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WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

nytimes.com

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Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#531

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

mrtksn wrote: post #8

Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services? I just don't want to believe that our services have to be paid for through proxy by giving huge cut to 3rd parties. The quality goes down both as UX and as core content, our attention span is destroyed, our privacy is violated and our political power is being stolen as conten…

People pay for their mobile phone service and internet service. Growing up one of my first emails was bundled with our dial-up ISP.

Just because you're paying for a service doesn't mean your data won't get sold and monetized, nor does it protect you from ads getting shoved down your throat. ISPs and mobile phone service providers both sell your data. It's a common practice for services to keep raising prices and introduce ad-supported tiers in order to squeeze pay-piggies as much as possible.

Any time someone has tried starting a service that competed with big tech it either gets bought out or ripped off. And big tech's infinitely deep pockets means they can run at a loss for years until all the competition has disappeared.

I think in order to truly solve these problems it will require legislation and breaking up big tech into smaller companies. We also need legislation to require tech companies to stop creating walled gardens that cannot integrate with other platforms.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#532

Post by rkachowski »

yarekt wrote: post #505
camillomiller wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do one cope on a day to day basis with this level of blatant bullshittery, apart from justifying it with a golden salary? Is this person aware that her role is to enact a farce, or even engineer such farce?

Pay for services that you use instead of forcing companies to rely on ad revenue to run their useful service? I get it though, no one wants to pay for 100s of little free marginally useful things we use every day, but if you look back at what whatsapp did in the beginning, the £3 a year they were asking is so worth it

> forcing them to rely on ad revenue to run their useful service?

Corporate advocates love to whine about cost yet seem to be blind to the context of the situation.

Meta captures enough of the entire global spend on ad revenue to be considered the biggest player in ads, yet we should spare sympathy for the poor servers of whatsapp - famously optimised to scale to 1B users with 50 engineers - which are now compelled to resort to inserting ads in order to cover the costs to run operations and keep the lights on.

These users just don't want to pay for anything, shame on them for using free services subsidised by massive corporations that undercut the market with the explicit aim of expanding the audience and clawing it back later. It's not Meta / Whatsapp's fault that they're exploiting this situation they've shrewdly developed over years, it's the individual moral failing of each user of the service.

Meanwhile ragebait / propaganda / angry racist uncle news is free on Facebook and shared in various forms, and meaningful news + journalism is locked behind various paywalls and other costs. Why won't these people just pay???

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#533

Post by EbNar »

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]

I did. It was something on the like of 1 €/year. I'm usually cheap as fuck, but I'd gladly pay for something useful not to enshittify.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#534

Post by camillomiller »

rkachowski wrote: post #532
yarekt wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay for services that you use instead of forcing companies to rely on ad revenue to run their useful service? I get it though, no one wants to pay for 100s of little free marginally useful things we use every day, but if you look back at what whatsapp did in the beginning, the £3 a year they were asking is so worth it

> forcing them to rely on ad revenue to run their useful service? Corporate advocates love to whine about cost yet seem to be blind to the context of the situation. Meta captures enough of the entire global spend on ad revenue to be considered the biggest player in ads, yet we should spare sympathy for the poor servers of whatsapp - famously optimised to scale to 1B users with 50 engineers - which are now compelled t…

Oh my God, thank you SO MUCH for this comment.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#535

Post by lynx97 »

camillomiller wrote: post #450
d3vmax wrote: post #426

Alice Newton-Rex, head of product at WhatsApp: “Alongside of private messaging, people were saying they wanted to hear more about topics, teams and organizations across WhatsApp.” - I am pretty sure NO ONE asked to hear about more topics and organizations across whatsapp.

How do one cope on a day to day basis with this level of blatant bullshittery, apart from justifying it with a golden salary? Is this person aware that her role is to enact a farce, or even engineer such farce?

[flagged]

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#536

Post by SunlitCat »

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.

Coworkers convinced me to switch to whatsapp a few years ago (like 2023 or so). The reason, tho was as old as the internet is! They wanted to see the pictures of our cats we have at our workplace, which I liked to take with my phone. Later on WhatsApp became (sadly) handy for other tasks as well but also as a good way to stay in contact with friends, living further away! :D

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#537

Post by lynx97 »

yarekt wrote: post #505
camillomiller wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do one cope on a day to day basis with this level of blatant bullshittery, apart from justifying it with a golden salary? Is this person aware that her role is to enact a farce, or even engineer such farce?

Pay for services that you use instead of forcing companies to rely on ad revenue to run their useful service? I get it though, no one wants to pay for 100s of little free marginally useful things we use every day, but if you look back at what whatsapp did in the beginning, the £3 a year they were asking is so worth it

Nah. I only use WhatsApp because friends and acquaintances of mine use it. I have NEVER had the need to send a video, nor a photo to anyone. I would be totally happy using iMessage or even SMS. The ONLY reason I have WhatsApp installed is peer pressure. No need for any of its features. No need to pay for it either.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#538

Post by pndy »

jahnu wrote: post #16
andrepd wrote: post #3

Would be nice if these kinds of articles would at least take a paragraph to plug some alternatives, such as Signal.

Signal have a few things that make it a hard sell. It's really hard to clean up media. You have to go into every single chat and from there go about deleting stuff. At least they finally added a "select all" option in there recently. So the size of it just grows and grows and grows until it's using all the space on your phone. Not a good fit for non-technical types. Secondly, no web view. There is the desktop app yes…

Signal does other things which annoy me to the point I can't consider it as a viable option for me, my family and close friends. For a start, it wants a full access to contacts and if doesn't get it it pops internal notification about it - but that one is easily dismissible. But then, I keep a strict notification settings on all my devices and Signal doesn't like that and wants me to turn these on. Perhaps because they can't otherwise push notifications about donation - which also appears within the app.

People behind Signal have a very corporate approach to their app where a permanent "no" doesn't exist when it comes to user choice - all what you have is "not now".

Then there's linking devices; it's not permanent but temporary and devices are removed automatically after 30 days. You can't even log into your account with tablet any more - that was replaced with linking. Cross-platform synchronization - didn't work for me at all despite being a loudly announced success.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#539

Post by fanwood »

EbNar wrote: post #527
d3vmax wrote: post #426

Alice Newton-Rex, head of product at WhatsApp: “Alongside of private messaging, people were saying they wanted to hear more about topics, teams and organizations across WhatsApp.” - I am pretty sure NO ONE asked to hear about more topics and organizations across whatsapp.

I'd literally PAY for a mod taking away the "updates" tab. I don't care about stories nor I want channels shoved in my face. I just need to message someone, from time to time.

I found the solution by convincing all my friends and family, one by one, to move to Signal. I still use Whatsapp for people who did not migrate, but it's surprisingly possible (if not easy) to convince people to use another app
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