Boy I hope they vet these ads better than they do on Facebook, otherwise my mum and many other marginally-online people are certain to get scammed and hacked within hours of this going live.
WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
821–830 of 1001 posts
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#822I guess this was expected, but it makes me feel really powerless in the sense that I can't really move away from WhatsApp. I have a couple of friends that I message via Signal and even convinced my dad to use it a while back, but here in Brazil WhatsApp is _everything_, and I doubt most people care about this at all. In my case, I'd love to just go over to Signal fully but then I couldn't talk to family, friends, and…
you should still slowly push for more ppl in family to use signal. In moldova as example most ppl used viber, but moved gradually to telegram and whatsapp.
I've convinced my family/friends to use telegram in the past, but I'll slowly help them use Signal more. Changes rarely happen fast
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#823Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get this. Everyone is used to juggling between multiple apps, many of which allow to send messages. People are fine talking over Discord AND WhatsApp AND three others, but somehow "it's unbearable to add Signal". And it's not exactly "yet another app", it's pretty much a clone of WhatsApp. So if everybody moved to Signal, we could just get rid of WhatsApp. Which gets us to your second point: > And I don't wan…
I don't use the others you mention. Only telegram because many communities are there (it's the only chat app with good group chat functionality) But it's exactly because I already have to deal with too many of them that I don't want to add more. Also I don't like moxie's attitude but that's more of a personal concern that won't apply to most. Like not allowing third party clients or federation and shooting many sugge…
For someone who "works in cybersec", you have surprising opinions...
Like you seem to care about your messages not being entirely public ("And even a bad third-party app will be sufficient to prevent drive-by hackers with a pineapple from reading my messages") but at the same time you're fine with Telegram not being E2EE.
And then you seem to consider that a state actor being able to read the messages in transit is the same as them hacking into the phones?
And it all suggests that somehow the only reasonable threat model is "not caring about a state actor targetting oneself specifically and not caring about anything more than 'drive-by hackers with a pineapple'"?
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#824Does 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…
In defense of ads: Ads do solve the pay-per-use problem, where most apps are subscription based so I'm constantly leaking subscription fees for apps / services I no longer use. Ads are great in that if I stop using a service, I stop paying the attention cost.
Ads also solve the price stratification problem: wealthy users pay with their valuable time, and poor users pay with their less valuable time.
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#825Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get this. Everyone is used to juggling between multiple apps, many of which allow to send messages. People are fine talking over Discord AND WhatsApp AND three others, but somehow "it's unbearable to add Signal". And it's not exactly "yet another app", it's pretty much a clone of WhatsApp. So if everybody moved to Signal, we could just get rid of WhatsApp. Which gets us to your second point: > And I don't wan…
This is not about Signal. This about being spread too thin. To be able to keep up with all the work projects I'm involved in, I need to use Slack, Discord, Matrix at the same time. Add WhatsApp on top of that. That's 4, but not all. Add e-mail and ordinary phone calls. 6 methods to just keep up with work. I also have at least three ways to reach required documents and meeting notes. I really don't want to jump like a…
I don't get that. I also must use Slack, Discord, Matrix, WhatsApp and I don't see a problem in having Signal on top. When I receive a message from someone, all it takes is clicking on the notification and answering there.
To the point where sometimes I can't remember on which app I was having which discussion.
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#826I guess this was expected, but it makes me feel really powerless in the sense that I can't really move away from WhatsApp. I have a couple of friends that I message via Signal and even convinced my dad to use it a while back, but here in Brazil WhatsApp is _everything_, and I doubt most people care about this at all. In my case, I'd love to just go over to Signal fully but then I couldn't talk to family, friends, and…
I refuse to be in servility to an app and don't use whatsapp. Facebook uses you. Let others, your friends, and family know the facts.
In the case of "business requirements", push back on businesses. You are actually the customer.
I get it though. The best might be a compromise where you try to limit the contacts on whatsapp to only those you have no choice.
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#827Earlier quoted context omitted.
WhatsApp make billions of dollars but Meta wants it to make hundreds of billions. There's no way to appease the dragon.
Curious how whatsapp makes any money besides the handful of companies that use it as a customer support portal
> handful of companies
Go to India. Way more than just a handful of companies using it
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#828June 18, 2012 -> https://blog.whatsapp.com/why-we-don-t-sell-ads Almost 13 years to the day! I find it really frustrating that I am not able to avoid using whatsapp due to how popular it is to the point that it’s become the go-to communication channel for most things :/
That blog post is very interesting in number of ways!
The principles they enlisted
> Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club
> Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought.
> Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.
---
That said, building a product and selling it for 19 Billion dollars in 2012 was essentially a success of capitalism over those principles. There shouldn't be any complaints, since FB didn't kill it, and the number of users kept increasing.
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#829Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe not the best example. Whatsapp started out as a paid service (even if it was comparably cheap, somewhere around a dollar per year comes to mind), but that didn't help them. They have followed the same trajectory as everyone else. No one exists in isolation, if the market values your user base at ten billion then that is what it is. That also indirectly means someone with deep pockets could spend that order of m…
> but that didn't help them What do you mean that didn't help them? They were doing quite fine up to the acquisition, no?
Not well enough to resist being acquired...
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#830I guess this was expected, but it makes me feel really powerless in the sense that I can't really move away from WhatsApp. I have a couple of friends that I message via Signal and even convinced my dad to use it a while back, but here in Brazil WhatsApp is _everything_, and I doubt most people care about this at all. In my case, I'd love to just go over to Signal fully but then I couldn't talk to family, friends, and…
This is why we need to unify on protocols, not platforms.
i mean this protocol does exist with RCS. In fact if you use your SMS client it probably defaults to RCS if you have an Internet connection.