[HN Gopher] WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
___________________________________________________________________
WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
Author : greenburger
Score : 166 points
Date : 2025-06-16 13:38 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| snapcaster wrote:
| Surprised it took them this long
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| they got so lucky with whatsbook taking over entire countries,
| they were swimming in money just selling support channels to
| gov and big companies.
|
| literal chat dialog tree with 4 options that is not connected
| to anything for around 250k/year.
| toast0 wrote:
| They were working on it in 2019 when I left, I thought it was
| tested in one country after that and then it got shelved. IIRC,
| it needed a ToS change and there was too much pushback.
|
| 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.
| blitzar wrote:
| > things that needed to be done to make ads doable and not
| terrible ... none of my ideas were deemed feasible at the
| time
|
| Don't sell yourself short ... they did all the things to make
| ads doable it was just not feasible to make them not
| terrible.
| toast0 wrote:
| I mean, they didn't, at least at the time, because they
| couldn't launch it.
|
| In my mind, early focus on ToS could have possibly gotten
| the change more palletable/directed the project towards
| more palletable choices or perhaps more likely gotten to
| the cancellation decision faster and people could work on
| different things.
| andrepd wrote:
| Would be nice if these kinds of articles would at least take a
| paragraph to plug some alternatives, such as Signal.
| jraby3 wrote:
| WhatsApp has long promoted itself as a safe alternative to apps
| like Telegram and Google's Android messaging. Users flocked to
| the app globally, finding it a cheap and secure alternative to
| texting, particularly people in unstable political climates and
| authoritarian countries, since its messages cannot be easily
| intercepted without access to personal devices.
| angry_octet wrote:
| This reply screams LLM. Not really responding to the parent
| comment, nauseatingly anodyne in content. Not wrong, but not
| right. Will HN be overwhelmed with LLM trash?
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| With all the LLM enthusiasts here why would HN not be at
| the forefront of it?
| gloxkiqcza wrote:
| It's a quote from the linked article.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| As always network effect will be the problem. I know plenty of
| people on WhatsApp and almost nobody on Signal
| stevage wrote:
| I don't find there is much network effect for one on one
| messaging. I have to use a few different apps to talk to all
| my friends, it's not a big deal to switch to/from Signal or
| Whatsapp. With groups it's more effort.
| tiluha wrote:
| This does not match my experience in Germany. If somebody
| gives you their phone number it is just expected that you
| can reach them on WhatsApp and i have yet to meet anyone
| that doesn't use WhatsApp.
| standardUser wrote:
| That seems true throughout the most of the Western world,
| excluding the US. I have a big WhatsApp network, but
| that's by virtue of living in SF and NY. Without big
| immigrant/expat/world-traveler communities, I think most
| of the US just uses iMessage or regular text.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| It's a problem but not insurmountable. Otherwise we'd all
| still be using ICQ/AIM/MSN Messenger/Skype/etc.
| blitzar wrote:
| We are off those because of multi messanger platforms made
| switching to the "hot new thing" very low friction. It was
| only once mobile came along that the playing field narrowed
| so much.
|
| Current networks have way more lock in than back in the
| day.
| randerson wrote:
| It's easy to have multiple chat apps in parallel though, each
| with their own network.
|
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| Network effects aren't a big deal when it comes to messaging.
| There was a time when people thought iPhone wouldn't be able
| to overcome Blackberry because everyone was on BBM. In the
| last couple decades we've seen people go from ICQ to
| AIM/Yahoo/MSN to Google Talk to Skype to Facebook Messenger
| to BBM to Whatsapp/iMessage/Instagram, with dozens of smaller
| options like Kik, Viber, Line, Signal, Telegram all hanging
| around. It doesn't take much to cause another shift in the
| space.
| standardUser wrote:
| That _sounds_ nice, but in reality most of my extended
| friend group has migrated to WhatsApp over the last 10
| years and is unlikely to change anytime soon.
| Interoperability would be nice (like we used to have) but
| that will never happen until Apple stops using their lack
| of interoperability as a way to ostracize young people and
| sell more phones.
| jahnu wrote:
| 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, 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.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| jahnu wrote:
| Yes it's also a problem there but WhatsApp gives you the
| tools to fix the problem in minutes if not seconds, or ask
| your tech literate relative or friend to help and it only
| takes them the couple of minutes to clear it and maybe show
| you how. With Signal it can take hours of work so what
| happens is the non-techy person understands "oh this app
| filled my phone up I shouldn't use it".
| MrDOS wrote:
| I stopped recommending Signal to nontechnical folks due to
| the inability to back up messages on iOS. People are pretty
| protective of their message history, and having everything
| tied to a single device with no recourse for backups is a
| nonstarter.
|
| 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.
| jahnu wrote:
| Oh yes this too. How could I forget!
| andrepd wrote:
| It's very frustrating, I admit. Backups and archival are
| indeed a pet peeve of mine, as are the frequent redesigns
| (but that's just a "feature" virtually every single god-damn
| modern app).
|
| 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.
| jahnu wrote:
| I suppose the true alternative would be a standard open
| protocol that enables this cross platform.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Discerning people will already seek out other options on their
| own, the vast majority won't. We know the pattern from the
| respective Reddit and Twitter enshittification phases.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| If I can only message with discerning people might as well
| not have any messaging app at all.
| nsagent wrote:
| I used to use Signal exclusively rather than Whatsapp, but I've
| had lots of issues sending media. This has not been a problem
| with Whatsapp, so I've recently begun to use Whatsapp more.
| There are also issues with message history that I've
| encountered on Signal that don't exist on Whatsapp.
|
| 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.
| jraby3 wrote:
| https://archive.md/L3W74
| leokennis wrote:
| At least in The Netherlands, WhatsApp could show a 60 second
| unskippable modal ad video on every launch, and still get away
| with it due to network effects.
|
| 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.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Signal seems to be booming right now in the Netherlands. I've
| been using it for years and never managed to grow my contact
| list beyond single digits, being a few friends in tech and a
| few who were very privacy conscious. All of those people were
| also available on WhatsApp and we'd often forget and message
| one another there.
|
| 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.
| ghusto wrote:
| In the Netherlands, was trying to promote Signal.
|
| 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.
| Funes- wrote:
| You should've made sure of how Signal works with regards to
| chat history before you removed the app from the old phone.
| egypturnash wrote:
| "the iphone 4's antenna isn't a bad design, you're just
| holding it wrong" - steve jobs
| jobigoud wrote:
| To be fair Whatsapp works the same, if you are not
| careful when changing phone you will lose your history.
| That's because they don't actually store your messages on
| their servers, they are just synchronized between
| devices.
| nsagent wrote:
| I have Signal on my phone and laptop. For some reason my
| laptop desynced from the phone, so my chat history now
| has a missing block of message history (that exists on
| the phone). I did nothing obvious to cause that desync.
| My guess is that my phone updated the Signal app, and I
| didn't update it on the laptop in lockstep. That's not a
| great UX, especially since there is no notification that
| this might happen.
| tomsmeding wrote:
| Desync happens simply after a month of not using the PC
| client. Yes, it's that short.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| How does it handle phone theft?
| dakial1 wrote:
| Something seems to have happened in NL in March that
| generated some demand for it, but it seems to have vanished
| now:
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=NL&q=%2Fm%2F012.
| ..
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Your link shows a peak at the time you mention but the
| interest in subsequent months has been around 4 times
| higher than it was prior to the inauguration, so it seems
| inaccurate or even misleading to say that demand has
| "vanished."
| xnorswap wrote:
| That "something" is just people searching for this news
| story, rather than interest in signal for the sake of using
| it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_grou
| p...
|
| NL clearly has some background interest in signal however,
| unlike the UK, which spikes on this story alone:
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=GB&q=%2Fm%2F01
| 2...
| wtmt wrote:
| It's similar in India. Even many businesses only use WhatsApp
| for orders and communications with customers. Heck, even the
| police use it to communicate between their people and with
| complainants/victims. Politicians use it between their party
| people and to send messages to the public. The average person
| on the street no longer knows what an SMS is or how to use it.
|
| 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.
| jonplackett wrote:
| It's not like there's no alternatives.
|
| But tbh if they keep the ads out of messages I don't see it an
| affecting people much.
| nand_gate wrote:
| Been tempting to spin up a competitor but the
| business/compliance side seems nightmarish whilst the actual
| tech aspects are trivial on modern hardware.
| mrtksn wrote:
| 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 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.
| blitzar wrote:
| > Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying
| for their core services
|
| Rounded to the nearest meaningful number - 0%
| mrtksn wrote:
| I don't know, I expect it to be at least %3 as this is the
| general conversion rate for "free" users AFAIK.
|
| 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.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| you're being too generous, as if people were on whatsbook
| because of a value they get.
|
| they are just there for the captive network effect, which
| will take a hit the second or becomes a freemium or ad
| ridden service.
| xp84 wrote:
| Yeah, nobody uses Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or Google
| anymore now that they're "ad-ridden"
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| none of those are blasting "encryption! only you can read
| your messages" as their main message and marketing.
|
| those are literal public forums people go to expose
| themselves. you don't have a very good point.
| blitzar wrote:
| Most of those are tricked into it by manipulative UI or
| nearly impossible to cancel trials or forgotten monthly
| subscriptions.
| mrtksn wrote:
| How is it possible to have impossible to cancel trails?
| On AppStore it's in your account and takes 2 taps to
| cancel regardless of what the developer does.
|
| Are you talking for direct, by credit card payments that
| somehow you can't cancel? Can you explain a bit?
| blitzar wrote:
| The abuse was so rampant that even the US has had to
| legislate. US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) introduced a
| new regulation, known as the "click to cancel" rule.
|
| As for the darkest of dark patterns - give Adobe some
| money and see what happens.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Right, my rule of thumb is to stick with AppStore and
| when that's not an option use a Virtual card that I can
| just abandon if I don't want to use the service.
| esrauch wrote:
| Play Store also does this now and it's a fundamentally
| radical departure from the era where if you give the
| company your card info directly theres a high chance you
| aren't going to be able to get out of it without paying
| at least some amount more than you should.
|
| Think gyms where you refuse to cancel even when you are
| physically there in person with someone to yell at and
| imagine trying to do the same online where there's not a
| phone number, or a phone number with a 1 hour wait and a
| CSR paid based on if they can successfully not give you
| what you want
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| it's probably under 0% even including the 2% error margin.
| blitzar wrote:
| Rounding up
| irjustin wrote:
| This is only true if they introduce them. i.e. FB doesn't have
| a paid service, but obviously Youtube does.
|
| 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).
| xp84 wrote:
| "Can't" is relative. I suspect there are a lot of people who
| pay for at least one streaming service that isn't YouTube,
| but spend more hours watching YouTube in a month than they do
| watching that service. And of course there's also the age-old
| comparison that if someone goes to Starbucks more than twice
| in a month, they probably spend more there than you would on
| YouTube Premium, and does that provide the person with as
| much value as YouTube does?
|
| 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.
| doix wrote:
| I remember WhatsApp costing money, 1$ per year or per lifetime
| or something. I paid for it, I think it was a WinRar situation
| though, where deleting and reinstalling the app gave it to you
| for free or something.
|
| 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.
| A_Duck wrote:
| Yep I paid for Whatsapp, I've even dug out the receipt email.
| I want my PS0.79 back!
| Ekaros wrote:
| Three years of WhatsApp service for phone just 2,67$... In
| 2015...
|
| So I think I got that...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Pre acquisition Whatsapp had 450M users. Even accounting for
| half the revenue of 1$ going away for payment fees (30%) and
| taxes (20%), that would still have been a nice cushy 200
| million $ a year in almost pure profit - WA had 55 (!)
| employees at acquisition and 550 servers [1].
|
| 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-...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34950843
| paxys wrote:
| That fee wasn't really enforced. I was in India at the time
| and no one paid because no one had credit cards tied to
| their account. Everyone still used WhatsApp just fine.
| roryirvine wrote:
| Other way round. Facebook bought them in 2014, and they
| dropped the fee in early 2016.
|
| 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.
| filoleg wrote:
| I don't have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a
| gigantic chunk of the "i would rather pay a small fee to use a
| service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads" crowd
| is mostly all-talk. And I am saying this as someone who
| genuinely believes in the "small fee instead of paying with ad
| exposure" approach.
|
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| By far the choice of most marginally savvy and above internet
| users is an ad-model where they themselves ad-block. Which
| somehow is spun to be morally righteous.
| johncessna wrote:
| Morally Righteous? I think it's more they don't have to so
| they don't. It's like the DVR days where you'd just fast
| forward ads. It wasn't a moral high ground, it was just
| easy to do and was better than the alternative.
| card_zero wrote:
| Dutifully watching the ads doesn't seem moral either, it
| seems insane.
| x0x0 wrote:
| I accidentally browsed a site without ads this morning from
| my work profile.
|
| Literally on the first link I clicked on on cbs the
| advertiser somehow figured out how to make my browser
| redirect to some super-sketchy site saying I was the 5
| billionth google search and won blah blah blah.
|
| Browsing without adblock is an unacceptable security risk
| so long as google et all refuse to audit and
| comprehensively secure the code they demand to run on my
| laptop.
| pydry wrote:
| Once google's shareholders have wet their beak, the on-
| campus sushi bars and manicurists and $400k pay packets are
| paid for and the Taylor Swifts of the world are paid off
| there isnt much left of your subscription to pay for the
| long tail of content creators who dont have Taylor Swift's
| leverage.
|
| Which is why many of them say things like "skip these ads
| if you like Im not getting any of it" or "Im here primarily
| for exposure, I make my money elsewhere".
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I don't have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a
| gigantic chunk of the "i would rather pay a small fee to use
| a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads"
| crowd is mostly all-talk.
|
| That's because micropayments are still fucking annoying to do
| on both sides of any transaction:
|
| - credit cards: cheap-ish at scale (2-5%), but users don't
| want to give random apps their CC details and integrating
| with Stripe/Paypal/whatever has the cost of UX flow break due
| to account details and 2FA compliance bullshit. In addition,
| every service paid-for by CC has the problem that only people
| with a CC can pay for it (so people in countries like Europe
| where "classic" bank accounts prevail are out of luck, and so
| are people in countries deemed too poor and/or fraud-
| affiliated are locked out entirely), and you gotta deal with
| tax and other regulatory compliance around handling payments
| as well. Oh and people will try to use your service to
| validate stolen payment credentials because a 1$ 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.
| UnreachableCode wrote:
| Europe isn't a country. And we have credit cards here.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Wow. Way to flippantly shit on the paragraphs of
| explanation they gave of their own free time.
|
| Europe though, yeah they're killing it.
| wheybags wrote:
| Why should anyone appreciate paragraphs of text from
| someone who thinks Europeans can't use payment cards?
| What reason would I have to presume the content of said
| paragraphs is better informed, given they have trivially
| disprovable rubbish up front?
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _I don't have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a
| gigantic chunk of the "i would rather pay a small fee to use
| a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads"
| crowd is mostly all-talk._
|
| 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).
| filoleg wrote:
| Not to dismiss your point about pricing numbers (as it is
| valid and makes sense to me), but I don't think iCloud
| comparison is that applicable to my argument, given there
| is no option to pay for larger iCloud storage with ad
| exposure.
|
| What I was talking about was paying by being exposed to ads
| vs. paying directly, and increased iCloud storage has no
| former option.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the
| time.
|
| (I worked for WhatsApp from 2011-2019)
|
| From that article, user count was about 900 Million when
| the fee was ended; user count was about 450 M in Feb 2014
| when the acquisition was announced [1]. Either way, it is a
| mistake to think everyone was paying.
|
| A) Some people still had lifetime accounts from when the
| app was $1 for iPhone, or from the typical late December
| limited time free for iPhone promotions. Windows Phone got
| marked as lifetime for a while due to a bug/oversight that
| took a while to get noticed.
|
| B) Enforcement was limited. A lot of users wouldn't have
| had a payment method that WhatsApp could accept; demanding
| payment when there's no way to pay isn't good for anybody.
| For a long time, we didn't even implement payment
| enforcement; we'd go through and extend subscriptions for a
| year, initially by manual script, then through automation.
| When we did build payment enforcement, I think we only set
| it on for Spain and maybe the US. Everywhere else would get
| the reminders that the account was going to expire, and
| then on the day of, it would silently extend the account
| and not bug you again for a while. Even where payment
| enforcement was on, it would only lock you out for I think
| a week, then your account would be extended and maybe you'd
| pay next time.
|
| Adding on, for a lot of users, the hassle of paying $1 is a
| bigger deal than the actual $1; but so for people in lower
| income countries, it's both --- a) it's hard to pay $1 to a
| US country for a large number of people, b) there are
| countries with significant number of people living on a
| dollar a day; I don't think it's reasonable to ask them to
| forgo a days worth of living to pay for a messenger.
|
| I don't remember numbers, and there's not a lot of
| financial reporting, because WhatsApp numbers are so small
| compared to the rest of FB/Meta, but there's a first half
| 2014 report [2] that shows revenue of $15M. Assuming
| payments are even over the year (probably not a good
| assumption, but we don't have good numbers), that'd be
| maybe 30 Million paying users (some users bought multiple
| years though), or less than 10%.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-26266689
|
| [2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001326
| 80114...
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| > Windows Phone got marked as lifetime for a while due to
| a bug/oversight that took a while to get noticed.
|
| Huh, is that what it was... I had a Windows Phone
| 2012-2013 and I think I signed up for WhatsApp on it and
| I remember chatting with a friend on it and he was
| talking about the $1 per year thing and I went to check,
| and it said I have lifetime and I was confused how I
| ended up with that, but was using it so lightly that I
| didn't bother to look into why. I figured maybe there was
| a promotion the day I signed up or something.
| toast0 wrote:
| You're welcome. :) IIRC, the check was written so that if
| the platform was one of the enumerated platforms
| (android, s60, s40, bb) give a 1 year, otherwise give a
| lifetime, which was intended to be iPhone gets lifetime,
| but then windows phone happened.
|
| IIRC, you had to have signed up with windows phone,
| switching phones to windows phone wouldn't grant you
| lifetime (switching to iPhone while the app was paid on
| iOS would).
| pmontra wrote:
| This is the story from the point of view of a user:
|
| One day the app asked me to pay. It was less than 1 Euro
| per year, I think. I never associated a credit card to
| the app store (Android) so I did not pay and waited to
| see what would happen.
|
| It kept asking for money for a few days but it kept
| working, so I thought they were not serious about it.
| Then it stopped asking. It started asking for money again
| after a few months but I remembered what happened before
| so I waited again. It kept working and eventually stopped
| asking for money. This pattern repeated a few times until
| maybe the time FB bought it.
|
| I believe that if it stopped working people would have
| switched en masse to another app, maybe Telegram? We also
| had Viber and probably FB messenger too.
|
| Switches happened many times in the 90s and early 2000s.
| I remember AIM, ICQ, MSN, then Skype. Whole networks of
| people moved to the next one or used more than one to
| message different friends. WhatsApp never had a chance to
| earn money directly from its users IMHO.
| neves wrote:
| Time to make it a public app and remove it from the
| private sector.
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| If I recall right, WhatsApp tookaway our lifetime
| subscriptions like a year after buying it, saying it
| wasn't necessary or something and put everyone all on the
| same plan.
| dieortin wrote:
| > When we did build payment enforcement, I think we only
| set it on for Spain and maybe the US.
|
| Can I ask why Spain specifically?
| cameldrv wrote:
| I know lots of people that pay for YT premium. Lots of people
| pay for Spotify too. I even pay for Kagi.
| yapyap wrote:
| Spotify I get because the Spotify free experience is
| HORRID.
|
| Youtube is also moving into that direction.
| jobigoud wrote:
| I think a good amount of people pay for Youtube just to
| be able to listen to audio with the screen off, which is
| a completely artificial restriction they added to the
| free version.
|
| Such a strange business model, making the free version
| below acceptable.
| timewizard wrote:
| > Such a strange business model, making the free version
| below acceptable.
|
| That's because the core product is not anywhere near
| worth what they charge for it. The youtube interface is a
| nightmare for users and creators alike. I have very
| little controls over what I do and don't see, how I can
| filter or search for content, or how I can search for new
| content. History of both videos and comments are
| effectively non existent and impossible to reasonably
| search or archive.
|
| It's not a service so much as it is a copyright
| clearinghouse.
|
| If they had an actual experience with worthwhile features
| to offer then they wouldn't have to artificially degrade
| the free experience to convince you.
| Hoasi wrote:
| It's unclear to me how the paid Spotify experience
| compares with free, but you still get ads with the paid
| one. Also, you need to curate heavily because Spotify's
| algorithm will push certain types of content. If you
| listen to a podcast once, it is hard to get rid of it, as
| it will keep popping into your feed, or whatever they
| call their interface.
| openplatypus wrote:
| Omg I literally puke with Shopify ads in podcasts.
|
| Whats the point of paid, premium service like Spotify if
| I keep being served those stupid, dishonest and bordeline
| illegally deceiving Shopify ads every 15 minutes.
| TingPing wrote:
| Because the ad has literally nothing to do with Spotify?
| Podcasters can say or sell whatever.
| qwerpy wrote:
| I rage quit my Spotify subscription after my first
| "sponsored" in the mobile app. Some people may tolerate
| ads in their paid subscriptions but many of us won't.
| tensor wrote:
| I'm honestly pretty damn pissed that even though I pay for
| the top tier of Spotify I still now get ads in podcasts on
| the platform. Yes, I can skip them for now, but when you're
| driving that's not always easy, and I have no doubt the
| "you can't skip them" is coming.
|
| Absolute bullshit.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Amazon prime had a lot of customers but they started to put
| ads to paying customers as well.
|
| So the alternative seems to be "free, with ads" or "paid,
| with ads"
| tehjoker wrote:
| We could also have public services.
| maplant wrote:
| I pay for YT Premium and Protonmail. Very happy to do so.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Paying for YT Premium is a no brainer. Especially for someone
| like myself with ADHD.
|
| I love paying for ad-removal. Take. My. Money.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Everyone else just uses newpipe, mpv, and so on
| xigoi wrote:
| I don't want to pay for YouTube because the official app,
| even without ads, has a much worse UX than Tubular.
| kalaksi wrote:
| I don't use YT much, but if I did and paid for premium, I'd
| assume they'd still track me, monetize the data and utilize
| dark patterns and enshittified UX.
|
| 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.
| acheron wrote:
| Exactly. The earlier post is overlooking the insanity of
| giving Google money, and acting as if they wouldn't just
| track you harder now that you have to be logged in with an
| account connected to your real identity and a credit card.
| I wouldn't pay for YouTube for the same reason I wouldn't
| pay for Gmail. But I'm happy to pay for another email
| provider.
| Guest9081239812 wrote:
| My site has about 30k active registered users a day. The vast
| majority are long term members that have been on the site for
| years, so they're quite dedicated to the service. Even so,
| only about 50 of them pay to remove advertising.
| stavros wrote:
| How much do you make per user on ads, and how much is the
| subscription?
| Guest9081239812 wrote:
| It only generates about 15k a year in ad revenue. It's
| fairly low revenue because:
|
| 1. Users are spread around the world. This isn't a site
| with 70% US visitors.
|
| 2. The majority of users run ad block, and this continues
| to rise.
|
| 3. Ad rates plummet each year. I earn about 5x less on
| the site now, than in the past, with the same number of
| active users, and 3x as many advertisements.
|
| I've tried all the major advertising networks. I setup
| header bidding and signed direct deals with large
| networks, such as AppNexus, Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, etc. At
| the end of the day, ads do not pay well for my audience.
|
| Users can pay $3/mo to remove advertising. Yes, I'm aware
| that's $36/yr, when the average registered user is
| generating less than $0.50/yr in ad revenue. About 30% of
| paying users choose to pay higher than $3/mo for no
| additional benefit (they can pay any amount they wish). I
| also have some individuals that have paid thousands of
| dollars.
|
| What would happen if I offered a $1/yr plan for an ad
| free experience, so it's more inline with ad revenues? I
| honestly don't know, but I would guess I would lose a few
| of the $3/mo paying users, and gain less than 100 users
| paying $1/yr, so it would likely be net negative.
| tobias3 wrote:
| This illustrates a bit the price discrimination "problem"
| that is solved via ads. With ads, higher-income people
| probably earn you more money automatically.
|
| With the fee to remove advertising, you'd need to use all
| the price discrimination tricks to maximize revenue.
| E.g., have sales, have discount codes, etc., and it would
| still not be close to the price discrimination possible
| via ads.
|
| I also wonder what the income of OP's bubble was when
| they were not paying for WhatsApp.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| This is really interesting. Can you say how much it costs
| the user to remove ads?
| wvh wrote:
| I am conflicted because to some extent, paying for some of
| these services feels like paying a blackmailer, spying on
| you, holding a whole ecosystem hostage and even jeopardising
| mental health and the public discourse.
|
| 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.
| sigotirandolas wrote:
| To be devil's advocate, this is the kind of all-talk
| argument the parent was referring to. Once the paid option
| is available, people will demand it to be [cheaper / better
| / someone else] and still not pay.
|
| While I don't love my money going to Google, I find
| YouTube's overall quality astronomically higher than
| Instagram/Twitter/TikTok/etc. and the amount of
| censorship/"moderation"/controversy has been relatively
| limited. When I find something I really want to keep I have
| always been able to download it without much trouble.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Taking the YouTube example, and many others like it, I _only_
| use it because it is free.
|
| 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.
| scrivanodev wrote:
| What would you replace YouTube with? To my its educational
| value is unmatched. I owe so much of my learning to it.
| hiq wrote:
| What did you learn thanks to it?
| LtWorf wrote:
| How to open my computer
| nkrisc wrote:
| I don't know what I would replace YouTube with, because
| YouTube is free so I have never needed to consider
| alternatives.
|
| But for the most part - probably nothing. For everything
| else, it'd just be either some other free option, or like
| going back to the internet of the early 2000s, which
| would be good and bad in its own ways.
| nytesky wrote:
| 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.
| mac-mc wrote:
| IMO if youtube was an actual paid service, I would also
| expect a lot of the advertiser driven demonitization
| actions to go away when your in paid mode, but it isn't
| so I still miss out on a lot of potentially interesting
| topics or things that could be talked about, but are not,
| due to the chilling effects of the demonitization &
| deboosting police.
| halfcat wrote:
| On the flip side, I'll pay $10/month for 10 streaming
| services I never use (and have forgotten about), but on a
| Saturday night if a movie isn't available and I have to pay
| $3.99 to rent it I never pay that. Instead I'll drive to
| the corner store and spend $20 on snacks, and come home and
| watch YouTube with ads.
|
| People are curious creatures indeed.
| danillonunes wrote:
| I paid like $2 to rent a movie about three years ago and
| didn't watched it entirely and boy it still hurts.
| timewizard wrote:
| > crowd is mostly all-talk.
|
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| Good news: Youtube Premium is trivial to cancel, comes with
| no multi-month obligations, and if you don't trust Google
| with your credit card you can pay for it with Google Play
| gift cards.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| Surely it has to be somewhat ideological given that
| adblockers exist? Have you seen your high paid engineer
| friends actually watching the 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, I'd pay more than
| the current cost of YouTube premium to definitely NOT be able
| to watch YouTube.
| nytesky wrote:
| YT Premium is pretty expensive. I think it costs as much for
| one user for a multi-device plan on Netflix?
|
| 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.
| qwerpy wrote:
| There's great content on YouTube but there's a lot of
| garbage. AI-generated slop, clickbait thumbnails/titles
| that actually don't payout, sales pitches, and plain old
| low-quality garbage. The lack of a thumbs down really makes
| it hard to avoid these. I realize that thumbs down is also
| used to punish "wrong" political viewpoints and companies,
| so it's a hard problem. But as a viewer who never uploads
| content, it only makes my experience worse.
| rconti wrote:
| I'm about to start paying for YouTube for the first time
| ever. Of course, they make it complicated because I don't
| actually want their bundled music service. And the "lite"
| version says _most_ videos are ad-free. But what 's
| preventing them from changing that deal the day after I sign
| up? And of course, once I become a customer, now I'm hooked,
| and I'm subject to their arbitrary price increases.
|
| Of course, as a "free" customer I'm already subject to their
| whims whenever they decide to add another advertising layer.
| kwijibob wrote:
| YouTube announced in March that they have 125 million premium
| subscribers.
|
| 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...
| A_Duck wrote:
| The trouble with charging people is you have to charge
| everybody the same[1], so you're leaving money on the table
| with wealthy users, and pricing out poorer users
|
| 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
| xp84 wrote:
| That is the absolute beauty of the targeted ad situation,
| isn't it: you can generate leads for mortgages or expensive
| enterprise SaaS services, that are happy to pay super high
| acquisition costs, maximizing revenue from your rich users,
| and with the same ad inventory, maximize the revenue from
| your poor users by advertising App Store casino games for
| children, payday loans, etc. You can see why Meta doesn't
| bother offering a paid service here.
| barnabee wrote:
| I'd love to know the expected ad revenue per user for makers of
| apps like WhatsApp, Instagram.
|
| 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.
| owebmaster wrote:
| You would not, because 90% of the years wouldn't pay and you
| wouldn't also to have nobody to talk to after everybody moves
| to the next chat app
| barnabee wrote:
| Why would users who can continue to receive exactly the
| same experience as today leave because some other users can
| opt to pay to go ad-free?
| detaro wrote:
| I'm not sure if the number was for Facebook specifically or
| all Meta apps, but they did quote a number of around $70
| revenue per year per US user a while ago. (with (much) lower
| numbers in other parts of the world)
| barnabee wrote:
| That's interesting, thanks
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| These numbers are actually kinda interesting, in that
| they're based on user location, not advertiser. So
| basically all global companies target the US first because
| it's a big market with consistent regulations and mostly
| one language (compare to the EU where you'd need
| English/German/French/Spanish/Polish and still would miss a
| lot).
|
| So, those numbers reflect a capital inflow to the US market
| rather than (as many people think) absurdly high conversion
| US users.
|
| Meta stopped reporting user numbers/CPMs by geography after
| the market freaked out when user growth plateaued in the US
| (because they'd acquired basically everyone).
| detaro wrote:
| > _So, those numbers reflect a capital inflow to the US
| market rather than (as many people think) absurdly high
| conversion US users._
|
| But the capital inflow is also because there is a lot of
| consumer spending in the US to convert.
| xp84 wrote:
| Don't underestimate how expensive ads are and thus how much
| money they can bring in. Marco Arment, the developer of
| Overcast podcast player, has made remarks in the past about
| how the ad-supported version is completely viable and may
| actually make him more money per user than the price of his
| paid option. In his case, he runs his own contextual ad
| system. Obviously Meta is in a completely different league in
| terms of sophistication, meaning they are probably able to
| sell more targeted ads which means more money, and they also
| have the luxury of not having to pay any middlemen since they
| own their own ad infrastructure as well.
|
| 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.
| tensor wrote:
| If Instragram had a reasonable paid tier, like $5 a month,
| I'd do that in a hearbeat. I'd also use instragram 1000x
| more. Because it's ads only in north america, I use it the
| minimum I need to for networking purposes.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I can say from experience and from others who have been in this
| position (not email, but general services); its around 1-2% of
| people.
|
| 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.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Nebula just doesn't have a product I want. I don't care for
| early access to Youtube videos.
| paxys wrote:
| Video is impossible to break into because of how expensive it
| is. Even YouTube by all accounts is just breaking even. And
| that is with Google's entire infrastructure and advertising
| machinery behind it. A new entrant simply doesn't stand a
| chance.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Hold on... A ton of broadcasters, production companies, and
| individuals have done it and are doing it.
|
| YouTube have many competitors and some of them are
| enormous, such as Netflix and cable TV. Production
| companies are popping up all the time and are making some
| of the world's highest quality material. The same for
| individuals who are making videos.
|
| Or do you mean that YouTube needs a competitor that does
| exactly the same thing as YouTube?
| paxys wrote:
| All of them are based on the traditional media production
| model. The companies were all well established in the
| industry (minus Netflix) and the only change was to go
| from broadcast/cable/theater to streaming. YouTube
| pioneered user generated videos and independent content
| creators. Its only competitor is probably Twitch, but
| that itself is owned by Amazon and losing a ton of money.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| All of them have the technical infrastructure to host
| user uploaded videos, so it's not impossible to compete
| with YouTube.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| No one does video even remotely close to the scale YT
| does it. YT has by far the deepest market penetration
| (close to 3 billion monthly users), and has by far the
| most hosted content, and critically, youtube adds over a
| half-million hours of video a day.
|
| Essentially, youtube adds more video every single day
| than the entirety of every other streaming service offers
| combined.
|
| Youtube is in it's own category, and it's unsurprising no
| else wants to touch it.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Counted in number of hours watched, I'm pretty sure that
| Netflix, cable TV and satellite TV, can compete with
| YouTube.
|
| But everybody has to start somewhere. Would it be
| impossible for Netflix to start adding for example 100
| 000 hours of user generated video per day?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Would it be practical and economical is the right
| question to ask.
|
| Providers would be more than happy to sell Netflix the
| build out
| giantrobot wrote:
| Serving user generated content is very expensive in terms
| of infrastructure. More expensive in many ways than
| streaming studio generated content.
|
| The scales of the two models are very different.
| Ingesting content is more complicated with user generated
| content because there's few guarantees about formats
| (encoding, color, file formats). Serving the content is
| also more complicated because it's not as friendly to
| edge caches as studio content. Part of the expense of
| YouTube is the long tail of content. Popular content
| might live in edge caches but YouTube serves up old
| unpopular stuff too.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I pay for Nebula and still use Youtube a ton. Nebula is nice
| but it doesn't have all channels I watch.
| maplant wrote:
| Vis a vis nebula, this is definitely a product issue.
| Dropout.tv seems to be extremely successful and has a similar
| value proposition
| tmtvl wrote:
| I've got a Nebula lifetime membership and it's neat. I
| actually discovered channels through it (Not Just Bikes,
| WonderWhy, 12tone,...) which I hadn't heard of before. I also
| paid for YT Premium Lite in the past. The full YT Premium is
| too expensive for me, though.
|
| 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| Twitch also lets people pay more than just the service
| price. So you'll they some people paying for themselves,
| but you'll also get whales paying for hundreds of other
| people. No other site I know of lets you do that really.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Most people go absolutely mentally deranged by a simple magical
| incantation. The powerful incantation or spell consists of only
| one word: "Free". That word will make people loose their mind
| and their soul.
|
| 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.
| UnreachableCode wrote:
| But Signal is free. And ad-free
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Sure, it's a rare case of a project which is sponsored and
| paid for by a billionaire. I wish there were more such
| projects, but you can't base an economy on charity from
| billionaires.
| tumsfestival wrote:
| Well, that is what happens when everything costs money and
| most people are just trying to get by on a daily basis,
| making cuts everywhere just to pay their bills, not everyone
| has a nice disposable income to throw away at apps. That
| people prefer ads over paying yet another subscription is a
| symptom of unchecked capitalism and the inequality that comes
| with it.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| I remember when Whatsapp became a paid app, I can't remember
| the details as I believe they varied by platform (iOS vs
| Android) but it was either EUR0.79 or EUR0.99, I'm not sure if
| one off or yearly payment, but it doesn't matter.
|
| I, as the "computer guy", had friends and family asking how to
| pirate it. This is coming from SMS costing EUR0.25 _per
| message_ (text only!) and also coming from people who would
| gladly pay EUR3 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.
| basisword wrote:
| >> I, as the "computer guy", had friends and family asking
| how to pirate it.
|
| 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.
| schroeding wrote:
| Interestingly, the pendulum at least in my friend group
| starts to kinda swing in the other direction, i.e. non-
| technical friends start to indirectly ask (me as the tech
| guy) about blatant piracy for (visual, Spotify is still
| very much accepted) media and (TOS-violating[1]) ad
| blockers for ad-supported streaming.
|
| I cannot overstate how unexpected this was and is to me, we
| talk about people in their mid-twenties with jobs - maybe
| (video) streaming / subscriptions services actually
| overplayed their hand in the current economic climate.
|
| Doesn't make me super optimistic in this regard.
|
| [1] even if most of it is void in my jurisdiction anyway
| nemomarx wrote:
| Number of competing video services with distinct
| libraries has kinda put it back in vogue, I think. No one
| I've ever talked to is really happy about paying for more
| than 1-2 streaming services, especially if some of them
| only have one show they're interested in. If that show is
| really tempting it becomes tempting to just pirate
| Severance or what have you instead of signing up to one
| new service for it on top of Netflix et al.
| yibg wrote:
| Similar situation as flights. People complain about lack of
| space, misc fees etc. But when it comes down to it, people
| for the most part, still pick the cheapest flight.
|
| 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).
| sdeframond wrote:
| > when it comes down to it, people for the most part, still
| pick the cheapest flight.
|
| Flight comparators don't show "avaliable legroom" in their
| metrics.
|
| As far as I know some companies charge more for seats near
| entrances where there's more space, so people _are_ willing
| to pay more.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _As far as I know some companies charge more for seats
| near entrances where there 's more space, so people are
| willing to pay more_
|
| In my anecdotal experience, the people complaining about
| leg room are precisely those who are not paying for
| additional leg room. (Similar to how people who compare
| modern air travel with service in the 1960s aren't
| purchasing the inflation-adjusted equivalent ticket,
| which would almost always be a lay-flat seat today if not
| Wheels Up.)
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Google flights does - at least as well as they can base
| don the airline and plane. They'll also compare this to
| the average. All airlines charge more for exit rows and
| their extra legroom, typically as "premium economy"
| seats.
| 6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote:
| I guess the point being Youtube versus Youtube without ads
| is as different as Coke versus water. But you're point
| holds in that people think they are the same service, as
| the ads bit, no matter how integral, is seen as 'other'
| than the service. This is a big win for the service
| provider. I remember when RyanAir charged PS5 per flight
| plus PS50 unavoidable add-ons, you ask anyone how much they
| paid, they said PS5. Seems like the same thing here - we
| give the service provider too much kudos, it's as though
| consuming a service makes it part of us, so we big it up no
| matter if it's taking us for a ride.
| noosphr wrote:
| People pick the cheapest flights because price is a simple
| number they can understand.
|
| How to you qualify the comfort of a seat with 20cm of
| legroom vs 30cm? Until we have a quality metric for flights
| that's also a single number we can't.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The price is one of the few things that's always
| available when choosing between flights. Journey time is
| the other, and people will pay for a shorter journey or
| shorter layovers.
|
| Strangely, some of my colleagues have 'paid' (work's
| money, their time) extra to avoid Ryanair, when Ryanair
| has the only direct connection. This I find strange.
|
| Given the choice, I've long paid a little more if it
| means an Airbus plane, as I think the cabin is quieter.
| However, that's rarely shown on flight booking sites.
| bsoles wrote:
| The problem with paying a small fee for a service is not the
| fee itself. It is the friction for paying for the service and
| the hassle that comes after the payment.
|
| 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.
| mikedelfino wrote:
| > It is the friction for paying for the service and the
| hassle that comes after the payment.
|
| I don't know. Paying for streaming services seems very
| natural nowadays.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| I can guarantee none of your concerns apply to the people I
| was talking about, particularly the privacy ones. These
| people would pay for their meal at a restaurant using their
| debit/credit card without hesitation, and they still do,
| and that's arguably more likely to get your card details
| stolen, and the issuer knowing about your life. Those
| worries you're citing never crossed their minds. They just
| didn't want to pay a tiny amount of money for an "abstract"
| thing.
| xandrius wrote:
| I really don't buy that the reason is the "tracking".
|
| It's the friction of paying for something at all. There is
| no free sandwich, so people don't generally expect it, on
| the other hand there's plenty of free software.
| rconti wrote:
| I was just thinking about this the other day -- hotels so
| badly want me to book directly with them instead of using,
| say Booking.com.
|
| But then to book directly and get the "guaranteed
| cheapest!" price, I have to sort through even more options
| than on an aggregator, I have to create an account, and now
| I'm getting spammed from ANOTHER entity I never plan to do
| business with again. At least with the aggregators I have
| one company whose privacy settings I've already dealt with.
| ab_testing wrote:
| I book with hotels directly almost all the time and never
| receive marketing spam just regular mail about my
| upcoming start. Also booking with the hotel lets me
| select options not available on booking sites like king
| vs 2 queen bed options, ADA compliant rooms and even
| floor options. Also if you have AAA or some other
| memberships, those codes can easily beat discount sites
| like Booking.com
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _... Whatsapp became a paid app ... it was either EUR0.79
| or EUR0.99, I'm not sure if one off or yearly payment, but it
| doesn't matter ..._
|
| 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 $1/year fee.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/8-pJa11YvCs?t=952
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > people would never pay for software.
|
| I mostly share your conclusion, but I think there is a
| specific twist: most people will pay for on the spot
| transactions.
|
| We see it in spades for games: in-app purchases and season
| passes have a lower barrier of acceptance. I assume buying
| stones to unlock a character must be thought at the same
| level as buying coffee, as just a one-time purchase that
| doesn't require further calculations.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| at least for some of it what's nice is that you are getting
| exactly what you paid for on the tin, and most importantly
| you are _not_ getting locked into some god-awful
| subscription with a cancellation process akin to pulling
| teeth.
|
| the urge to buy goes down if the subscription is cheap
| enough ($.99 songs versus $12 a spotify subsscription) but
| having been through my fair share of attempting contract
| cancellations this isn't surprising.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| On the other hand, I did pay the $1 for Whatsapp back in the
| day and I was promised it'd be ad free. Want that $1 back, I
| actually even deleted my account and uninstalled Whatsapp!
| fossuser wrote:
| I feel a bit for Brian Acton - iirc he refused to sell
| because the 500M users paying $500M dollars was more than
| enough to fund his tiny team (of 30?), but when the offer
| went up to 19B$ it's just kind of hard to turn down -
| there's extreme opportunity cost there. Most people would
| sell before that, 19B$ of principle is quite a lot.
|
| I think it's just if you're empire building - and Zuck is
| insanely good at this, one of the best - then it'll never
| be optimal to charge vs. grow massively and then monetize
| the larger attention base.
|
| Zuck is also in a trench warfare competition with other
| social media players, it's far from a monopoly. He's
| historically been more inclined to do things that were
| worse for growth, but better for users when they had more
| of a dominant position - but he can't do that anymore.
|
| Somewhat relatedly Apple really missed an opportunity with
| iMessage. Had they timed it right they could have had a
| dominant cross platform chat. Instead they're going to be
| stuck with the modern equivalent of BBM while Zuck and Meta
| erase their only remaining stronghold in the US as iPhone
| users continue to move to WhatsApp.
| gsich wrote:
| Or because back then only credit card payment was possible?
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| I pay a third party to host my email, and wouldn't mind paying
| an honest service provider to host something like an XMPP
| service.
|
| I wouldn't pay Meta or similar companies for messaging
| services. And especially not for siloed messaging networks.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| HN crowd has never been representative in this regard.
|
| 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.
| basisword wrote:
| >> Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying
| for their core services
|
| 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.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "There must be a 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."
|
| 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 software, and certainly not 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. (We have 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.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| YES!
|
| finally people will start to move out of whatsbook!
|
| ....i hope
| vachina wrote:
| If ads are not unblockable (via DNS), then it's time for Signal.
| Funes- wrote:
| With all the morally reprovable shit they've pulled on their
| users, it's always been time for Signal.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| If that's the case, I'll just switch to Apple Messages since all
| 3 people in the world that I talk to have those available.
| rootnod3 wrote:
| I think that kind of business model will screw them. Line has a
| more sensible one. For example if a business wants to message all
| its followers, they can only do so twice a month unless they
| start paying. So customers get an ad-free experience and can only
| receive ad messages from companies or accounts they follow.
| davweb wrote:
| Meta are already monetising business usage of WhatsApp in this
| way[1].
|
| Any ads are in addition to this, not instead of.
|
| [1]: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/whatsapp/pricing/
| nottorp wrote:
| I remember paying 0.99 for ... something ... before Whatsapp was
| acquired by Facebook.
|
| 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?
| charles_f wrote:
| Whatsapp used to be paying (and pretty cheap) before it was
| bought out, and I was happy to pay for it. I'd much rather have
| that than starting to get ads. They're going to be hidden in a
| feature no-one uses, they're not going to use private data, but
| given Facebook's invasive behavior, how true is it and how long
| will it last?
| perks_12 wrote:
| WhatsApp has S-tier status here in Germany. If I had access to a
| proper API I would pay them per message, without them needing to
| make their UX worse. If anything, if I had to pay per message,
| I'd be incentivized not to send too many messages, keeping the
| distractions for the user at a minimum.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| This is why they've been pretty draconian in banning users who
| work around the official apps and limits. Otherwise, to force
| their ads they would have to oust third-parties the way Reddit
| did.
| timeon wrote:
| > If anything, if I had to pay per message, I'd be incentivized
| not to send too many messages
|
| Sounds like SMS.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Except not limited to 160 characters (70 if you want Unicode)
| and with rich media capabilities.
| stonogo wrote:
| So... MMS, then?
| djtango wrote:
| Why did MMS feel so janky back in the day?
|
| Was it a client thing or a protocol thing?
|
| Whatsapp felt so responsive back in the day. I'd be
| pinging my family in real time halfway across the globe
| on mobile in 2009. For Free. That was a killer app...
|
| Why did MMS fail where Whatsapp succeeded?
| okdood64 wrote:
| > S-tier status here in Germany
|
| What does this mean exactly?
| jobigoud wrote:
| It's the top tier in tier lists.
|
| See the image here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_list
|
| Popular format on Youtube, reddit, etc.
| christina97 wrote:
| There's something particularly paternalistic about this statement
| from the PM: "Your personal messages, calls and statuses, they
| will remain end-to-end encrypted".
| blitzar wrote:
| Any man who must say, "I am the King", is no true king.
|
| Any tech company who must say, "we don't harvest your
| information", is a tech company that harvests your information.
| gruez wrote:
| Signal also claims the same:
|
| > 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?
| 7373737373 wrote:
| Yes
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Signal isn't backed by a global data gathering
| conglomerate, so no.
| gruez wrote:
| You're right, they're funded by something far more
| sinister - the US government.
|
| More to the point, I thought the principle was "Any man
| who must say, "I am the King", is no true king."? That
| seems to leave no room for hedging, like only distrusting
| "global data gathering conglomerate" or whatever. If
| you're have to do a holistic assessment of an
| organization's governance structure and incentives,
| you're basically admitting that witty one-liners like the
| above are pointless, which was my point.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Sure you should be suspicious. You should always be
| suspicious. Especially if it's free. And you can do
| something to calm your suspicions. Like checking out
| Signlas Open Source code.
| gruez wrote:
| >Like checking out Signlas Open Source code.
|
| What's preventing them from serving a backdoored version?
| xz was open source as well, that didn't stop the
| backdoor. There might be reproducible builds on android,
| but you can't even inspect the executable on iOS without
| jailbreaking.
| paxys wrote:
| Every time I read such a statment I mentally add " _for now_ "
| at the end.
| rchaud wrote:
| US TV channels are inundated with Whatsapp ads claiming the
| same. Not surprising considering that it's been considered the
| "foreigners" messaging app for a long time, and the US
| government is now doing its very best to make them feel
| completely unwelcome.
| gear54rus wrote:
| Does anyone know what's the state of the art way for cutting crap
| out of android apps? In the same way adblock cuts crap out of web
| pages?
|
| 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?
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| DNS blocking with tools like DNSNet get you halfway there
| without tampering with the apps. It installs itself like a VPN
| and filters dns requests to ad domains using lists from the
| same sources as the adblockers.
|
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| More than halfway I'd say. It blocks everything from third
| party ad networks, which is what 90%+ of websites and apps
| use.
| yehoshuapw wrote:
| also adaway, which does the same or can be used in root mode
| to edit the hosts file.
|
| I use the hosts file from there, and edit it manually via
| "adb root" (lineageos. root only via adb)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, the
| messaging app had a clear focus. No ads, no games and no
| gimmicks.
|
| 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.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Youtube was the same. Both are products that people really want
| to use.
| timeon wrote:
| Also Instagram and others. It was about capturing and selling
| community.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I agree, although that's too vague. YouTube has a different
| appeal. But my point is more that I wouldn't say YouTube got
| ads because it stopped having a focus on not having ads. It
| needs to pay for itself.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| How was it unsustainable? As far as I know they were simply
| competent. They charged $1/year, so had ~half a billion in
| revenue, right? They probably could've bumped that to
| $2-$5/year with similar uptake. And they ran it with ~500
| servers and 50 employees 12 years ago, so could probably do the
| same with ~50 or fewer servers today.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| They're doing a lot more now, though. Voice notes; multi-way
| video and audio calls; e2ee. And they barely even charged
| $1/year. I never paid for it.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Whatsapp revenue was $10M and the cost of revenue was $52M,
| with total net loss of $138M/yr just before facebook
| acquisition.
|
| [1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/00013268
| 0114...
| BiggerChungus wrote:
| Respectfully, clearly you aren't familiar with Jan and Brian's
| history of public statements.
|
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > The founders, however, were never interested in an ad
| business and hold that POV to this day.
|
| 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.
| otterley wrote:
| They did have VC funding from Sequoia Capital. (https://www
| .crunchbase.com/organization/whatsapp/financial_d...)
| dakial1 wrote:
| https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/whatsapp-will-monetize-lat...
|
| 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"
| like_any_other wrote:
| It's called bait-and-switch - lure users in away from (possibly
| FOSS, e.g. Matrix) competitors, and when you have enough
| network effects that switching becomes hard, spring the trap.
| rchaud wrote:
| Have you considered that _you_ may be making the surface-level
| analysis? I paid $3 for Whatsapp in 2010 on the Blackberry app
| store. They had a staff of ~20 people handling messages across
| almost 200 countries.It became the defacto global messaging app
| because it was available on every single platform, not just the
| Apple /Google duopoly VCs cared about.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| One thing I don't hear people is ads used as tracking tools. The
| Facebook pixel is huge for not just tracking for digital
| advertisements but tracking across the web for surveillance. With
| ads in WhatsApp, you could in theory use advertisements for
| identity resolution.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| This post was no.5 on hacker news, minutes later I'm surprised it
| is now somewhere around 67.
| ommz wrote:
| Ah... There's a pattern here. Soon enough, just like with
| Facebook pages eons ago, they will nerf the reach of WhatsApp
| channels then prod channel owners to pay for more eyeballs.
|
| 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.
| vips7L wrote:
| Just another reason iMessage is coming out on top.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| imessage is irrelevant outside of the US.
| standardUser wrote:
| iMessage is successful because it is designed to reward other
| iMessage users and punish those who dare not use an iPhone.
| It's social engineering in the pursuit of profit by the
| overwhelming market leader (in the US) and it's working really,
| really well.
| nojvek wrote:
| WhatsApp promise to users by it's founders.
|
| "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.
| baggachipz wrote:
| I'm sure their tears are rolling down the mountains of cash
| they sit upon.
| illiac786 wrote:
| > In-app ads are a significant change from WhatsApp's original
| philosophy. Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who founded WhatsApp in
| 2009, were committed to building a simple and quick way for
| friends and family to communicate with end-to-end encryption
|
| 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.
| kovariantenkak wrote:
| Fun fact: For the first few years WhatsApp didn't have any
| encryption whatsoever. It took public pressure for them to even
| add TLS.
|
| A massive oversight on the authors part and completely missing
| the point of early WhatsApp as first status update application
| and then SMS replacement.
| EGreg wrote:
| Didn't Facebook promise the WhatsApp guys, or its users, that it
| will "never" show ads in that app, as a condition of buying it?
| saintfire wrote:
| They didn't pinky promise, though.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Looks like it's (for now) only in the "Updates" tab..
| huqedato wrote:
| Great. It's then time to drop it and move on.
| openplatypus wrote:
| I could easily pay for WhatsApp if it wasnt Facebook/Meta.
|
| With it being Meta I can be sure I will pay and still have my
| data and privacy violated.
| arch_deluxe wrote:
| This seems like a good time to mention that FreeFollow.org is
| looking for private beta testers for our app that combines the
| pub/sub model and slick UX of social media (posts, comments,
| following) with the economic model of webhosting (pay to host a
| group, not to participate in them) and the E2EE design of
| 1Password (but using OPAQUE which is actually the protocol used
| by WhatsApp, rather than SRP).
|
| 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.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Today is the day the notion of the 'internet is free, good and a
| convenience' is over for the global public. WhatsApp was the
| first ever primary convenience brought by the advent of the
| internet - it fulfilled a legitimate need all over the world by
| providing essentially free, limitless, boundless communication if
| you had few megabytes of internet in your mobile quota. It is to
| this day the #1 most used app for a good percentage of the
| population, only surpassed by social media. (Mostly because of
| the immortal network effects lingering from a decade ago.)
|
| 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.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> WhatsApp was the first ever primary convenience brought by
| the advent of the internet
|
| Unique but I believe fundamentally incorrect take on the
| Internet...
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