WhatsApp promise to users by it's founders.
“No ads! No games! No gimmicks!”
I wonder how the early founders feel about what Whatsapp has become with random junk and gimmicks in the UI.
WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
101–110 of 1001 posts
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Signal seems to be booming right now in the Netherlands. I've been using it for years and never managed to grow my contact list beyond single digits, being a few friends in tech and a few who were very privacy conscious. All of those people were also available on WhatsApp and we'd often forget and message one another there. But since January the trust in Meta has not only plummeted but it's become a mainstream enough…
In the Netherlands, was trying to promote Signal. I switched phones and lost all my history. Now I’m fairly careful with these things, and make backups, but even I wasn’t able to get it back. Couldn’t recommend it to anyone since. There’s a line between being secure and being useful, and they’re slightly unbalanced in Signal.
You should've made sure of how Signal works with regards to chat history before you removed the app from the old phone.
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#103At least in The Netherlands, WhatsApp could show a 60 second unskippable modal ad video on every launch, and still get away with it due to network effects. If you’re not on WhatsApp, no updates or news from your kids school, your sports team, your family, your car dealership etc. for you.
It’s similar in India. Even many businesses only use WhatsApp for orders and communications with customers. Heck, even the police use it to communicate between their people and with complainants/victims. Politicians use it between their party people and to send messages to the public. The average person on the street no longer knows what an SMS is or how to use it.
But I manage without WhatsApp (it’s also a privileged position to do so). Not having WhatsApp also helps avoid seeing all the junk and misinformation that people forward on it without any thought. There’s actually a name for this in India: “WhatsApp University”, which is a derogatory term for how people believe anything they read on WhatsApp and share it around without any analysis or thought or skepticism whatsoever.
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#104If ads are not unblockable (via DNS), then it’s time for Signal.
With all the morally reprovable shit they've pulled on their users, it's always been time for Signal.
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Video is impossible to break into because of how expensive it is. Even YouTube by all accounts is just breaking even. And that is with Google's entire infrastructure and advertising machinery behind it. A new entrant simply doesn't stand a chance.
Hold on... A ton of broadcasters, production companies, and individuals have done it and are doing it. YouTube have many competitors and some of them are enormous, such as Netflix and cable TV. Production companies are popping up all the time and are making some of the world's highest quality material. The same for individuals who are making videos. Or do you mean that YouTube needs a competitor that does exactly the…
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Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Video is impossible to break into because of how expensive it is. Even YouTube by all accounts is just breaking even. And that is with Google's entire infrastructure and advertising machinery behind it. A new entrant simply doesn't stand a chance.
Hold on... A ton of broadcasters, production companies, and individuals have done it and are doing it. YouTube have many competitors and some of them are enormous, such as Netflix and cable TV. Production companies are popping up all the time and are making some of the world's highest quality material. The same for individuals who are making videos. Or do you mean that YouTube needs a competitor that does exactly the…
All of them are based on the traditional media production model. The companies were all well established in the industry (minus Netflix) and the only change was to go from broadcast/cable/theater to streaming. YouTube pioneered user generated videos and independent content creators. Its only competitor is probably Twitch, but that itself is owned by Amazon and losing a ton of money.
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#107> In-app ads are a significant change from WhatsApp’s original philosophy. Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who founded WhatsApp in 2009, were committed to building a simple and quick way for friends and family to communicate with end-to-end encryption
End-to-end encryption was added by Meta, they reused (part of) the Signal app code for this.
This was a big topic for years, I am surprised by this oversight.
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hold on... A ton of broadcasters, production companies, and individuals have done it and are doing it. YouTube have many competitors and some of them are enormous, such as Netflix and cable TV. Production companies are popping up all the time and are making some of the world's highest quality material. The same for individuals who are making videos. Or do you mean that YouTube needs a competitor that does exactly the…
All of them are based on the traditional media production model. The companies were all well established in the industry (minus Netflix) and the only change was to go from broadcast/cable/theater to streaming. YouTube pioneered user generated videos and independent content creators. Its only competitor is probably Twitch, but that itself is owned by Amazon and losing a ton of money.
All of them have the technical infrastructure to host user uploaded videos, so it's not impossible to compete with YouTube.
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
As always network effect will be the problem. I know plenty of people on WhatsApp and almost nobody on Signal
It's easy to have multiple chat apps in parallel though, each with their own network. Ads will make more people Signal-curious, or even drive people back to text messages. The average person who switches will convince a non-zero number of their contacts to come with them. The shift will start gradually. Think of Skype, which at one point everyone I knew was on. That network didn't protect them from being replaced by…
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Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. And I am saying this as someone who genuinely believes in the “small fee instead of paying with ad exposure” approach. The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many…
> I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. That's because micropayments are still fucking annoying to do on both sides of any transaction: - credit cards: cheap-ish at scale (2-5%), but users don't want to give random apps their CC details and integrating w…
Europe isn't a country. And we have credit cards here.