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WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

nytimes.com

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Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#481

Post by dsego »

xp84 wrote: post #285
1oooqooq wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

none of those are blasting "encryption! only you can read your messages" as their main message and marketing. those are literal public forums people go to expose themselves. you don't have a very good point.

Whatsapp is messaging-focused, but I'm willing to bet the quotation you just gave is not even 10% of the reason people choose to use it. If I understand it correctly, people use it mainly because MMS was a dumpster fire and WA was the first platform which got critical mass in most countries, which it achieved by being both pretty good overall and by being cross-platform. The encryption is a nice bonus that everybody…

I don't think anybody in my non-tech circle even knows that messages are encrypted. It's just a convenient way to message people and share pictures from android phones. At some point in the past it was viber and before that fb messenger. I know older people who wouldn't know how to attach a document to an email but can share vacation photos via whatsapp, and we have group chats between friends and family. People also care about their chat history, and if they don't know that the data is encrypted and needs to be backed up, they loose it when transferring to a new device. It's happening all the time, a lot of common users would expect chats to just stay in the cloud somewhere and be available.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#482

Post by prmoustache »

conradfr wrote: post #420
RestlessMind wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. I used Android phones back then and so did all my family members and most of my friends. No one I knew paid a dime for Whatsapp.

I remember that the grace period was extended one or two times when it was time to pay, and then Facebook bought it.

I remember people being angered and threatening to leave if they had to pay that 1$/€ fee per year. And now here we are with ads.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#483

Post by muppetman »

daveoc64 wrote: post #415
muppetman wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for YT Premium. Not because I care for stupid videos, but because you get YT Music for free with it... Spotify is the hottest of garbage in my opinion, constantly trying to push podcasts at me. Why more people don't cancel Spotify and just pay for YT Premium - you get ad-free videos and all the music of Spotify. Plus with YT Music you can upload your own FLAC/MP3s to it, so all that odd werid music you've got t…

I pay for both YouTube Premium and Spotify Premium, because I don't think that Google's music offerings have ever been that good. There's no desktop app for YouTube Music for starters.

What would you want/need a desktop app for? If you use Chrome (and yes, I'm aware some people use Firefox) you can install it as an App that way, so it appears in your start menu/finder. It can cast to your local devices etc.

I can't think of a single reason I'd want/need a standalone app over having the Chrome version of the app, which to all intents and purposes appears as a standalone app anyway.

So I'm curious, what's the use-case for a Desktop App to stream music? Even with the webapp you can download music for offline play.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#484

Post by mschuster91 »

DecentShoes wrote: post #398
SlowTao wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the Apple App store came along it was wild seeing how quickly software went from $10 down to 0.99c in the space of less than a year. And then it was only a matter of time before it dropped to zero. Once it hit zero, the tolerance for payment of any kind went to zero as well for a very large portion of people. Apps and the internet in general, for most people, is considered almost weightless and zero cost. In the…

True. Yet, if you don't charge for the software itself, but instead you make that purchase only unlock a skin or some fake currency in that software, and worse, only have a small chance of being the one that user wants, suddenly people will pay 10, 20, or 100 dollars for your software, over and over again.

It's gambling at the core that's the issue here. We used to have robust regulation of it for decades (and it was recognized millennia ago that gambling is bad for societies anyway), the problem is that the global gambling industry moved far too fast for regulations to catch up - and now we're at a point where children, even toddlers are getting lured into gambling mechanisms. It's all lootboxes nowadays.

Personal take on it: that's all just preparing children for the inevitable fact that everything from education over employment and housing to dating is mostly depending on luck...

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#485

Post by osculum »

bapak wrote: post #471
fouronnes3 wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is becoming painfully apparent that the cycle of enshittification is truly inevitable, right up there next to the second law of thermodynamics.

[flagged]

WhatsApp used to be a paid app, and I paid for it back in the day, as did lots of my friends.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#486

Post by prmoustache »

rconti wrote: post #228
bsoles wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with paying a small fee for a service is not the fee itself. It is the friction for paying for the service and the hassle that comes after the payment. Now the credit card company knows what service I am buying; I would get endless marketing emails from the service for buying additional things; my info as a person willing to pay for such a service would get sold to other companies; my credit card info wou…

I was just thinking about this the other day -- hotels so badly want me to book directly with them instead of using, say Booking.com. But then to book directly and get the "guaranteed cheapest!" price, I have to sort through even more options than on an aggregator, I have to create an account, and now I'm getting spammed from ANOTHER entity I never plan to do business with again. At least with the aggregators I have…

A lot of hotels allows you to book room without creating an account and I don't remember receiving spam from those I visited. It would only make sense for chains which have a foot in every major city.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#488

Post by Symbiote »

lmm wrote: post #316
Symbiote wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ryanair are notorious for a) nickel-and-diming and b) general nastiness (e.g. charging a big fee to print a boarding pass at the airport, flying to an airport 70km from the city name they advertised, telling the press that they're going to start charging for the toilet). They're one of the few airlines whose reputation is big and extreme enough that it's percolated into the public consciousness.

It's easy to see where the flight is going.

Meanwhile, I get half a day free in Gdansk or Budapest or wherever while my colleague wanders around Munich Airport.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#489

Post by tigroferoce »

Daisywh wrote: post #472

I remember switching to WhatsApp many years ago, mainly because it had no ads and encrypted chats, while other apps were constantly crammed with ads and features I didn't need. Now I feel like I'm slowly going back to that old path. Sometimes it really feels like no app can really stay clean for long.

I think this is two sided topic:

- on one side there is the increasing number of features in WhatsApp that nobody asked for and that make the experience worse and worse, I agree. Yet, on the other side of the world a 1B people in China use WeChat for so many things beside communicating, so I understand Meta's appetite to become the West WeChat. Still I hate it. - on the other side there is the business model of WhatsApp. Or the complete lack of it. It's 100% unrealistic that a global, always on, high availability, high security service is free. These things are expensive and they need to be monetized.

It's either ads, either fees on extra services they are providing through the app, either a monthly subscription. Now, I think nobody would pay for WhatsApp and they would lose their market immediately if they went that route (for many good reasons). They tried hard to position WhatsApp as WeChat, failing at that (for many good reasons). Ads is the only thing that is left IMO.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#490

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

bapak wrote: post #471
fouronnes3 wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is becoming painfully apparent that the cycle of enshittification is truly inevitable, right up there next to the second law of thermodynamics.

[flagged]

Wasn’t it like a dollar a year or something way way back in the day?
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