberg and other billionaires. If retirement funds were growing at 2%, the same people criticizing this decision would be looking for alternative investment vehicles.

What choice do we have? Indeed, I would rather prefer that the companies that comprise the broad market embrace some form of ESG ethos, but that's clearly out of vogue these days. I vote to that extent, but I'm a breathtakingly small portion of the vote when it comes to corporate governance.

How would being actively discriminatory against a large part of the population help anything?

That is not my case. If Meta had minted thousands of millionaires in my country I would have way less problems with them

They kinda did. Before facebook brought them, the app cost $1/£1 per year (iirc your first year was free). Thing is back then MMS and/or texts across borders was expensive, so if you were regularly sending picture messages to people the $1/£1 sub was a no brainer.

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).

I happen to remember paying 1€ for Whatsapp.

And my understanding back then was that enforcement of payment was via the honour system. It was even possible to pay for your contacts, likely to make it as low friction as possible especially as paying for something on the internet was still a relatively new thing.

For $1 per contact, I'd be happy to pay for anyone I know, or ever meet in the future to keep a messaging platform ad-free/user-centric.

There's no way it would've gotten the adoption it did in 3rd world countries if you had to pay $1 per year.

Thing is, it already was getting that adoption, and network effect can largely take care of the rest. Also, some it’s tied to a real phone number, geographic price differentiation is trivial to implement.

Ok I paid the 1 buck, or agreed to pay a year later. Those days I lived in India, and my friend kinda forced me to use whatsapp by selling it. I still remember sitting in an auto-rickshaw and downloading the app after the sales pitch :) This must have been 2012, but could it be earlier - maybe.

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.

I think it grew there when you had to pay. It was still cheaper than the alternative.

> the app cost $1/£1 per year

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.

> most people won't switch because of network effects, so meta can keep tightening the screws.

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.

Although those apps are still out there, i really miss those days were all you needed was some kind of unique identifier like a nickname, username or something like that an email address and some fancy password (and you weren't even pestered about to provide a phone number anywhere!).

Those were simpler times. :')

It is becoming painfully apparent that the cycle of enshittification is truly inevitable, right up there next to the second law of thermodynamics.

Unless it's an open, federated system.

Right. Instant messaging should be considered basic / core utility like ISPs. I can pay a cheap or even a free one and they'll probably sell my data or I can pay more for an ISP that preserve my privacy

> or I can pay more for an ISP that preserve my privacy

In what alternate universe?

No system can credibly claim to sustain massive consumer scale until proven in real life.

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.

Despite its flaws and issues, email is federated and has been working at scale for decades.

I agree. That’s an interesting model for chat. But remember, modern email is quite complex when you add all the standards for authenticity and security together, as well as informal requirements like spam filtering. But even if self-hosting were a pain, it’d still be an improvement over today’s fragmentation-by-app status quo.

> But even if self-hosting were a pain, it’d still be an improvement

Why hypothetical? Matrix already works sufficiently well.

Not at global scale it doesn't.

Are you aware of any particular bottleneck?

Only if you think Capitalism is also inevitable

The next one to enshittify will be Threads. Right now it's in the honeymoon stage where there aren't any ads so people are encouraged to use it and help grow the platform.

This one I don't mind, there is like 1% of actual posters, everyone else are bots or tweet copy pasters

I used Threads for the first day. And seeing occasionally promo pics that James Gunn posts of Superman. But from my ancedotal experience, Threads is already full of bots, escort services, and random tweeters who I have no interesting in following. I feel Threads might be shut down eventually or integrated into Instagram perhaps.

Ha! You jinxed it!

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.

> most people won't switch because of network effects, so meta can keep tightening the screws

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.

There is a massive barrier to switching.

In order to switch, you also need to convince your acquaintances to switch.

Good luck with that.

There is no switching involved, you can have two apps installed at the same time. It's not a social network where posting to one means the people posting on the other won't see your stuff.

You are ignoring chat groups here.

You're always going to send the message on the app with 100% coverage.

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.

> In order to switch, you also need to convince your acquaintances to switch.

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. :-)

This needs a regulatory involvement (for federation)

That already happened in EU with trying to force leading communications platforms to integrate with at least one competitor. I remember an initiative to make WhatsApp integrate with (wait for it..) Skype.

I'm not sure how or why it fizzled out.

When I did it, because my phone supports multiple apps being installed at the same time, I was able to do it gradually. Most people I know do have a second option to reach them so it wasn't a problem at all.

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