I hope the only valid use for WhatsApp becomes giving people a link to your Signal.
WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
831–840 of 1001 posts
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#832I 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
What makes Signal less at risk than WhatsApp?
Are they profitable in other ways? Are they at the same risk of capture?
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#833I 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…
what you're saying is they've locked you in. Good business model
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#834Earlier 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?
Didn't help them [avoid this fate] is how I read it; that doing quite fine was tragically insufficient to escape the maw.
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#835Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless it's an open, federated system.
No system can credibly claim to sustain massive consumer scale until proven in real life. Even if your technical architecture supports scale and federation, these are just some threats off the top of my head: - spam, fraud and Sybil attacks, deteriorating the experience for everyone - infighting, forking among maintainers of core libs and protocols - maintainers get poached by mega corps - hostile takeovers of founda…
Despite its flaws and issues, email is federated and has been working at scale for decades.
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#836I 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…
how is Apple in Brazil? iMessage is the way to go
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#837Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about non traveling Chinese?
I'd say Chinese people are aware that their Internet is pretty different from the rest of the world. Americans tend to believe everyone is trying very hard to be like them (when they think about the rest of the world at all).
Your comment is snide and unnecessary. Do Chinese walk around thinking they want to be more American? No they don't. Americans certainly dont believe everyone is trying very hard to be like them - typically go about their own business. Chinese may be influenced by western shows and movies but everybody is influenced by the shows that they watch. Why do Americans need to think about the rest of the world? Do Chinese think about the rest of the world? Your hatred really shows in your comment.
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#838Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sort of. It's more because of how ML models work. If you have an audience of 100mn then it's much easier to get enough conversions to optimize the models. It's much harder to do it with an audience of 3mn.
By that logic Indonesia and Bangladesh would have higher ad-spend per head than France, because they are larger markets and it doesn't matter how much money people have to spend?
It's clearly both. But if I have a 1/100000 outcome, I can get maybe 500 conversions in France or the UK, but 3000 in the US. That makes a really large difference in terms of how many times your ad is shown to likely users.
But yeah, ML models do in fact work better in Indonesia and Bangladesh, but as you noted they have less money to spend.
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#839Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
What makes Signal less at risk than WhatsApp? Are they profitable in other ways? Are they at the same risk of capture?
Non-profit and actually quite economically efficient per user.
Once WhatsApp was bought by Meta the writing was on the wall. I moved out of it immediately and I'm surprised people are caught off-guard by this news.
I suppose there's little guarantee Signal won't be sold, but an ultra popular app with no profit, owned by a single bloke (WhatsApp) was the last thing I expected to be a sustainable platform for my communications. Same reason I've never looked at Telegram.
Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
#840Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a massive barrier to switching. In order to switch, you also need to convince your acquaintances to switch. Good luck with that.
This needs a regulatory involvement (for federation)
That already happened in EU with trying to force leading communications platforms to integrate with at least one competitor. I remember an initiative to make WhatsApp integrate with (wait for it..) Skype.
I'm not sure how or why it fizzled out.