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 content gets curated by those who extract money by giving us the "free" services.
It's simply very inefficient. IMHO we should go back to pay for what you use, this can't go on forever. There must be way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy.
I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it. This is coming from SMS costing €0.25 per message (text only!) and also coming from people who would gladly pay €3 for a Coke at a bar that they’d piss down the toilet an hour later. It didn’t matter if it only took 3 or 4 messages to make Whatsapp pay off for itself, as they were sending dozens if not hundreds of messages per day, either images, videos and whatnot (MMSs were much more expensive).
At that moment I realised many (most?) people would never pay for software. Either because it’s not something physical or because they’re stuck in the pre-Internet (or maybe music) mentality where copying something is not “stealing” as it’s digital data (but they don’t realise running Whatsapp servers, bandwidth etc cost very real money). And I guess this is why some of the biggest digital services are ad-funded.
In contrast, literally never someone has voiced privacy concerns, they simply find ads annoying and they’ve asked for a way to get rid of them (without paying, of course).
I should say, I’m from one of the European countries with the highest levels of piracy.
Apps and the internet in general, for most people, is considered almost weightless and zero cost. In the race for market dominance meant dropping the price as low as possible to drive out competition.
I see this and not see this.
See this = friend wants to check out app but it costs $1-$3. I'm like, that's less than a coffee or a candy bar that you consume disposably. Why not just try it and if it's sucks throw it away, the same way you might with a new food item? That argument doesn't work on them for some reason.
not see = Steam
I mostly share your conclusion, but I think there is a specific twist: most people will pay for on the spot transactions.
We see it in spades for games: in-app purchases and season passes have a lower barrier of acceptance. I assume buying stones to unlock a character must be thought at the same level as buying coffee, as just a one-time purchase that doesn't require further calculations.
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 would get leaked/stolen, ...
If the whole experience was literally as simple as handing someone a $1 bill, I promise I would pay for many many internet services.
I think the other factor is a bit of anchoring. I know this impacts me anyways. If there is a "free" alternative, then that's where I'm anchored at. I can watch youtube for free so paying for it seems like a bad deal. Where as there is no free alternative to Coke that still gets your Coke (as opposed to say water).
To be fair, that was in era when pirating was such a normal thing. Everybody at least knew about it. Cheap pirated DVD's were super common (I received them as gifts even) and everyone knew someone selling them. With people accustomed to paying for Netflix, music streaming, Office 365, etc. maybe a subscription version of WhatsApp would be more palatable. The problem is nobody will pay as long as the tech behemoths are offering the same thing for free.
Interestingly, WhatsApp put up paid plans to slow down user acquisition [0].
On Androids, in some countries, WhatsApp continued to work even if you didn't pay the $1/year fee.
In this case the service started as free (and thereby training people that it costs nothing) and and only later tried to pull the rug out under people after locking them in via network effects. It's perfectly reasonable to refuse to financially reward such tactics.
It's also that people already pay ridiculous amounts of money for their own internet connection. There is no reason why with A paying for internet and B paying for internet that A and B should pay again just to be able to talk to each other. Of course the technical reality is different but that's at least partially due to how WhatsApp designed their system.
The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many people in the “a fee instead of ads” crowd consumes YT for hours a day, but so far I’ve only met one person (not counting myself) who actually pays for YT Premium.
And yes, a major chunk of the people I talked about this with were FAANG engineers, so it isn’t like they cannot afford it. But it felt like they were more interested in complaining about the ad-funded-services landscape and muse on their stances around it, as opposed to actually putting their money where their mouth is.
All I can say is, I am not paying for YT Premium out of some ideological standpoint or love for Google (not even close). It has genuinely been just worth it for me many times over in the exact practical ways I was expecting it to.
I pay for email and some other services. Some other services, not so much. I find it hard to support some companies financially because I don't agree with their basic modus operandi. It's not the money; it's who it goes to.
If only we could convince large crowds to choose more free alternatives.
If YouTube was subscription only, hypothetically, I would just not use it, and my life would be same as it is now.
There are a great many services that are nice to have, but very few I would bother paying for out of my wallet. Given the choice of paying for them or not using them, I would just walk away from most of them.
I think they are carefully riding the balance between being free for the masses with ads while milking those who have the funds to get rid of ads.
I reckon they will continue to increase their subscriber base where other streaming services are plateuing.
Certainly, YouTube Premium has been worth it for me. A big quality of life improver.
https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/20-years-125-million-sub...
I dont like that while the ad revenue barely extracts a dollar from me, my subscription suddenly expects $10-30 per month regardless of my usage.
Thats not "we need to charge you to continue our services", thats "we need to charge you and then 20x times again just because we can".
I block all ads and wish commercial ads would cease to exist even though it would mean I couldn't use somethings anymore without payment.
They don’t create nor curate much content.
I am curious about the poster who has learned so much from YouTube — I have tried learning many topics from science to programming to home repairs, and finding a quality program can be very challenging, and there are a lot of programs which are actually elaborate sales pitches.
Of course, as a "free" customer I'm already subject to their whims whenever they decide to add another advertising layer.
So the alternative seems to be "free, with ads" or "paid, with ads"
I would rather pay a fee than watch ads, but as long as “do neither of those” is an option I’ll be picking that. If they remove that as an option I’ll either pay or not watch YouTube.
Probably not watch.
I pay for email, and was paying for search until something about the way kagi integrates with safari annoyed me. I’ve been paying more for a seedbox than Netflix costs for longer than Netflix has existed. That’s part for ad avoidance as in it initially replaced free to air tv but ad avoidance is just one factor in the best experience for my time and money trade off I’m trying to make. So i know I’m willing to both pay for things i can get ad supported from Google and also pay for a better media experience.
When it comes to that best experience for my time and money trade off though, even with money being set at zero, the vast majority of the YouTube i watch is already in the negative. Most things i watch on there, i regret the cost of just the time it took to watch the content before ads or money even gets in to it.
Which i think is a big part of the issue with ad supported internet going fee based. YouTube and so many ad supported sites and games are already just super low value and derive most of their consumption not from people making intentional lifestyle choices of “i want to be the kind of person who watches garbage all day while playing crap” but rather people making bad short term vs long term trade offs and falling in to holes of recommendations and fun looking thumbnails.
Paying for something leads to asking yourself “is this worth $x?” And i know that for at least myself $x is a large negative number. I’d pay more than the current cost of YouTube premium to definitely NOT be able to watch YouTube.
What I mean is that, IMO, ads by themselves are only a small part of the puzzle. Paying for YT premium doesn't sound enticing if it only gets rid of the ad part and not the surveillance machinery.
I do pay for my email that does no tracking and has good UX. I allow ads on duckduckgo because they actually respect my privacy and don't try to trick me all the time. I also pay for Spotify premium and have donated to Signal and Mozilla, but I won't support the likes of Google and Meta.
Depends on the price.
I'm guessing lots of folks are paying $1/month to Apple to upgrade from the free 5GB tier of iCloud storage to get to the 50GB tier.
WhatsApp charged people $1 per year before being acquired by Facebook:
* https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/
Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time. Even if they went to $1 per month, that'd be fairly cheap (and WhatsApp ran fairly lean, personnel-wise: fifty FTEs).
I want to pay the small fee, through a simple to use portal, that makes it obvious how to cancel, and if I'm being obligated to a multi month term or not. I also want my payment card details to be perfectly secure and for none of my private information or usage to be sold to third parties.
> who actually pays for YT Premium.
Have you ever asked them "why don't you?" Or "what would it take to get you to pay?" Or even, "would you take a free month to see if it's worth it?"
Point being I don't think the problem is nearly as black and white as you've apparently surmised.
I love paying for ad-removal. Take. My. Money.
That's because micropayments are still fucking annoying to do on both sides of any transaction:
- credit cards: cheap-ish at scale (2-5%), but users don't want to give random apps their CC details and integrating with Stripe/Paypal/whatever has the cost of UX flow break due to account details and 2FA compliance bullshit. In addition, every service paid-for by CC has the problem that only people with a CC can pay for it (so people in countries like Europe where "classic" bank accounts prevail are out of luck, and so are people in countries deemed too poor and/or fraud-affiliated are locked out entirely), and you gotta deal with tax and other regulatory compliance around handling payments as well. Oh and people will try to use your service to validate stolen payment credentials because a 1$ charge (especially for a well known service like Whatsapp) is most likely to be ignored by the accountholder even if fraudulent in nature, which in turn will lead to issues with chargebacks or, worst case, getting dropped entirely by the payment processor.
- in-app purchases: expensive (30% cut for the platform provider), serious headache to do when a significant chunk of the user base doesn't run phones with properly licensed Google Play Store (e.g. Huawei who aren't allowed to embed Play Store on their phones)
- bank transfer: possible, but restricted to the economic zones where there's enough customer base to justify the expenses of setting up a local company with a bank account (i.e. US, EU, India, possibly China), and transaction fees from the banks may end up being >>50% of the transaction's face value at such low amounts
- crxptxcurrency: even more of a hassle for customers to acquire, questionable legality / KYC issues, no realtime authorization due to mandatory waiting time for mining to confirm transactions
- pay by phone bill, premium numbers: possible, but need bureaucracy in each country, fraud / "my kid did it" complaints will run rampant, premium number calls are by default blocked in most if not all modern phone contracts ever since the early '00s and "dialer" fraud malware, difficult to associate with customer's phone number in the backend
In the end, if you truly want to capture a global audience with microtransaction payments, be prepared to deal with a loooooooooooooooooot of bullshit just to get started.
Long story short, we desperately need a global government effort to standardize payments at low fees. There's absolutely zero reason why banks and other intermediaries should be allowed to skim off more than 5% of any kind of transaction. ZERO.
Nebula, the answer to the tyranny of Youtube (who works for advertisers), has a <1% conversion rate despite tons of huge Youtubers pushing it. Vid.me, the previous answer to youtubes tyranny, went bankrupt because people hate ads and also hate subscriptions, nor do they donate.
I could write pages about this, but I wish I could violently shake all the children (many who are now in their 40's) that so deeply feel entitled to free content on the internet, and scream "If you are not paying directly for the product, you have no right to complain about the product".
In reality the ad model is not going anywhere. Given the choice, people overwhelmingly chose to let the advertisers steer the ship if it means "free" entry.
But I feel a better example of paying for convenience is the Twitch subscriber system. They make it work in a way that others fail at by tying it in to various things like emotes and channel points and the general sense of supporting the creators. I know YT memberships exist, but I don't know how widely those are used and they just don't seem to get pushed as much.
I'm someone willing to shell out for SaaS and I don't see nebula being significantly better than just paying for youtube premium (which I do). They have some exclusive content but paying to watch a subset of content ad-free is just not going to work out (on a large scale, I know they're worth like $200m but that's much less than $1t)
I'm guessing most people didn't pay though, since they scraped the fee (even before FB bought them). I guess it was just too little money to be worth the effort.
The fee wasn't enforced in many developing countries, and some users elsewhere will have been jumping through the delete-and-reinstall hoops (which was painful because it lost chat history) to avoid paying.
But with 1bn active users at the time the fee was dropped, it would still have been bringing in more than enough revenue to have sustained Whatsapp as an independent business if they had chosen not to sell to FB.
That's nothing at this scale of users and speaks volumes for the ingenuity of their staff.
The only ones driving even leaner than that are StackOverflow with just nine servers [2].
[1] https://highscalability.com/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-...
Internet is a paid service.
When I first accessed the internet in the 1980s, the only paid "service" necessary to use it was internet service. There was not the plethora of VC-funded third parties trying to act as intermediaries. The term "internet" amongst younger generations usually means only www sites, maybe app "endpoints" and _nothing else_. This is such a waste of potential.
Today's internet is more useful than the 1980s internet. But I do not attribute that to third party intermediaries that only seek to profit from other peoples' use of it. I attribute the increased utility to technological improvements in hardware, including networking equipment. I do not attribute the increased utility to "improvements" in software, and certainly not the proliferation of software distributed for free as a Trojan Horse for those seeking to profit from data collection, surveillance and advertising services.
The idea of paying for what these intermediaries try to call "services" makes no sense to me. Certainly, paying these intermediaries will not prevent them from data collection and surveillance for commercial purposes. (There are already examples.) It only subsidises this activity. Perhaps people believe these intermediaries engage in data collection, surveillance and ad services because "no one will pay for their software" instead of considering that they do so because they can, because there are few laws to prevent them. It was unregulated activity and is stilll grossly underregulated activity. It is more profitable than software licensing.
Rounded to the nearest meaningful number - 0%
There must be some some number that makes it viable to have free users and paid users. For games, the free users are usually those who provide the "content".
People usually demonize freemium games but IMHO its much more benign than extracting huge sums by artificially making it worse and sell attention.
I wouldn’t pay Meta or similar companies for messaging services. And especially not for siloed messaging networks.
Sure, it’s easy to get some 20 or 30-something year old with a cushy 6 figure salary to pay 20 USD or similar per month for some digital service (esp. when they are building some digital service themselves, so they know what it entails). For someone strugling to make ends meet, there’s many higher priority things than some digital service when there’s free alternatives, let alone email.
And your privacy concerns? In my experience, absolutely non-existent in the real world. Actually I only ever hear about them in HN, not even my software development coworkers. Just the other day there was some raffle where there was some weekend trip to somewhere as a prize, but you had to give all your personal details, there was a big queue, they would’ve given their blood type details (if not literally a few ccs of their blood) and told them all about their kinkiest fantasy if they’d asked for it. Literally, I’m not joking.
1. I think folks would be naturally more skeptical of the government than they are of big tech, ideally leading to E2EE for email that's usable by the masses.
2. Phishing and scams could have a dedicated law enforcement arm (Postal Inspectors).
3. We'd reduce the amount of email-based personal data being mined and turned into entirely unregulated ad-tech nightmares.
That is so weird to me. "Institutions that exist for the sole purpose of serving the people might end up having some power, so let's instead give it all to the literal oligarchs."
I used to... like some app, paid for a "PRO" version to get additonal features. Everything was ok.
Then 6 months went by, and they added a cloud feature, to upload some stuff and configs and sync between devices, and it turned from one time payment to a subscription plan. Then built-in features got moved into the cloud, and previously working stuff didn't work without subscriptions anymore. Then they added ads. PRO has maybe 2 more features than a free version and no nag screen at the start, and that's it.
Can this corporate propaganda stop? Premises:
1. That we (the corporation) offer a free service is because people don’t wanna pay
2. Those freeloaders are costing us money
3. Eventually we have to introduce ads, shrugs we hate to do it but the freeloaders force our hands
Instead:
1. The strategy IS to be free to use
2. INVEST money in building the network effect
3. When a critical mass has been reached: MONETIZE
Where is the user’s preference in this? Nowhere. Why assume anything else? Why?
It is patently irrational for all parties to spend money (“pay for what you use”) on a buergoning social media platform:
- Business: why add any friction at all to a social media platform that you are supposed to grow?
- ... and why concede any talking points to the naive people who think that paid service equals no ads or monetized “attention” if you do both?
- Just monetize people instead
- User: why would anyone on God’s Green Earth pay to use a social media platform that was pay-to-use on day zero when there are no users?
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.
Gmail's promise of 1GB free storage was an incredible offer at those times, where many people used "paid" mailers. Paid as part of the Internet subscription with a worse Webmailer and less storage than Google provided.
It is especially complicated with Mail, where Anti-Spam measures make operating an own server work (on one side for filtering incoming mail, on the other side to prevent being blocked for spamming)
They also issue bonds which is another fun way to collect money.
I’m pretty convinced I’d pay 10x or more than that amount for a completely ad free version but I can’t be sure.
Part of me thinks the reason why they don’t offer that paid ad-free version of Facebook (which they built to try and appease the EU regulators) in the US is because their ARPU is so high that people would laugh at the price “Facebook/IG Premium” would have to cost.
Also, don’t forget that at least for now, paid subscriptions to social media apps would need to pay a 30% rent to the platform owner duopoly. This means that the price it would be it would cost would need to be 42% above than its ad ARPU just to break even.
It will make people accept anything and everything that they would never otherwise accept. They will line up for hours, they will accept hostile and toxic messages being screamed into their faces, they will humiliate themselves, they will spend sleepless nights, they will willingly enslave themselves, they will wither away in sickness, they will murder millions in the most cruel way imaginable.
All for "free".
Societies in our history were not arranged in the same way around money, because probably there was some knowledge of the two-sided curse of avarice and stinginess. I'm talking about medieval and post-medieval society, where most people didn't use or have money in their everyday life. Instead they had duties.
This would cost $350M/year to Europe [1] -- which is a drop of the ocean in their budget -- in exchange for control of information.
Sounds like a no-brainer to me.
[1] assuming the initial business model of whatsapp was cash neutral, which I think it was
Probably not many. OTOH, I pay for Fastmail and NextDNS (both for at least 5 years at this point).
People give strange looks when I mention paying for e-mail, even people "in the know."
SAAS offerings for individuals don't have a lot of market share (streaming services aside). The exception might be iCloud/GMail harassing people about running out of storage, and people just eventually going "sure, here's 3 bucks a month."
Why are you using that as an example, and not asking how many people pay for their cellular data plan?
Do you use any free (as in no money comes out of your wallet) services today? If so, which ones?
Ads also solve the price stratification problem: wealthy users pay with their valuable time, and poor users pay with their less valuable time.
* phone
* whatsapp, because others use it
* signal, because it's actually good
* telegram, because that one group is on it
* my todo list app
* duolingo
* a good mapping app without ads
... and so on. And the same for my kids. And before you blink, you suddenly pay several hundred dollars per month.
Aka the slippery slope.
One of the problems seems to be that everything comes with transaction costs, so for example Signal cannot easily charge me a single dollar per month, which I suspect is a price point that would work for both me and them (if every one of their users paid it).
Some of us actually paid for WhatsApp! I think it was about $1 a year when it launched. At the time it was providing significant value, especially in areas where cross-border communication was common.
I'm sure $1 isn't enough to cover costs anymore but someone could make a nice living charging $5-10 a month for something similar. The problem is people will always sell out to investors and fuck over their users. It's inevitable.
The problem is Whatsapp is a closed ecosystem so unlike email we can't just buy a provider.
And I do pay for youtube. The experience is well worth it and I'm thankful I can afford it (it's not a lot but many can't).
FB does - “Meta Verified” for $16/month (presumably different depending on locale), but the benefits aren’t very good. (A verified badge, Increased account protection, Enhanced support, Upgraded profile features, Bonus stars and stickers)
In my opinion, it’s rarely about “can’t” when we’re talking about 12 bucks a month or whatever. It’s about the psychology: when a free tier exists, people reframe it in their heads that paying for that thing is an extravagance. Relatedly, removing the free tier altogether also has dangerous effects, as people immediately jump to “I can’t believe you’re taking away the free thing I used to have” outrage, while nobody complains about not having free access to say, HBO.
Ads mean each user 'pays' you according to their spending power
Kinda socialist when you think about it! From each according from his ability...
[1] Obviously companies try to get around this with price discrimination, but it's hard especially for a network effect platform
I use StreamFab + Plex for most providers these days precisely because it offers a better experience than their own native apps. Just the other day, I tried to watch a show on Amazon only to discover that subtitles were skewed because someone messed up cutting out the ad breaks - it'd shift the subtitles by ~10s for each cut. Plex not only has the ability to adjust offsets, but it can actually analyze the audio and perform autocorrection (which works flawlessly, I must add). Of course, this also means that this show is now permanently in my video library, even if I drop my Amazon subscription. And no, I don't feel bad about that.
Ads money is larger than user buying subscription they don't want you to buy software lol
I don't have high hopes either but people did stop using Messenger in favor of WhatsApp, so they can absolutely stop using WhatsApp too.
The "mistake" (if you're evil) those apps make is that they use your phone number as unique identifier, not a login. So if you switch app, you still have the phone number of all your friends.
Network effects are much much smaller for messaging apps vis-a-vis social networks because there is no problem in incrementally moving your DMs from one place to another.
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 probably couldn't even book a haircut or pay my taxes (my accountant messages me on WhatsApp).
It's one of those where unless just about everyone were to go over to Signal, most people won't, because keeping track of messages in two apps is quite hard.
That leaves me stuck in this ecosystem, which is quite sad.
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 impede normal societal functions. It’s pretty much de-facto standard and arguably critical infrastructure.
I do agree that just accepting this is not the way to go, and also that slowly making changes is a valid approach.
I do want to qualify though, for those who aren't in a WhatsApp-heavy country, how things work.
I looked at my latest messages and beyond all my friends and all my family, I have my accountant, my landlord, my barber, HOA, groups for birthday party invites (where you're asked to confirm attendance), a painter, etc. In many restaurants, if you want a reservation, WhatsApp is the only way. For people who work in Brazil (I work remotely for a company abroad), a lot of work communication happens on WhatsApp.
Again, this is not to say that not dong anything is the way to go! But I think abroad some people don't understand the extent to which WhatsApp is used here. Someone mentioned iMessage for instance and I don't think I know a single person who uses it. Most Brazilians have Android phones too.
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.
More extreme, a friend of mine one day eliminated his cellphone entirely but kept Skype on his laptop. So now it's email or nothing with him and sadly it's been nothing for some time now.
Sure, we have email, but the MS/Google duopoloy has effectively unfederated that, with their inscrutable block lists and nonexistent appeals processes, allegedly in order to protect you from spam.
Sure, XMPP is a thing, which has been mostly dead for well over a decade.
Sure, Matrix is a thing, but every time I look at it, all I see is criticism of its specifications and poor interoperability between implementations?
What would it take to sort out this mess? More money for Matrix or XMPP? Someone with enough clout to promote them? I'm sure organizations like the UN or the EU would, in theory, be in favour of an effective global communicator. But those same organizations would like rail against encryption and decentralisation.
Not sure what you're talking about. Everything is working fine for me, and they even conduct a whole conference about it annually: https://2024.matrix.org/
With a large number of clients and servers and the lack of a walled garden (like with Signal), you will always find something non-interoperable. It doesn't mean that you have to use it.
But messaging apps are especially tricky to take off, because the most important feature of the messaging app is how many friends already using it. So I don't really believe in independent open-source apps becoming popular. It's always startups, funded with billions, pouring those billions into marketing.
We have to get to the point where progress in messaging is incremental, not revolutionary.
How do you tell that an open standard is "dead"? There are zillions of XMPP servers around with lots of people quietly using them. For a standard to be "alive" does there have to be a large revenue stream associated with it? Does it need a large commercial entity promoting it?
No need to reinvent the wheel. But who are we kidding, of course we will
It's really not.
I've had a good experience moving close contacts to Snikket, which uses XMPP. Text, voice, and video chat work great across platforms.
Previously I tried Jami, which seemed promising, but message delivery was too unreliable due to it being fully P2P.
How much of a problem is personal (!) email being dropped for reasons other than the recipient account not existing realistically?
If you’re not on WhatsApp, no updates or news from your kids school, your sports team, your family, your car dealership etc. for you.
But since January the trust in Meta has not only plummeted but it's become a mainstream enough talking point that I now receive invites to join Signal groups from--for want of a better term--normal people. Two of the local parenting groups I'm on are on Signal and no one ever mentions it or questions it, it's just "here's the group link" and the expectation that everyone has it installed.
I switched phones and lost all my history. Now I’m fairly careful with these things, and make backups, but even I wasn’t able to get it back. Couldn’t recommend it to anyone since.
There’s a line between being secure and being useful, and they’re slightly unbalanced in Signal.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=NL&q=%2Fm%2F012...
Ads are one thing, but now WhatsApp is letting businesses message you in Europe, only with opt out. This is pretty frustrating. I suspect some users will seek alternatives.
Credit where credit is due, Microsoft needed more than a decade to kill skype. It was so resilient and entrenched.
I've given up on trying to get my non-tech network to use some other messenger, it's just too exhausting and wasted time.
Isn't this because Facebook is paying telcos to keep its services free? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org
Even banks et cetera are making it the first class communication medium especially for OTP (which technically is safer than SMS but a glaring lock into a desk-less foreign company and at the same time the “OTP” can literally be the single point to take over someone’s almost entire life - including almost every single paisa). Every other day I am shown a sneaky lightning popup or two asking me to consent to send everything or something on WhatsApp. Sometimes the popup is about something entirely else but there’s an already checked checkbox with WhatsApp consent. Calling it bizarre will be an understatement.
But I manage without WhatsApp (it’s also a privileged position to do so). Not having WhatsApp also helps avoid seeing all the junk and misinformation that people forward on it without any thought. There’s actually a name for this in India: “WhatsApp University”, which is a derogatory term for how people believe anything they read on WhatsApp and share it around without any analysis or thought or skepticism whatsoever.
But tbh if they keep the ads out of messages I don’t see it an affecting people much.
Maybe, but not being in WhatsApp is also a signal.
The app itself is 100% ad free and runs on credits. You get credits through se other portal by logging in to watch ads whenever it’s convenient for you.
Good app experience for the user, and potentially better experiences for the advertisers because they get the target audience when they are most open to ads (and not annoyed by them).
And if you want add something that makes sure the user is paying attention, then you have seen this advertising mode: it's basically the second ever Black Mirror episode.
This sort of analysis is very surface-level I think. My impression is WhatsApp offered that by running on VC money and had no plan to run an actual business. That's not a question of focus. It's an unsustainable, please monetise me later land grab.
> In April 2011, Sequoia Capital invested about $8 million for more than 15% of the company, after months of negotiation by Sequoia partner Jim Goetz.[63][64][65]
> By February 2013, WhatsApp had about 200 million active users and 50 staff members. Sequoia invested another $50 million, and WhatsApp was valued at $1.5 billion.[26] Some time in 2013[66] WhatsApp acquired Santa Clara–based startup SkyMobius, the developers of Vtok,[67] a video and voice calling app.[68]
> In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users used the service each month.[69] The year 2013 ended with $148 million in expenses, of which $138 million in losses.
I mean, when Facebook bought WhatsApp for billions, what did people expect? How else were they going to monetize?
A $3 one-time payment (which I'm guessing is about $2.75 after BlackBerry app store fees) is not sustainable for lifetime access and updates on a service that needs 4-5 nines of service availability and data integrity.
[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...
Even for years after they were acquired by Meta, Jan refused to allow advertising and kept pushing the $1 dollar per user subscription fee. Sheryl nixed it b/c it was "not scalable."
VC's may have the mindset that the founders will eventually acquiesce to ads, but also they didn't really care b/c all they wanted was an exit, which they got.
The founders, however, were never interested in an ad business and hold that POV to this day.
Actions speak louder. He did acquiesce - he sold to an ad-financed company.
> and hold that POV to this day.
You can hold any POV when nothing depends on it.
Fair enough, but the founders don't necessarily make these decisions. I wasn't particularly referring to them. If they got VC money (I don't know if they did or not) then the VCs must've had something in mind to get a decent return on their risk.
Zuck Says Ads Aren’t The Way To Monetize Messaging, WhatsApp Will Prioritize Growth Not Subscriptions
"Monetization was the big topic on today’s analyst call after Facebook announced it acquired WhatsApp for a jaw-dropping total of $19 billion. That’s $4 billion in cash and $12 billion in stock, and it reserved $3 billion in restricted stock units to retain the startup’s employees. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, CFO David Ebersman, and WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum all said that won’t be a priority for the next few years. And when the time does come to monetize aggressively, it won’t be through ads"
(In another news Signal still has focus on crytpo. Is this Firefox+Pocket level of stickiness and “we are right!”?).
But yeah, I might agree that the third party clients thing is a bigger issue. Especially when the official client insists on not officially supporting Linux on ARM64 and not playing nice with Wayland. (Seriously, Signal on Linux is so blurry!)
Maybe financial pressure will push Signal to promote its crypto more in future.
(And yes, my comments history has me extensively promote XMPP, no big secret here.)
<Your wife> 30m ago: Honey, buy me new Tampax Eraser Pro Black Night
<You> 1m ago: There are only Day version, should I buy it?
<Your wife> 0m ago: What? What are you buying?
<Your wife>. 0m ago: I didn't write this...Firefox bought Pocket. It's not a third party product.
End-to-end encryption was added by Meta, they reused (part of) the Signal app code for this.
This was a big topic for years, I am surprised by this oversight.
A massive oversight on the authors part and completely missing the point of early WhatsApp as first status update application and then SMS replacement.
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 :/
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.
Once you internalize the how and why (such as "forks are good" and "the more publicly auditable code the better"), there's really no going back and for the rest of your life you prefer FOSS even when you can't use it.
That's why I think that for some future generation there will be a FOSS equivalent of the waves of democracy that spread across the world starting in the 18th century. Once a country becomes democratic and people understand the benefits, they never really want to roll that change back. Our current generation is probably not going to double down on the "right to fork," but once an individual gets it they get it for good, so I feel it's just a matter time before a sea change occurs, even if we're all dead when it happens.
- 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.
There was some wild change they wanted to push some time ago, users started mass migration away from it forcing them to abandon their insane plans.
These companies only learn when the problem hits their pocket.
I still have my social media accounts coz otherwise, hobbies and alike gets impossible to track. But I only access them via PC browser/mobile browser on my GrapheneOS phone.
Instagram only allows video upload via their app which I can understand (compression and etc), GrapheneOS allows me to lock everything so I only use it to upload videos. Man, it is a complete mess, Sponsored, Threads posts that takes you to install apps and ADs is everywhere and I mean everywhere.
On my phone/PC, nothing of the above exist. It is just one post after another with, no Ads, no sponsored, no apps, nothing. Facebook follows suit, I have not used their app in years now, mobile browser only.
WhatsApp is gonna become exactly the same, a complete mess. People accepted Instagram changes so....
You can upload videos from the web now; even Reels.
Any tech company who must say, "we don't harvest your information", is a tech company that harvests your information.
> We can't read your messages or listen to your calls, and no one else can either.
Should we be suspicious of Signal as well?
Messages from businesses are absolutely not private.
Sounds like SMS.
What does this mean exactly?
See the image here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_list
Popular format on Youtube, reddit, etc.
It should be a law of nature that whatever Meta/Facebook acquires will surely be ad-riddled & 'spyware' infested regardless of the "we won't" promises they swear to abide by.
But I do wonder if this is just the first step, and like other platforms, ads might slowly spread into more parts of the app over time.
With it being Meta I can be sure I will pay and still have my data and privacy violated.
WhatsApp was great because it didn’t have ads and kept things private. Once they start changing that, it usually doesn’t stop with just one small change.
Is that a bad thing? It's a useful dedicated tool. Paperclips have been feature stagnant since the 19th century, and they're fine
Just 30 minutes ago: I got an official message from WhatsApp asking for my email address "for improved security just in case you lose your account"...
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, which is flaky, slow and wants to update every day or two.
I just can't see average people putting up with those inconveniences and that's just a couple of them.
The slightly longer version of the story is that my wife, travelling alone, had some trouble with an iPhone update (it hung for hours), and so she took it to the nearest Genius Bar; they eventually got the update to apply, but then did a factory reset “just to be safe”. Of course, everything except her Signal message history was restored from the automatic iCloud backups. She was devastated, and refuses to touch it now.
Please do not reply to say this was the fault of the Apple Store employee. It was, but at the same time, it also very much wasn't.
To be fair I've met plenty of non-techie types whose phones were "full" of stuff from WhatsApp or photos that had already been backed up, because the idea they could clear their local storage would never cross their minds. I've seen people buy new phones instead of clearing their cache.
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.
What is the alternative though? A private chat app, mobile + desktop, syncing, with enough ease of setup and use for normies to adopt? I don't see it.
Ads will make more people Signal-curious, or even drive people back to text messages. The average person who switches will convince a non-zero number of their contacts to come with them. The shift will start gradually. Think of Skype, which at one point everyone I knew was on. That network didn't protect them from being replaced by competitors.
People are also increasingly worried about retaliation from the government for their supposedly free speech, which has already driven a few people I know to secure alternatives that aren't operated by Trump allies.
If Signal could address these concerns I'd be happy to move away from Whatsapp.
With this news I'll likely need to reassess my use of Whatsapp again.
It’s frustrating that it’s basically only Telegram and WhatsApp that take desktop platforms seriously.
An additional layer of security would be installing it in a Work profile in Android (maybe the new profiles feature works for this, I'm not sure), and only activating that profile when you need to use it.
With the recent news about the Facebook and Instagram tracking via WebRTC[1], we can only assume that they're doing it with WhatsApp as well.
Apps should not have free access to all contacts but anything else is currently highly impractical to the point of being unusable. (Android work profile is a good idea, unfortunately that profile is usually take up by… work)
I've tried it in the past and all that could be done was due to the platform not having e2e encryption on standard chats.
I think one point not raised here is that Telegram is an attempt to create a global Asian style messenger with quick, sleek and maybe too animated (to my taste) design and vibrant ecosystem.
Whatsapp cannot be fast - otherwise Grandmas will not be using it, so Meta always has to compromise, while Telegram can just adapt WeChat/Line features for years with WA limping behind.
Signal is cool for people that consider privacy paramount. If I get it right, they are also on a mission of creating safe communication for the most vulnerable. They are just different; I could never make myself start using TikTok, and can completely relate to someone saying Signal has just the right amount of features one needs.
- much much better performance - a good desktop client - open source message clients - scheduling messages - better search - many small gestures/UX features that feel thoughtfully implemented - better channels - message threads - chat folders - very easily programmable & deployable bots for moderation or implementation into your work flow - a lot of customisable settings
Telegram is so much further in performance and feature than it's counterparts it's laughable. Almost all of the new features in Whatsapp/Signal were first implemented in Telegram.
Some of them, as you said, are feasible because of the non-e2ee chats, but a lot of them are just plain universal.
How long until "Updates" gets a red badge despite no updates only to show you an ad? Also, I find the language used in their announcement deeply offensive.
> Helping you Find More Channels and Businesses on WhatsApp
> support your favorite channel
> help you discover
> find a new business and easily start a conversation with them
> help admins, organizations, and businesses grow
I had been voluntold to be on the ads team, because I had sent a list of things that needed to be done to make ads doable and not terrible. Of course, none of my ideas were deemed feasible at the time, including figuring our the ToS stuff, because no use building a product you can't launch and ToS changes aren't easy.
Don't sell yourself short ... they did all the things to make ads doable it was just not feasible to make them not terrible.
literal chat dialog tree with 4 options that is not connected to anything for around 250k/year.
Any ads are in addition to this, not instead of.
I assume one would need a Java disassembler at least. On desktop, something like recaf works and allows changing things in classes without the full recompilation.
Is there something like this for android?
I say halfway because some apps have a fallback, built-in, ad when it can't reach the server, other serve the ads from their own servers so no way to block them. Most only leave a blank space.
I use the hosts file from there, and edit it manually via "adb root" (lineageos. root only via adb)
From a 2018 interview of Brian Acton after he left Facebook ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive... ):
" "An SMS has just come in from his local Honda dealer saying “payment received.” He points to it on his phone.
“This is what I wanted people to do with WhatsApp,” he says of the world’s biggest messaging service, "
A company representative adds that it has "no plans to place ads in chats and personal messages." Plans, of course, could change in the future.
As many here have noted, WhatsApp is the dominant communication platform for many people, and many businesses, particularly outside the US. In the short run, almost none of them will be able to leave the platform. In the longer term, so many of them are upset about the introduction of intrusive ads that it could well become "the beginning of the end" for the platform.
Social media platforms can rise and fall.
I don't know if it'll manage with another 15% loss.
Time for a new messenger, and I don’t mean Signal, but the creation of some kind of old Skype, with a peer to peer protocol. It was very good before Microsoft bought it. Of course, if the code is open and does not require a proprietary server part.
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha and then after I catch my breath, a bit more hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Seriously, who expected anything different? Like.. in which universe does anything think "Facebook/Meta is going to do the right thing"(?)
Zuckerberg is ruthless and cutthroat and Whatsapp was less a "savvy acquisition" (I mean, yeah, get rid of competition) than a "I want this, I need to own it"
But to be fair, competitors like Telegram also do not allow registering an account from desktop app, only from a smartphone. This seems to be the new trend: you cannot sign up for Gmail and Vk without a smartphone too: for Gmail, you need to scan the QR code, and for Vk you need to install a mobile app.
I just wish there was something else with such far reach and capability. We can only hope for interoperability with other chat apps.
At least the ads are in Updates, where I never bother looking at
“No ads! No games! No gimmicks!”
I wonder how the early founders feel about what Whatsapp has become with random junk and gimmicks in the UI.
As for status updates… that’s something many people seem to actually use, so ads in there may have an effect.
Delete your WhatsApp and Instagram and Facebook. Delete the apps from your devices.
Every time you launch the app you vote willingly for more abuse and surveillance and censorship.
There is a cult understanding that Instagram ads are highly relevant and quite useful at times and WhatsApp ads have the same possibility. But the messaging is quite poor.
Signal is a cool 2nd alternative to WhatsApp, but their desktop client is absolute garbage, their videocall echo cancelling is non-existent and sending media over slow connections absolutely sucks (it keeps on resending and resending the files)
I was honestly expecting it, after recently seeing on a friend's phone that it already essentially turned to social media on Android. They can't yet push it on the higher income iPhone users (lest they switch to other messenger apps), but change is coming rather inevitably since it's nothing but untapped advertising dollars potential in the eyes of the behemoth that is Meta.
I don't think there's a sustainable solution here except to self-host a Matrix server for family and friends if you have the time, money and technical expertise.
Unique but I believe fundamentally incorrect take on the Internet...
Yes, truly WhatsApp was the first of its kind. It's all the communication of sending a letter through the mail, except delivered electronically - one wonders why they didn't call it "electronic mail", or perhaps "e-mail" for short.
The group chats it offers are another huge innovation - for the first time, people were able to chat with each other by relaying their messages across the internet. Truly a marvel.
Personally, I divide the internet into two eras - "before Whatsapp", when there was simply no primary convenience of any sort to be found upon the internet and all users were deeply encumbered by bounds; and "after Whatsapp", when I and others can communicate, conveniently, via the internet, because of WhatsApp, boundlessly.
Everything seems to have either adds or subscription modes now, from Sudoku apps to flight tracking (yes Flighty, talking about you).
Naturally the only ones that show up are thirst trap profiles masquerading as "uwu just sharing my life" channels.
It's unclear that Signal/Telegram/etc have a shot, though.
Is that 1.5 billion people engaging with it, or 1.5 billion people seeing it because it's the first tab and then immediately switching to "Chats", the only useful tab in the app?
please create a new messenger.
Is it? Most software developers I know prefer having a job to not having a job. You don't want to implement ads? You're fired.
Blaming the users is also the wrong thing to do, of course. The blame lies squarely with Meta. And with regulators. Any communications platform that has as much market penetration as Whatsapp should be open to use by third parties, just like the telephone system.
We all hate ads, but what did we expect ? That some rando will pay for all those server and personnel bills out of the goodness of his "heart" ? Please. I wish the culture of Silicon valley wasn't so full of bullshit that this'd have become obvious a long time back.
(For a more egregious eg. of ads, look at LINE which is all the rage in Japan. Or indeed Google, whose entire Android/Chrome business is made to subtly feed data back into its ads business).
finally people will start to move out of whatsbook!
....i hope
Wouldn't mind doing it again.
Unfortunately now they're owned by a Silicon Valley company so I guess 0.99 is too little for them, they'll charge the price of a SV latte... how much is that? 59.99? 99.99?
I mean, my messages are encrypted, the thing Just Works, UX is great, calls are free despite what I assume is substantial bandwidth and server cost, and so on. Why did they give this away to 2b people for 10 years? Could they really cover the all cost and then some just with those WhatsApp Business API call charges? I mean I love it but I can't say I get it. Thanks for all the freebies Mark!
- I am pretty sure NO ONE asked to hear about more topics and organizations across whatsapp.
We're one of only a few countries[1] who call the game Chinese Whispers.
Would you like to hear more about topics, teams, and organizations? If no, please explain using at least 1000 characters (required)
[ ] yes [ ] no
Why don't they just come out and say "because, profit!" or some good ol' fashioned BS about "value-creation" or some other American thing like that ...)
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
No offence to the product team, i know that this is how it works in tech. It's the same for engineering and design teams in every single b2b/b2c business. There is no concept of feature completeness anymore, every single service has to copy from others or be something instead of 10 other services.
"Meta’s ad business is “in as strong a position now as it’s ever been,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst and founder of the consulting firm Madison and Wall. The company’s share of the global digital ad business is around 15 percent, he said. Last year, almost all of Meta’s $164 billion in revenue came from advertising."
TL;dr: Advertising business injects more advertising.
everything else is just noise.
...oh wait
Especially given that Trump already helped so many people move away from Meta, I see the whatsapp monopoly coming to an end pretty soon.
Our initial use case -- why we're building this -- is parents who are currently using text groups in Apple Messages or WhatsApp to share photos/videos of their kiddos with friends/family and want something less interruptive and more casual, but for whom social media is so toxic and untrusted as to be a non-starter.