Live data from Hacker News

Signal Introduces Stories

signal.org

31–40 of 480 posts

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#31

Am I in a bubble and these features are, in fact, widely used on WhatsApp? I'm in groups with a whole lot of other people including a few who keep up with modern social media stuff, use TikTok, use Instagram, et c., and zero of them use the Status feature or Stories or anything but messaging. For us it's just ICQ/text with better media embedding (but still really bad, somehow). Some of us regularly use similar featur…

I'm using WhatsApp everyday, but have never encountered anybody using stories (I can't even find it in WhatsApp on Android, is it the camera-ocon in the top-left?)

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#36

Am I in a bubble and these features are, in fact, widely used on WhatsApp? I'm in groups with a whole lot of other people including a few who keep up with modern social media stuff, use TikTok, use Instagram, et c., and zero of them use the Status feature or Stories or anything but messaging. For us it's just ICQ/text with better media embedding (but still really bad, somehow). Some of us regularly use similar featur…

None of the various Europeans I met at a hostel last year use it. So that’s a random sample of people from a dozen or so countries.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#37

So did Moxie leave because Signal got overtaken by Feds? Why is a secure messenger adopting the appearance of social media? Doesn't this work explicitly against the entire claimed reason for not having an account system? I would love to hear tptacek's views on this.

> So did Moxie leave because Signal got overtaken by Feds?

No, he worked on Signal for so long that he probably just wanted to take a break to work on other passions too - he's still on the Signal Foundation board (https://signalfoundation.org/)

> Why is a secure messenger adopting the appearance of social media?

I'd argue that Stories (or equivalent) is nowadays a standard feature in many messengers. To more directly answer your question no - Signal is missing a key aspect of Social Media: discovery. Stories is pretty much equivalent to share a picture to a group of people. You can also easily disable the feature in settings.

> Doesn't this work explicitly against the entire claimed reason for not having an account system?

I'm not sure specifically to what you refer to but in general: phone numbers is still the primary way to find new folks, but they're working on a username feature. They will still use phone numbers for simplicity as "account" but again, Stories is simply a new interface to share pictures with your contacts.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#38

Signal has demonstrated product-death (loss of cohesive product vision), what do we use next?

Internet standards like IRC or XMPP? Investing in those instead of walled gardens was the right choice to begin with.
Post reply on HN