Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
91–100 of 965 posts
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#92Did I read that right $19m people cost for 50 people.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#93Signal can be better, IMHO, by separating from phone number requirements. In other words, let users have secure random ids, rather than forcing each user to hand over their phone number for phone company verification. It turns out the budget shows the phone number registration problem: the costs to deal with phone number verification seem to be $6MM, which seems to be 10% of the entire budget. If Signal staff are rea…
The phone number requirement is why WhatsApp won the space over in the first place. There were loads of username+password-based services before it, but none reached the market it did. Why? An incredibly wide user funnel, singing up is frictionless. You might understand that it's a bad idea, but that makes you an outlier.
Why not support both?
Let one communicate from a computer (or phone) with a username+password account, with people who use the service with phone number account.
This without the mechanism Whatsapp uses, where you can use it in a web browser, but it's still linked to your phone.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#94Signal can be better, IMHO, by separating from phone number requirements. In other words, let users have secure random ids, rather than forcing each user to hand over their phone number for phone company verification. It turns out the budget shows the phone number registration problem: the costs to deal with phone number verification seem to be $6MM, which seems to be 10% of the entire budget. If Signal staff are rea…
A bit handwavy, but allowing sign-up without a phone number could massively increase bot/spam traffic and ultimately increase hosting costs for Signal.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#95Who is the active user base for signal these days? Everyone I knew who was using it dropped off after the SMS debacle, which was a shame. Edit: Wow some weird haters on HN today. I was honestly curious as an active signal user that was no longer able to use it to message people in North America and had never seen anyone using it in East Asia. Apparently this makes some other signal users very angry.
I still use it, and ask my friends & family to use it as well.
What would you recommend to use instead of Signal?
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#96Signal can be better, IMHO, by separating from phone number requirements. In other words, let users have secure random ids, rather than forcing each user to hand over their phone number for phone company verification. It turns out the budget shows the phone number registration problem: the costs to deal with phone number verification seem to be $6MM, which seems to be 10% of the entire budget. If Signal staff are rea…
Phone verification does have value in adopting the network effects of phone numbers and integrity by making it harder to mass create accounts.
It would have very particular ethical trade-offs, but they could just make signing up without a phone number a paid option. That has the advantage of actually turning a cost center into a profit center, at the distinct disadvantage of creating a moral hazard by the exact same virtue.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#97The cloud tax is crazy (especially bandwidth). Pretty sure Signal has reached the scale where they would be cheaper by building their infra, maybe starting with the most expensive (storage + bandwidth), and then doing others.
SMS is (unfortunately) core to the product, so I'm not certain how they could make it cheaper, while retaining the same properties (user+pass registration would be a nightmare for spam and change the UX).
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess, then the question is how real time was the website. Was it as real time as supporting, instant messaging, voice/video calls etc
Oh I forgot that signal is not just about forwarding messages. I’m wondering how much the VOIP costs.
Don't forget media!
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the stack is not really optimal (last I heard it was java) how's java relevant here?
Java in theory and in synthetic benchmarks: damn near as lean and mean as C. Every actual Java project: “oh, did you want that memory and those cycles for something else? Yeah, sorry, I need them all. Why no, I’m not actually doing anything right now, why do you ask?”
100% true in my experience. Literally anything else is far better when it comes to bloat, including C#, RoR etc.
Increasing the Java heap size just makes it so that when garbage collection eventually hits, it causes an even more massive slowdown across the entire application.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#100> Another $19 million a year or so out of Signal’s budget pays for its staff. Signal now employs about 50 people, a far larger team than a few years ago. What? I know silicon valley salaries are a thing, but absolutely everywhere else in the world this would be insane. Maybe change the headquarters to somewhere cheaper?
I keep re-reading this section of their blog post trying to figure out what I'm missing here. $2.6 million full load per employee on avg? Is this heavily weighted to a few executives? Can somebody explain this to me? Edit: I'm stupid and did the math backwards.
A few employees and their compensation are listed on their Form 990, page 7.
Sidenote: did "Moxie" legally change his name from Matthew Rosenfeld?
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...