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WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

nytimes.com

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Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#921

Post by parliament32 »

mvieira38 wrote: post #897
dataexporter wrote: post #883

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admire the conviction, but I think you're underestimating the social inertia that platforms like WhatsApp benefit from. The unfortunate reality is that most people won’t follow you. Not because they don’t respect you or your concerns, but because the cost—in effort, friction, or just breaking habitual patterns—is too high. Social coordination is fragile, and it leans heavily on lowest-common-denominator tools. What…

Your predictions assume I live in a contemporary, "atomic", social organization where people aren't integrated in tight-knit communities apart from the internet. My core friend group meets a few times a week because of church-related activities at a fixed weekly schedule, to the point where if someone is missing with no explanation they get a phone call. Football night is also at a fixed, weekly schedule with no need…

I was also reading some of the comments in this thread with incredulity. You switch messaging apps and your friends.. just aren't your friends anymore? Not being on a particular platform means you'll be "left out"?

I've seen a number of group chats move platforms because "we need to add X but he's not on imessage, let's use snap instead" etc. I have all sorts of group chats and contacts on various platforms and they move around all the time. A group being beholden to a single messaging platform sounds.. inflexible, and probably not the kind of people I'd want to associate with in the first place.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#922

Post by oqy »

palata wrote: post #896
stuporglue wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 1:1 conversations I think you're right. Having multiple channels for communication is fine. Where it breaks down is for group conversations. If Person A won't use Signal and Person B won't use WhatsApp, you can't easily have group communications. And it only gets worse as the number of people in the group goes up.

In my experience, people who use Signal usually also have WhatsApp. It's really mostly that many people absolutely refuse to install Signal on their phone. Like they have all sorts of apps (including social networks that are sometimes downright malware), but they will fight against Signal for some reason I don't understand.

The reason is simple: Comfort. They simply prefer not to have the mental load of multiple channels, albeit at some cost.

That's the appeal of software like Beeper&Co.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#923

Post by ajkjk »

account-5 wrote: post #915
ajkjk wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just curious.. why you are deleting your chats? what if you want to search them for something from a while ago?

I can't think of anything beyond a month is need to search for. And I'm definitely not interested in having it just in case. If it's important I'll write it down. I'm also not a social media user. How many people have been caught out over shit they've said decades ago that is now not fashionable to say? What parts of your old chat histories can get you in trouble if the police got hold of your phone?

I mean... none of mine, that's for sure, nor am I expecting to get in trouble for anything I've said in the past. I don't customarily do things I wouldn't be okay with somebody finding out about, and if did find something out and decided to become angry at me, that's on them for being a shitty person and doesn't really bother me. Nor am I expecting anyone to be looking at my history other than me anyway; that's why my phone has a passcode.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#924

Post by bigyabai »

recursive wrote: post #858
klabb3 wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Non-traveling US Americans mostly won’t understand how critical WhatsApp is in many parts of the world, for more than a decade. It’s much much stronger than the iMessage norm in the US. Businesses put WhatsApp numbers on their stores, and it’s often the only way to get a hold of a person. I would bet it’s more used than email, especially for young people. If WhatsApp went down for a week, it would seriously impe…

> It’s much much stronger than the iMessage norm in the US. I've lived in the US all my life, and I didn't even know there was a norm at all, so that's not much of a threshold.

It's less prominent if you were already 20-30 when the first iPhone came out. In slightly-affluent primary schools, owning an iPhone was your inroad to a cult of iMessage games and insular group chats. If you didn't beg mommy and daddy to fork over $600 and tax to Verizon then you didn't join the cool group chats.

It sounds petty, but not very abnormal for growing up in America.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#925

Post by klabb3 »

EuAndreh wrote: post #835
klabb3 wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. That’s an interesting model for chat. But remember, modern email is quite complex when you add all the standards for authenticity and security together, as well as informal requirements like spam filtering. But even if self-hosting were a pain, it’d still be an improvement over today’s fragmentation-by-app status quo.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#926

Post by udev4096 »

ezst wrote: post #856
udev4096 wrote: post #357

The revenue it will generate will be astonishing. Probably even make 10-20% of facebook's total revenue. It's never too late to shift to Signal

With evidence upon evidence that every centralised service eventually devolves into an enshitified user-hostile nightmare, why would you recommend yet another silo?

Because it's very similar to what people use. I would definitely recommend matrix but not everyone would feel comfortable with it

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#928

Post by notpushkin »

notpushkin wrote: post #565
socalgal2 wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sony does not follow this, how are they getting away with it?

My point is, this is just something Steam does, not something they are required to do (at least not everywhere).

Just for clarification: they are required to refund customers in some jurisdictions (apparently Australia was the reason, indeed), so they might have decided to do this for everybody

a) out of the kindness of their heart (i.e. good public image), or

b) just not to deal with complexity of introducing different refund schemas per region.

Probably a mixture of both.

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#929

Post by notpushkin »

iggldiggl wrote: post #618
whilenot-dev wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that, EU consumer rights already stated that "the consumer shall have a period of 14 days to withdraw from a distance or off-premises contract". Steam purchases count as "digital content" in that case. [0]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2011/83/oj#art_9.tit_1

In practice I've sometimes encountered that in the form of "either waive your right of withdrawal or else wait 14 days to download your content/activate your licence/etc.", though.

I don’t think that would fly in any EU court?

Re: WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

#930

Post by scrivanodev »

nytesky wrote: post #207
scrivanodev wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you replace YouTube with? To my its educational value is unmatched. I owe so much of my learning to it.

Can you elaborate on your learning journey? How did you separate out the worthless content from quality education programs? Very few Unis post lectures anymore, so it’s all hit or miss for me.

I have completely disabled the history feature, so when I navigate to the homepage there's no "recommended" content. I rely on search exclusively to find what I need. Also I don't have the YouTube app installed, if I need it I just use the browser. This helps minimising the distractions a lot.

As for content, it depends what you're looking for. For me, I'm mostly into maths and physics and there are so many channels and lecture series that were immensely helpful. For example, I recently went through this playlist on Lie Groups [0].

[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN_4R2IuNuuRgJb00X2J53Iq9...

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