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WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

nytimes.com

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Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#251

Post by cherryteastain »

gruez wrote: post #215
Krasnol wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you should be suspicious. You should always be suspicious. Especially if it's free. And you can do something to calm your suspicions. Like checking out Signlas Open Source code.

>Like checking out Signlas Open Source code. What's preventing them from serving a backdoored version? xz was open source as well, that didn't stop the backdoor. There might be reproducible builds on android, but you can't even inspect the executable on iOS without jailbreaking.

You can instead install a FOSS fork of Signal like Molly [1] built by F-Droid directly from the source code

[1] https://molly.im/

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#252

Post by herewulf »

Symbiote wrote: post #211
noosphr wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People pick the cheapest flights because price is a simple number they can understand. How to you qualify the comfort of a seat with 20cm of legroom vs 30cm? Until we have a quality metric for flights that's also a single number we can't.

The price is one of the few things that's always available when choosing between flights. Journey time is the other, and people will pay for a shorter journey or shorter layovers. Strangely, some of my colleagues have 'paid' (work's money, their time) extra to avoid Ryanair, when Ryanair has the only direct connection. This I find strange. Given the choice, I've long paid a little more if it means an Airbus plane, as…

I'll happily pay more for an Airbus plane or even an older Boeing model because I prefer not to crash and die.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#253

Post by tcfhgj »

rconti wrote: post #230
filoleg wrote: post #34

Earlier 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'm about to start paying for YouTube for the first time ever. Of course, they make it complicated because I don't actually want their bundled music service. And the "lite" version says most videos are ad-free. But what's preventing them from changing that deal the day after I sign up? And of course, once I become a customer, now I'm hooked, and I'm subject to their arbitrary price increases. Of course, as a "free" c…

Don't start, please

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#254

Post by jeroenhd »

ghusto wrote: post #100
AlecSchueler wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

Had the same happen with WhatsApp. Turns out you get one chance to get the local file backup right or you're screwed.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#255

Post by toast0 »

dieortin wrote: post #242
toast0 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time. (I worked for WhatsApp from 2011-2019) From that article, user count was about 900 Million when the fee was ended; user count was about 450 M in Feb 2014 when the acquisition was announced [1]. Either way, it is a mistake to think everyone was paying. A) Some people still had lifetime accounts from when the app was $1 for iPhone, or from the typical late…

> When we did build payment enforcement, I think we only set it on for Spain and maybe the US. Can I ask why Spain specifically?

IIRC, user count / population was very high and users were likely to have payment methods we could accept, and $1/year is not a significant amount for most residents of Spain. I don't remember if maybe Spain had a high voluntary payment rate too?

The US never had a high user count, but it was chosen because US tech journalism sets the narrative. If you want people to pay around the world, convince US tech journalists that payment enforcement is on, and the knowledge that you need to pay filters through the world in a way that it doesn't by just enforcing payment in Spain.

See also: the invisibility of Nokia phones when they pissed off US carriers with SIP clients and left the US market; despite being the top selling phone manufacture of both feature phones and smart phones, there were no media stories about them.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#256

Post by jeroenhd »

stonogo wrote: post #133
Kwpolska wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except not limited to 160 characters (70 if you want Unicode) and with rich media capabilities.

So... MMS, then?

MMS has terrible limitations, in both file size and media resolution.

RCS has replaced MMS as a protocol back in 2008 and it's only now gaining traction. Many carriers have shut down their RCS infrastructure half a decade ago, though, so they're not exactly jumping on the chance to turn it back on.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#257

Post by Zak »

homefree wrote: post #245
cherryteastain wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I did pay the $1 for Whatsapp back in the day and I was promised it'd be ad free. Want that $1 back, I actually even deleted my account and uninstalled Whatsapp!

I feel a bit for Brian Acton - iirc he refused to sell because the 500M users paying $500M dollars was more than enough to fund his tiny team (of 30?), but when the offer went up to 19B$ it's just kind of hard to turn down - there's extreme opportunity cost there. Most people would sell before that, 19B$ of principle is quite a lot. I think it's just if you're empire building - and Zuck is insanely good at this, one…

Now Brian Acton has a huge pile of money to help fund Signal, so I don't think he has to feel too terrible about selling out.

> Somewhat relatedly Apple really missed an opportunity with iMessage. Had they timed it right they could have had a dominant cross platform chat.

Google also had the opportunity to do this. Around the same time iMessage launched, Google made Hangouts the default SMS app on Android with a similar capability to upgrade to Internet-based messaging when all parties to a conversation had it. Hangouts was cross-platform. Rumor has it carriers whined and Google caved.

I'm kind of glad Google doesn't have a dominant messaging service, but it's only true due to their own lack of commitment.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#258

Post by Zak »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #250
homefree wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel a bit for Brian Acton - iirc he refused to sell because the 500M users paying $500M dollars was more than enough to fund his tiny team (of 30?), but when the offer went up to 19B$ it's just kind of hard to turn down - there's extreme opportunity cost there. Most people would sell before that, 19B$ of principle is quite a lot. I think it's just if you're empire building - and Zuck is insanely good at this, one…

I have not had someone ask me to use WhatsApp in nearly ten years, I deal with people on iMessage every day...

I can predict the country you live in with reasonable reliability from this comment alone.

This would not be true most places outside of the USA and maybe Canada. In a few countries/regions it might be a different third-party messaging app.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#259

Post by jpalawaga »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #127
ndriscoll wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was it unsustainable? As far as I know they were simply competent. They charged $1/year, so had ~half a billion in revenue, right? They probably could've bumped that to $2-$5/year with similar uptake. And they ran it with ~500 servers and 50 employees 12 years ago, so could probably do the same with ~50 or fewer servers today.

Whatsapp revenue was $10M and the cost of revenue was $52M, with total net loss of $138M/yr just before facebook acquisition. [1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...

they also never required many of their users to pay. whatsapp allegedly cost $1 a year, and I never paid a dime despite using it for years.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#260

Post by als0 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #250
homefree wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel a bit for Brian Acton - iirc he refused to sell because the 500M users paying $500M dollars was more than enough to fund his tiny team (of 30?), but when the offer went up to 19B$ it's just kind of hard to turn down - there's extreme opportunity cost there. Most people would sell before that, 19B$ of principle is quite a lot. I think it's just if you're empire building - and Zuck is insanely good at this, one…

I have not had someone ask me to use WhatsApp in nearly ten years, I deal with people on iMessage every day...

Meanwhile in Europe it’s the opposite.
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