Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive • Hacker News Board

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#671

Post by YetAnotherNick » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 12:29 AM UTC

eviks wrote: post #436

lxgr wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling a service automatically opts you in to all kinds of consumer protections, either legally or de facto through the dispute mechanism of the payment methods your customers use. Just ignoring customer complaints and selling the service "as-is" is usually not an option.

Why is it not an option when it already exists in many places (all these protections fail all the time)? Your first sentence doesn't imply high/expensive level of customer service Besides, even now they're not ignoring all the complaints, the do fix bugs? Maybe to be more specific, how much did it cost WhatsApp when they had $1 price and a tiny team? How does it compare to the cost of SMS?

In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users used the service each month. The year 2013 ended with $148 million in expenses, of which $138 million in losses.[1]

FB acquired them next year and if my memory is correct there were 19 in the team then.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#672

Post by StressedDev » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 12:29 AM UTC

cmiles74 wrote: post #254

oarsinsync wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the default Android messaging app do?

Android's messaging app does much the same thing. My preference would be that Apple drop SMS support from Messages all-together and market it as an iOS only communication method. People with iPhones would then have to pick some alternative, perhaps they would use Signal or perhaps something else. I already have to install a handful of applications to talk to all of my friends and co-workers, at least I wouldn't have…

As an iPhone user, I am happy with messages and do not want it to drop SMS support. Note Apple created iMessage way before RCS even existed. iMessage works well and I am happy with it.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#673

Post by activescott » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 12:30 AM UTC

I almost skipped reading into this article because I love Signal and it's mission (and their rare commitment to stick to it) and would have known it's good. Yet, the details on expenses and infrastructure was a good read. $1.3M/yr for temporary storage! $6M for verification codes during sign-up!? Toll fraud!? GOOG & FB data center spend, data breaches from GOOG, MSFT, et. al 50 full-time employees vs 3K or 4K for similar apps! All interesting.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#674

Post by gamblor956 » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 12:31 AM UTC

macNchz wrote: post #285

gamblor956 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per the 990, which is just salary, multiple employees at Signal are getting paid over $650k. That's way above market for the nonprofit sector for comparable positions.

From page 2 of Schedule J (at the bottom) they break out the components of the compensation, showing that most of those numbers incorporate a base salary that looks fairly normal with 2-600k of bonus & incentive comp on top. In curious Googling to see if there was an explanation for how their structure works, I stumbled on this interesting Glassdoor review: > The bonus structure promised up to a 100% match with salar…

After a few hours of reaching out to people about this, the Signal salaries appear to be grossly inflated not only compared to other non-profits, but to what engineers working on iMessage and Meta Messenger make for the same or more difficult work (considering that both of these competitors many several times the users as Signal; Meta Messenger has over 1 billion users).

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#675

Post by andrewguenther » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 12:33 AM UTC

astrostl wrote: post #659

Love the product. Had a monthly recurring donation for many years. Dropped it over what I consider to be their serial mishandling of open source. See https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/pull/6186 for the latest chapter in the, "we won't implement desktop GIPHY that we announced in 2016, and also won't merge it when someone else thoughtfully implements it for us" saga.

I feel like they've made their position here quite clear and it's well-reasoned. I understand the disappointment, but this doesn't give any indications to me of "serial mishandling" unless there's some other context I'm missing?

Open source != open to contributions. Signal has made it pretty clear that their motivations for open source are visibility and verifiability, not to get people to do work for them for free. It seems like the action item to update the CONTRIBUTING.md to make those expectations more clear is a reasonable one.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#676

Post by CDRdude » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 12:39 AM UTC

mortallywounded wrote: post #518

AnonHP wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if messages are queued, how do you get millions of dollars in queued storage? It's hard for me to imagine... The details are there in this post, but I can offer a few guesses. Users may be using multiple devices. And the service has to deliver to all the linked devices before ejecting the message from its storage. The time limit for storing and waiting for linked devices to come online is about a month. With t…

Even if every user had dozens of queued up messages, I don't think it equals millions in storage costs. Maybe I'm naive, but I have a storage/database/queue with billions of records and it costs shrugs

I think some messages will cost more storage than others. I have 4 devices synced to my Signal account. Yesterday, my friend sent me a 6.8 MB cat video[1]. I presume Signal has to store this cat video until I boot up my 4th device and load the queued messages.

[1]: It was a copy of this cat video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8Ud1Cr76j8s

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#677

Post by bfors » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 12:39 AM UTC

astrostl wrote: post #659

Love the product. Had a monthly recurring donation for many years. Dropped it over what I consider to be their serial mishandling of open source. See https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/pull/6186 for the latest chapter in the, "we won't implement desktop GIPHY that we announced in 2016, and also won't merge it when someone else thoughtfully implements it for us" saga.

That's too bad. I'm surprised they have that much internal process for the desktop app. Using the app, it really feels like it's an afterthought.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#678

Post by lijok » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 12:42 AM UTC

astrostl wrote: post #659

Love the product. Had a monthly recurring donation for many years. Dropped it over what I consider to be their serial mishandling of open source. See https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/pull/6186 for the latest chapter in the, "we won't implement desktop GIPHY that we announced in 2016, and also won't merge it when someone else thoughtfully implements it for us" saga.

Why would you ever want to raise the bar for what constitutes open source, all the way up to "Must be open to spending their time reviewing and integrating massive contributions from 3rd parties"?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#679

Post by unethical_ban » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 12:47 AM UTC

charles_f wrote: post #494

wpietri wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> They are meant to manipulate me personally, as well as other persons I care about. I will take them personally. This, absolutely! they play on people's psyche and mental cabling by trying to guilt you in the same way your parent would ; it's manipulative, and I have an absolute hatred for these tactics.

I agree with everything before the semicolon. But as an NPR listener, I find it hard to be offended by it.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#680

Post by junofan » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 12:50 AM UTC

pardoned_turkey wrote: post #667

MrDresden wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it personally insulting to you that a completely free high quality services sometimes ask if you want to donate what ever small amount you'd like? You'll be proper mad when you realize how much money that other company, whom you regularly pay for access to their services, has in the bank.

Wikipedia is... nuanced. Keep in mind that the entity doing the fundraising is the Wikimedia Foundation. They pay the hosting costs, but return nothing to the actual Wikipedians (editors, admins.) Instead, what's left is used to pay the salaries for hundreds of administrative employees, fund third-party charities, and so on. You can love Wikipedia but have misgivings about the Foundation.

It’s openly a grift. The fundraising messages are disingenuous.