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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#531

Post by conductr »

websap wrote: post #511
conductr wrote: post #509

I'm seeing all the comments about the $6m Twilio expense, but nothing commenting on how their cost per employee is $380,000 totaling $19m. I think they could optimize this easier if the will was there. I know HN is very SV/tech centric, and that number makes sense there given the run up of VC money, etc. but I'm willing to bet they could source talent from cheaper places and slash this in half; if they wanted to. Jus…

If you want to hire the best talent - engineering and ethics, you need to pay top dollar. 380k is senior engineer comp at most FAANG adjacent companies. It's not a lot.

This is SV tech logic that I mentioned. I’m just not usually of the opinion it’s necessary. There’s a lot of talent around the world. And I’d guess only a few really “top talent” folks are needed to build the unusual problems/cryptographic parts of their app. A lot of it could likely be build by an average dev with some oversight.

I say this as a person that regularly and successfully hires devs from low COL areas. I know the common pitfalls of it and know it’s completely possible to manage and get high quality outcomes. It requires a management approach that’s slightly different than having 100% top tier talent from high COL areas but it’s possible all the same.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#532

Post by wkat4242 »

godelski wrote: post #484
wkat4242 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is a check in any way private? Your name is on it.

A cashier's check doesn't.

Ah ok I didn't know those still existed. In fact even the named checks are long gone here in Europe lol.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#533

Post by denysvitali »

akprasad wrote: post #255

I just donated $10 to Signal. Here's how to do so on iPhone in less than a minute: 1. Open Signal and click on your user icon in the upper left. 2. Go to "Settings" --> "Donate to Signal". 3. Click "Donate", select your donation options, and pay with Apple Pay.

So you donated to Apple too in the process?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#534

Post by GabeIsko »

wpietri wrote: post #487
GabeIsko wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are just non-profit fundraiser consulting tactics. Don't take them personally, just ignore them. The reason they exist is that Wikipedia has too much money, so they spend some on consultants who say they can raise more. It's weird, but that's how the world works. I would much prefer the Wikipedia endowment model of non-profit orgs. They have a standard operating procedure with a predictable budget, and endowmen…

> Don't take them personally No. They are meant to manipulate me personally, as well as other persons I care about. I will take them personally. More broadly, I don't have to excuse bad behavior just because somebody's making money off it or because it makes some too-narrow metric go up. Yes, it's a complex and imperfect world. But to me that's a reason to work harder to make things better, not a reason for people to…

I'm not saying they are not wrong - it's unfortunate that there is a second hand market for fundraising consulting. It doesn't accomplish anything productive, yet here we are. The key point is to understand that this is caused by Wikipedia having too much funding, not too little. As internet denizens, we can be proud that an open source store of knowledge has money to blow on wasteful consulting, and then proceed to create our ublock filters worry free.

This is different than what is currently going on with venture backed services like reddit and youtube. I would argue that we should block ads there too, but there it is an arms race where we have to consider ways to protect ourselves from encroaching privacy violations. It's much ruder, and that is something we should actually be mad at.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#535

Post by mlboss »

benreesman wrote: post #516
conductr wrote: post #509

I'm seeing all the comments about the $6m Twilio expense, but nothing commenting on how their cost per employee is $380,000 totaling $19m. I think they could optimize this easier if the will was there. I know HN is very SV/tech centric, and that number makes sense there given the run up of VC money, etc. but I'm willing to bet they could source talent from cheaper places and slash this in half; if they wanted to. Jus…

It grinds my gears when people on a hacker forum lobby for hackers to make less. When it’s people who are running a worldwide communications network on the cheap without getting hacked all the time? Absolute pros. I don’t downvote, let alone flag, but I hate this comment.

Think from the perspective of the non profit. $19m/year is a lot of money to raise year after year from donations.

What’s the game plan if the donations stops coming in ?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#536

Post by JohnFen »

GabeIsko wrote: post #295
charles_f wrote: post #279

You have to appreciate the complete transparency, gently nudging towards giving without ever begging for it. Refreshing compared to the alternative that Wikipedia is showing, with the tantrum-like emails we receive from their CEO like "LAST REMINDER" or "We've had enough" ; which they ironically send to people who gave.

Those are just non-profit fundraiser consulting tactics. Don't take them personally, just ignore them. The reason they exist is that Wikipedia has too much money, so they spend some on consultants who say they can raise more. It's weird, but that's how the world works. I would much prefer the Wikipedia endowment model of non-profit orgs. They have a standard operating procedure with a predictable budget, and endowmen…

> Those are just non-profit fundraiser consulting tactics. Don't take them personally, just ignore them.

I don't take them personally, of course, but they do encourage me to avoid forking over any money.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#537

Post by sowbug »

wolverine876 wrote: post #319
Dunedan wrote: post #2

> Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year. > Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year. > Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year. > Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year. > Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year. Signal pays more for delivering verification SMS during sign-up, than for all other infrastructure (except traffic) combined. Wow, that sounds excessive.

Signal agrees: (from the article:) ... legacy telecom operators have realized that SMS messages are now used primarily for app registration and two-factor authentication in many places, as people switch to calling and texting services that rely on network data. In response to increased verification traffic from apps like Signal, and decreased SMS revenue from their own customers, these service providers have signific…

SMS has become a kind of real-world PoW (proof of work) mechanism. A phone number typically has a recurring fee to keep it working. So a live number indicates that someone is spending money (a proxy for effort) to maintain it.*

It still seems like a lot of money to spend on simple, old technology, but from the PoW perspective, making it cheaper would defeat its purpose.

*Which is why many sites reject Google Voice numbers, for example, for SMS verification.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#538

Post by ActorNightly »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #58
ActorNightly wrote: post #49

Has anyone tried setting up their own Signal server? Be cool to do this, and then give all your friends the ip for truly private messaging. https://github.com/signalapp Seems like all their stuff is open source.

unlikely the people i want to talk will bother setting this up

I mean the idea would be you download the app but use my server instead of of the default ones.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#539

Post by jjav »

Dunedan wrote: post #2

> Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year. > Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year. > Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year. > Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year. > Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year. Signal pays more for delivering verification SMS during sign-up, than for all other infrastructure (except traffic) combined. Wow, that sounds excessive.

> Signal pays more for delivering verification SMS during sign-up, than for all other infrastructure (except traffic) combined. Wow, that sounds excessive.

Particularly when the phone requirement is the biggest weakness in Signal.

Getting rid of it will make it substantially cheaper to operate and much more private. Win-win.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#540

Post by Vicinity9635 »

akprasad wrote: post #255

I just donated $10 to Signal. Here's how to do so on iPhone in less than a minute: 1. Open Signal and click on your user icon in the upper left. 2. Go to "Settings" --> "Donate to Signal". 3. Click "Donate", select your donation options, and pay with Apple Pay.

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