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Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

#321

Post by einpoklum »

Erazal wrote: post #175
Lazare wrote: post #56

Telegram is a great IM experience . The client is good, feature set is good, the stickers are amusing (if you're into that kind of thing), the feature set is complete and everything is polished. Telegram is, I think, going to be one of the easier sells if you're trying to convince non-technical users to switch from WhatsApp or FB Messenger. The privacy, security, and governance story is not great though. If you care…

/Aside First time I'm meeting my virtual Doppelganger, best part is, it's on HN !

Yeah, you and me both. Took the words out of my mouth.

Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

#322

Post by tim333 »

apexalpha wrote: post #155

Where is the "Don't switch" option? Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they're part of what I would call "critical social infrastructure." Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.

There's also the keep WhatsApp for legacy contacts but use Signal or some such for new ones option.

Personally I'm probably a bit odd here in that I don't mind facebook having my info. So they may show me a personalised ad - big deal.

Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

#323

Post by incrudible »

jbotz wrote: post #283
apexalpha wrote: post #155

Where is the "Don't switch" option? Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they're part of what I would call "critical social infrastructure." Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.

Well, I don't know where parent is located, but here in Brazil they are pretty much right. Everybody has WhatsApp... it's assumed that if you have a phone you have WhatsApp. A lot of financial transactions are conducted by doing a bank transfer and then sending the receipt via WhatsApp. The schools send essential messages to parents via WhatsApp. During lockdowns, stores were taking delivery orders via WhatsApp. What…

I like to think the problem is that "the nerds" have failed the rest of the people. People used to listen to us about computer stuff. Then computers became usable without us. Then smartphones arrived. We gladly were relieved of our obligations, but also of our influence.

It's too late to go back. People are already used to the trade-offs, convenience rules above all. People may be "sort of concerned" about privacy, but they shrug it off. If privacy was high-value, any privacy-conscious competitor would've taken the market by storm.

Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

#324

Post by pelasaco »

MOUNOPANO wrote: post #189
apexalpha wrote: post #155

Where is the "Don't switch" option? Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they're part of what I would call "critical social infrastructure." Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.

How is it possible for this answer to be first... Really HN? WhatsApp is critical infrastructure?? Excluding company ownership, what is the crucial difference between all IM listed? There's LITTLE DIFFERENCE, they all serve the same purpose, feature parity is pretty much there. When you add company ownership to the mix, WhatsApp is owned by fucking Facebook. Let that sear in your mind.

big words, unfortunately little common sense.

I can give you some scenarios:

- Practically every school (elementary school) in Germany uses WhatsApp for communication among Parents and Teachers. If you don't have WhatsApp, you have go to the school and read the official announcements in the wall. Lot of important information there, for example Teacher short-notice absence, protocol from meetings, etc.

- The favorite communication channel of my university is via Whatsapp. There are lot of tools to consolidate and do the customer relationship via WhatsApp.

- Back in the normal days, every single airbnb host that i contacted, were using WhatsApp

So to make it clearer, the main difference between all IM listed are:

- the user base itself (two billion users for WhatsApp[1])

- The number of 3rd part tools offering integration with that tools (zendesk, salesforce, etc).

References:

[1]: https://www.messengerpeople.com/global-messenger-usage-stati...

Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

#326

Post by studiecomput »

enumjorge wrote: post #247
studiecomput wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm facing the same problems. All the people in my (real life) social circle are using WhatsApp. All of my friends are calling me crazy that I don't have Instagram, so talking about alternative messaging apps is probably not going to work. I think this is true for most people in the western culture. I value my privacy, but the struggle is to big for me. Maybe an open-source protocol, like how e-mail works, could be a…

There already are IM protocols. The problem is that companies prefer to create walled gardens. Even if a protocol were to take off, what usually happens is that one company leverages the protocol to gain traction, spends enough resources to build a really great user experience, and once they’ve amassed a big enough percentage of users, they toss the protocol and use something proprietary. You’d need the protocol to h…

Thanks for your comment. I quickly searched for the IM protocols and there are plenty of open-source projects with promising functionalities.

I think that the mindset of the majority of the people is the source of this problem. Most of the people I speak to don't care about their privacy. They say that they have nothing to hide and that's a valid statement. The problem is that we don't get to choose. If someone wants to share all of their personal information it's their choice, but to not share your personal information seems almost impossible. Social standards expect that you have WhatsApp and LinkedIn and such.

Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

#327

Post by Vinnl »

alias_neo wrote: post #234
hrns wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal requires phone number in order not to store your contact list on their servers. Instead of id's/email addresses/nicknames they are using your phone contact list. IMHO that's better for privacy.

Signal appear to have been making efforts to switch unique identifier to an arbitrary ID, I believe this is a move towards removing the phone number requirement. I can't say for sure. I know their infra codebase pretty well as I've worked on it for projects unrelated to Signal/Open Whisper Systems. Unfortunately their public Github is usually ~3 months behind their running infra and often released much later than the…

> Signal appear to have been making efforts to switch unique identifier to an arbitrary ID, I believe this is a move towards removing the phone number requirement. I can't say for sure.

It is: https://mobile.twitter.com/moxie/status/1281353119369097217

> Our goal with PINs is to enable non-phone # based addressing. Since that will mean your Signal contacts can't live in your address book anymore, they're Signal's responsibility. Every other messenger does this by storing them in plaintext, but that's not private, so we built SVR.

Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

#329

Post by j-james »

ValentineC wrote: post #206
Lazare wrote: post #56

Telegram is a great IM experience . The client is good, feature set is good, the stickers are amusing (if you're into that kind of thing), the feature set is complete and everything is polished. Telegram is, I think, going to be one of the easier sells if you're trying to convince non-technical users to switch from WhatsApp or FB Messenger. The privacy, security, and governance story is not great though. If you care…

> If you care about such things, I think Signal wins hands down. And the UX is fine, just not quite as good as Telegram in my view. Signal (by design, probably) has no chat sync or backup. That's a dealbreaker in my book. Edit: looks like chat history transfer has been a feature since June 2020: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/9/21280664/signal-chat-trans...

Signal has (even automated) backups. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by chat sync, but using multiple clients at the same time causes no issues.

Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

#330

Post by rglullis »

apexalpha wrote: post #155

Where is the "Don't switch" option? Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they're part of what I would call "critical social infrastructure." Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.

Last I checked, my phone and my computer do not require me to use only messaging app.

WhatsApp is "critical" now only now due to its network effects, but you can transition away to something else.

Right now I have maybe a dozen friends and family members on my matrix server. I helped them set up the app, configured their communick accounts, made a few video calls to ensure it was working, etc. Current step is to help my wife to do the same with her friends. Slowly but steadily, we are moving our communication network away from WhatsApp and into Matrix.

Each one that we move makes WhatsApp less "critical" and makes us more free from monopolistic assholes. We don't need the Government to control any of that, in fact I believe that waiting for the government to do anything is not going to achieve anything.

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