341–350 of 392 posts
Shit, I just convinced my parents to use WhatsApp instead of SMS. Time to start looking for an alternative. What's Telegram's business model? (yes, a good UI is a requirement and no, Signal isn't there yet).
Can you crystallise that in to something they could use to work on?
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Nothing can compete with 0 rupees. Also unlimited SMS are free these days.
How many rupees does the extra data for a year's worth of ads cost? Or are unlimited data plans common in India?
On Airtel, which I use- 4G data 2Gb/day, Unlimited SMS, Unlimited calls(Anywhere in India), for 90 days, comes to like $9(around 599 rupees).
This is a pre-paid plan.
Whatsapp had a great business model: $1 a year. With their current 1.5 billion users, that's nothing to sneeze at. It doesn't cost them $100M a month to provide the service. I wish more companies were like Craigslist - happy to make an great profit and a lasting business by providing basic information services for a reasonable price. Instead, a bunch of MBAs want to rule the world by focusing on growth at all costs,…
Ok, I agree that some MBAs can be full of it but can we already stop this MBA hate on HN? I feel like lots of people here think that if you build something then customers will surely come. I've got a huge surprise for you. You will have to sell your product and some of the MBA's are really great at that. In B2B a single sale can make or break your company when you're low on cash. You do your job and let them do their…
Shit, I just convinced my parents to use WhatsApp instead of SMS. Time to start looking for an alternative. What's Telegram's business model? (yes, a good UI is a requirement and no, Signal isn't there yet).
>Signal isn't there yet Can you crystallise that in to something they could use to work on? https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/requests/new
More seriously, it needs to stop sending me "X is now on Signal" notifications for people who've been there for ages.
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If you are ok with your traffic routed being to russia (and recently, Iran), not having default encryption on 1on1 chats and no encryption whatsoever on group chats - sure, choose Telegram. Not even counting the ICO, which is suspect in itself.
> If you are ok with your traffic routed being to russia (and recently, Iran) Where does that come from? Because from what I gather it's precisely the opposite: Telegram users in Russia and Iran are leveraging proxies (sometimes run by volunteers) to get around their nations filtering. When you're using someone else's platform it all comes down to trust, and I'd rather trust an expat Russian that left his home countr…
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Yeah but who do you think is pushing the company to bow to the shareholder pressure?
A company has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, who bought the stock on the assumption that the company will be run in their best interests. If they do't do that they are open to shareholder lawsuits. (This is the way that activist investors often work.)
Is it really common for lawsuits against normal sized companies? (I'm not talking intel, facebook etc.)
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"if you can't charge people even $1 for your product...." Only folks aren't always just paying $1. He's describing folks needing to set up a freaking payment system for a small amount of money - and that some folks aren't going to be able to do that and others aren't going to be willing. That's even before you get into the actual payment of $1. And this is before even considering there are other free apps that will w…
I don't understand all this talk of "setting up a freaking payment system" like it's some huge technical hurdle? Do the vast majority of people not get WhatsApp through the Play Store / App Store? Isn't adding a debit / credit card or purchasing a topup card for these trivial? All this is besides the fact that we're talking about making the subscription model an option in addition to the ad-supported model, not forci…
These folks are very wary of subscriptions, regarding them as potential scams or traps and while I'm sure Whatsapp would be successful even with a recurring price tag, I'm confident the service would be nowhere near as ubiquitous as it currently is.
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>Signal - Featureless Come now. Signal has group chats, document sharing, built-in GIF searching (GIPHY), disappearing messages, encrypted calling (video and/or voice), oh and the most important feature: text messaging.
Sounds awesome. Who pays for it? (Honest question, I burned myself on WhatsApp.)
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Sweeping generalization.
Our ability to generalize is one of the key traits that makes us the dominant species on this planet. Describing that particular commenter's path is not nearly as informationally useful as describing the most common path. MBA is the business equivalent of " Specialist Certification" in engineering. It's for the second-rate.
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I don't understand all this talk of "setting up a freaking payment system" like it's some huge technical hurdle? Do the vast majority of people not get WhatsApp through the Play Store / App Store? Isn't adding a debit / credit card or purchasing a topup card for these trivial? All this is besides the fact that we're talking about making the subscription model an option in addition to the ad-supported model, not forci…
You have to know WhatsApp's user base to understand this. Here in germany it's the de-facto standard communication platform. Everyone and their mother uses WhatsApp - and I mean that literally: Lots of old, non-tech-savvy folks use the service - the kind that even see creating an account as a barrier big enough to not use the service. I still think using the phone number as account was a genius move that enabled wide…