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WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

seirdy.one

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Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#41

Post by TacticalCoder »

strogonoff wrote: post #37

Social media and instant messaging giants of the world are incentivised to prefer the captive user over the paying user. (I prefer the term “lock-in” over “domestication” to highlight the ethically questionable nature of it.) A piece of US legislation could address this. For example, if a business that connects people to people—such as a social network, an instant messenger, etc.—grows larger than X users, it could b…

> ... social media and instant messaging giants of the world are incentivised to prefer the captive user over the paying user.

What's the incentive though? That approximately zero user would ever pay for a social media or messaging app? I think they simply have no other viable business model whatsoever.

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#42

Post by f430 »

Beautifully written. Domestication is apt-its userbase has largely been kept blissfully ignorant and still a huge chunk of its users have no problem using it with the term changes.

I guess the big deal is that if your friends who aren't accustomed to authoritarian style governments no longer wants to talk to you because you are on Whatsapp then it will force those people to stay on it at the risk of looking stupid and ignorant.

I rather not talk to friends or people who refuse to stop and look at whats happening. So many of them say "I have nothing to hide so whats wrong with this?". They are fully domesticated.

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#43

Post by koolba »

hnick wrote: post #39
cameldrv wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except in group chats. The switching costs are higher for those.

And chat history, if it's relevant. I think it is possible to export and browse chat history 'offline' but it's not trivial. Simply transferring my history from Android to IOS was a pain and I gave up, but I still have the backup somewhere just in case.

> And chat history, if it's relevant.

Losing your chat history might be a blessing in disguise.

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#44

Post by imposterr »

stirlo wrote: post #36

People forget that WhatsApp used to have a subscription that cost $1 per year. With 1 billion users that's plenty enough money to pay for their infrastructure. Imagine if they'd kept that business model rather than being bought out by FB and sucked into their data harvesting swamp.

Yes, but many of the people who use the service are in developing countries where free is always considered better. If they had to charge those people WhatsApp never would have taken off in those locales like it has.

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#45

Post by StavrosK »

stirlo wrote: post #36

People forget that WhatsApp used to have a subscription that cost $1 per year. With 1 billion users that's plenty enough money to pay for their infrastructure. Imagine if they'd kept that business model rather than being bought out by FB and sucked into their data harvesting swamp.

I've always thought that was a marketing trick. After all, how could all the bandwidth and development time and resources I was using only cost $1/yr?

However, now that I know how lean the team that built WhatsApp was, the math does check out, and it's amazing that all it costs to keep the bullshit at bay is $1/yr.

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#47

Post by ksec »

I am not sure where to begin.

WhatsApp didn't create any of these. Before that it was MSN, and before MSN it was ICQ / AIM. Instant messenger has been around for a very long time.

Every Single criticism of WhatsApp could be said to any of the above.

I felt the author made it as WhatsApp was specifically designed from Facebook for target advertising. For a long time, even after Facebook acquisition WhatsApp has little to do with its parent company, other than moving their insanely great Super Size FreeBSD Box to thousands of tiny little Linux blade.

WhatsApp used to charge iOS user $1. And $1 / Year for Android. Despite that they still grown to hundreds of millions of users.

WhatApp grew because it was the only IM that worked on Smartphone. Thanks to Erlang. Yes. ICQ didn't bother. Microsoft refuse to accept Smartphone is the future of computing hence there never was MSN on Smartphone. Other contender tried but none of them managed to Scale. I still remember all my colleagues and friends used to download instant messenger on our phone to test them out, creating a group and basically DDoS each other until the system or network crash. No IM was able to handle the traffic load, not only did WhatsApp does it many times better than their competitors, they also had almost all platform support, from Symbian to Blackberry.

It then made its point about User domestication. Which really is a FOSS, GPL, Richard Stallman angle on Software. I argue it would be the same with many of today's software.

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#48

Post by orsenthil »

The article misses some of hte core problems with WhatsApp.

- It treats Phone and Contacts a personal identity and world. - You don't need any permission from your contacts to add them to a group. - You can forward any message and it cannot be verified for the source.

All these try to given an effect that user is in control of many things, while ignoring socially learned concepts of personal space, non-intrusive behavior and sharing of truth.

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#49

Post by YarickR2 »

alexpc201 wrote: post #3

We should decide which information about us we give, and which we don’t. No matter the app we use, noone should collect information about the app usage without user permission. This should be a law right now, but the cookies were more relevant, I pressume.

app usage data is collected all the time, in form of server logs, and you shouldn't expect this to change. We should be able to opt into using our data for marketing purposes, getting various benefits in return, but that should be opt in , not opt out. Still , this begs a question, what could be attributed as marketing purpose

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#50

Post by strogonoff »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #41
strogonoff wrote: post #37

Social media and instant messaging giants of the world are incentivised to prefer the captive user over the paying user. (I prefer the term “lock-in” over “domestication” to highlight the ethically questionable nature of it.) A piece of US legislation could address this. For example, if a business that connects people to people—such as a social network, an instant messenger, etc.—grows larger than X users, it could b…

> ... social media and instant messaging giants of the world are incentivised to prefer the captive user over the paying user. What's the incentive though? That approximately zero user would ever pay for a social media or messaging app? I think they simply have no other viable business model whatsoever.

I don’t think people are any less willing to pay for social media than they are for their phone and it’s time we recognized that.

The largest player in social wants to normalize free service and lock-in: this way its users can come but can hardly leave, competition is impossible since no one can undercut it on price, and its leverage with the advertiser approaches infinity.

Now, the moment big social is legally obligated to enable feature-complete third-party clients to exist so that users can easily switch social service providers, a company will pop up and say “we don’t make money from advertising; we’re very transparent about all our records; we provide a full API so you can keep using your favourite client app; our subscription starts at $X”. You can count that this new provider will tear out a chunk of WhatsApp’s user base.

The next day yet another provider pops up and advertises cheaper subscriptions at $X/2, further eating away at Facebook’s advertising power. FB understands that the earlier it revamps its business model, the more revenue it can generate from actually paying users; so it revises the ToS, adds paid tiers to its services and becomes very good at upselling them.

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