Live data from Hacker News

Whatsapp playing low, really low. (Can't click/copy Telegram URL's)

reddit.com

1–8 of 8 posts

Re: Whatsapp playing low, really low. (Can't click/copy Telegram URL's)

#6
post #5

No reddit at work; what's going on?

Here's the imgur[1] link.

It appears to show contextual formatting of http links from within Whatsapp - when you text someone 'https://google.com' it formats it as a clickable link, and not just text. However, the same formatting is not applied to 'http://telegram.me' or 'http://telegram.org' links.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/B5ISWZw.jpg

Re: Whatsapp playing low, really low. (Can't click/copy Telegram URL's)

#8
It's disappointing, but to be honest, not all that unexpected. A company blocking links to competitors on their service is pretty common, even in the world of social media and instant messaging.

Which raises an interesting point with these services. At what point is it 'wrong' for a company to control what people can link to on their service? This example is pretty tame given it's merely not being linked, but if the link had been removed altogether, would that be 'unethical'?