- 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.
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
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.
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.
Would you like to hear more about topics, teams, and organizations? If no, please explain using at least 1000 characters (required)
[ ] yes [ ] no
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
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 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.
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.
"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.
everything else is just noise.
That was in response to this.
