Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

seirdy.one

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 112 posts

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#31

Post by iujjkfjdkkdkf »

optimalsolver wrote: post #17
devmunchies wrote: post #9

"domestication" makes me think of "oversocialization" used in the unabomber manifesto[1]. > 24. Psychologists use the term “socialization” to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. > ... > 26. Oversocialization can le…

So what were his alternatives? That society be made up of loosely-connected hermits such as himself? If you're going to have anything resembling a community, you're going to need strongly enforced norms (aka "oversocialization") that minimize internal strife and division. This is true for hunter-gatherer bands and continent-spanning civilizations.

Anti-social behavior is undesirable if everybody does it, but its also what makes a leader. Look at the discussion around CEOs having dark triad traits. We simultaneously know that we dont want most people to behave this way, but also gravitate towards those that do.

I think there is a spectrum: on one end are sheep and cows where everyone is social and as a group they are dumb but plentiful. On the other end are tigers, where everyone is antisocial, everybody is an apex predator but as a species there aren't that many because they dont cooperate. And then there are humans, ants, maybe wolves, where there is a nice mix of conformity and leadership, social and antisocial, that lets us come up with new ideas, but then fall in line behind executing them.

So yeah, society full of antisocials is pretty ineffective, but so is a society of conformists.

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#32

Post by ryukafalz »

kappi wrote: post #26
cameldrv wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except in group chats. The switching costs are higher for those.

Agree, active whatsapp users have so many groups with huge number of members. whatsapp switching cost is high because couple of group members refuse to switch, so group remains in whatsapp. Without group chats migrating to new platform, it remains a ghost town.

This is why interoperability is so important: it lets you move from one platform to another gradually rather than all at once. I've done this myself; my friend group was on XMPP for a while, then we moved to Matrix, but there was never a point when we all switched at once. It was a gradual process, with us bridging our group chats between the two, and slowly people started moving over (and in fact some of us still use both). I have never had a transition that successful between proprietary chat platforms.

To quote a recently-posted piece by Cory Doctorow:

> Interoperability lowers “switching costs” – the cost of leaving behind whatever you’re using now in favor of something you think will suit you better. When my grandparents emigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union on a displaced persons ship, they incurred a high switching cost: for more than a decade, they had no contact with their family in Leningrad except through unreliable, slow word-of-mouth with the rare person who got a visa to travel there.

> Contrast this with my move from the UK to Los Angeles in 2015: we are in routine contact with my in-laws in London and Wales, as well as my family in Toronto. My laptop and books came with me, as did our other personal effects. We left most of our appliances behind because they ran on a different voltage, but there were a few things we loved that we brought with and either changed the plugs on or connected to our house’s electrical outlets via transformer or adapters.

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#33

Post by Swizec »

vinay427 wrote: post #29
sn_master wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside the US, texting was/is charged per-message rather than unlimited texting. It was/is very expensive to send thousands of texts vs the fixed-rate data plans.

I think it was also a timing issue. Paying per SMS was a thing in the US when texting was novel ($0.10/SMS or so, IIRC?) but the US seemed to move to unlimited texting sooner than most places. However, today in the European country I live in it's almost impossible to find plans that don't include unlimited SMS, but it perhaps happened "too late" to take over messaging now that online platforms offer effectively free…

As a European teenager I always laughed at America for having to pay for SMS receipt. Ours were free and sending was free up to some ridiculously huge amount.

Then I started dating a girl from another town and got a $500 sms bill. Oops

This was before data, WAP was barely a thing. Circa 2004. We texted our days away at school. Got very good at touch typing under the desk.

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#34

Post by amelius »

kiwidrew wrote: post #23
amelius wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way, this whole problem of network-effect based lock-in was already solved for telephony in the old days. Why do we have to solve it again?

Because regulation is bad and therefore we have been left at the mercy of the invisible hand of the free market. Even this recent spate of "deplatforming" events can't seem to sway (a certain subset of) the tech community towards the idea that some amount of regulation can be a good thing .

You mean regulation as in net neutrality?

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#35

Post by stirlo »

tambourine_man wrote: post #19

WhatsApp gained many users at first by running on most of the early feature phones (largely Java ME if I’m not mistaken). These days you target two platforms, iOS and Android, and you’re done, but back then running everywhere was a big feature. Interesting article, I find domestication analogy quite apt.

Blackberry support was also huge, as countries like Indonesia moved off BBM they migrated to WhatsApp en masse.

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#36

Post by stirlo »

People forget that WhatsApp used to have a subscription that cost $1 per year. With 1 billion users that's plenty enough money to pay for their infrastructure.

Imagine if they'd kept that business model rather than being bought out by FB and sucked into their data harvesting swamp.

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#37

Post by strogonoff »

Social media and instant messaging giants of the world are incentivised to prefer the captive user over the paying user. (I prefer the term “lock-in” over “domestication” to highlight the ethically questionable nature of it.)

A piece of US legislation could address this. For example, if a business that connects people to people—such as a social network, an instant messenger, etc.—grows larger than X users, it could be required to allow fully-featured third-party clients to exist, or it can’t operate.

(This is not dissimilar from how mobile providers are required to facilitate phone number transfers, so that you can switch to another provider and not lose your number.)

If big players are required to offer a fully featured API, and the user can switch freely, they would be incentivised to stop taking their money from the advertiser and charge the user directly, becoming a commodity like electricity.

That way you could switch between messaging providers freely, while using your preferred client app. Messaging services will be competing on which one is the most reliable, ethical, has the most complete API, and so on.

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#38

Post by sn41 »

I can't switch from Whatsapp because my close relatives are on Whatsapp. I can't persuade them to switch because they are quite elderly and their close friends are on Whatsapp. Moreover, the video chat, and the ability to send documents directly from Whatsapp are the reasons why many working professionals keep using Whatsapp. Signal is not there yet in polish, unfortunately.

To me, it's not a Whatsapp versus Signal debate. It is about communication tools being consolidated into behemoth social media platforms. I don't think Signal is immune to that.

We probably need an Ida Tarbell for the information age.

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#39

Post by hnick »

cameldrv wrote: post #18
smoovb wrote: post #12

WhatsApp grew to its size because of its first mover advantage. The completion, SMS, had the highest cost of data transmission on the planet, so not hard to see the reason for its growth. WhatsApp squandered their early lead with slow development and so competitors like Line, Viber, Wechat and Telegram all came later and added features and took market share. If you are an international business person, you have all t…

Except in group chats. The switching costs are higher for those.

And chat history, if it's relevant. I think it is possible to export and browse chat history 'offline' but it's not trivial. Simply transferring my history from Android to IOS was a pain and I gave up, but I still have the backup somewhere just in case.

Re: WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users

#40

Post by dannyobrien »

strogonoff wrote: post #37

Social media and instant messaging giants of the world are incentivised to prefer the captive user over the paying user. (I prefer the term “lock-in” over “domestication” to highlight the ethically questionable nature of it.) A piece of US legislation could address this. For example, if a business that connects people to people—such as a social network, an instant messenger, etc.—grows larger than X users, it could b…

This is pretty much what the ACCESS Act proposes: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/legislative-path-inter...
Post reply on HN