591–600 of 972 posts
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I honestly wish I understood what the big deal is. Don't give the app any permissions and you're good. All they can share then are your contacts.
Just like you didn’t give Facebook permission to track you on the web?
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…
In the past I might have said to people try telegram or signal, but now with the momentum of this whatsapp policy change I am pushing signal so I don't dilute the efforts.
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> Critical social infrastructure At least for the UK, this is not at all the case. It’s perfectly feasible to socialise and do business without going anywhere near WhatsApp.
I live in the UK and this is absolutely 100% not true, you cannot function in society here without WhatsApp. In Australia the same is true for Facebook. In every country there's something, and almost all of them outside China are owned by Facebook.
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Why is this the top voted comment? Leaving WhatsApp is nothing at all like cutting off your internet connection. It is just one out of literally dozens of available text messaging apps, and it is owned by one of the least ethical companies that exists today.
"It is just one out of literally dozens of available text messaging apps" It baffles me people are still saying this. You can only message people that are using the SAME messaging app as you. I can't just up and switch apps and expect my 30+ friends and relatives and housemates and coworkers to switch with me!
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> Viber, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Threema and Discord are all built on the same paradigm: accounts tied to a single service and thus the inertia of network effect makes vendor lock-in a real problem when acquisitions happen or Terms of Service change From a purely technical perspective. However, how organization is structured and who is in it matters: https://signalfoundation.org/ I am in the camp that there are a…
> I am in the camp that there are alot of things we try to solve (and sacrifice things like usability) at a technical level that we should be solving at a social level. I agree in theory but unfortunately I think we need both. I have little confidence in either on it's own. And I've been burned too much by vendor lock-in in the past to ever advocate for ANY service that isn't federated (I use many non-federated servi…
Touche, but if they were there before why aren't they "here" in popular adoption? I think, although it is perfectly technically feasible in a vacuum it is not in real life.
Because it requires that all your common contacts (friends, family) use it. The question isn't whether you can do but whether you can be easier to use and offer more feature then the competition. Most people don't care. You need to be competitive.
From a technical perceptive you will have to spend more, make less, and have decreased usability for privacy, and federation. So picking any one is already shooting your self in the foot. Pick two and you aren't going anywhere.
Simplified argument but Signal picks to minimum they feel they need to do to see change they want. And I am big fan of this method. I am tired of projects with good intentions not getting adoption.
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Why would you want your government to mandate how technology works? Sounds like a recipe for disaster and the perfect way to stifle innovation
Because innovative != ethical! Hopefully it would stifle innovation that depends on tracking users and platform lock-in. I think there would certainly be space for innovation beyond that, possibly with even better conditions for competition as it would be easier for users to move between platforms.
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I agree with you. However it won't solve the problem of privacy regarding Facebook. Other issue that I see here, people want an unified messenger, with a great user experience, 100% secure, open-source, multi-platform, free (as in beer) and no monetization included. I'm sometimes shocked that here - hacker news - people underestimate the price of good software development, infrastructure and maintenance.
Even a tiny amount of monetization should pay for development of a chat app... Imagine you build it with a team of 5 software devs for each of linux, mac, windows, android, ios, web. You build it in Europe paying a generous salary of $80k. You need 1 server per million users (as whatsapp did pre-acquisition), hosted on say AWS. If you get 10% of the world to use it, the total running costs are 1.2 cents per user per…
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I'm in Brazil as well. Everybody uses Whatsapp. It is now so entrenched into society that it turned to be part of its popular culture. When people say "I'm part of a group of old car enthusiasts", they meant they are part of a Whatsapp group in which they discuss old cars. Countless online services and apps were replaced by Whatsapp over the years, from the top of my head: all IMs, customer service apps, e-commerce (…
I'm having a hard time understanding how WhatsApp could be convenient enough to replace most online services and apps. Do you send text messages with some magic keywords to order at Burger King, or is there a person on the other end reading it, or how does that work? How do you pay? How do you browse the menu? I don't understand.