- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
You must log in or register to comment.
As someone in the Netherlands who has to use it and really doesn’t want to, I sure hope this motivates to Dutch to stop using this stupid app as the defacto texting platform.
That’s why I’ll defend vigorously the way we use SMS in the US.
Sure, it’s an outdated, insecure, bad system. Improvements like RCS are still iffy and poorly-rolled-out. But it’s also a standard you can use to connect with EVERYONE, isn’t controlled by a single private company (even if the evil fucks at Google desperately want it to be), and is totally interoperable between apps (since the apps are, after all, merely implementing a protocol).
I have high hopes the interoperability standards the EU is proposing will amount to something, but I won’t be holding my breath for it. In the meantime, I am not going to switch to whatever app is trending until it can at LEAST do everything I currently can with SMS.
WhatsApp claims to be E2E/not readable by Facebook and to my knowledge, all we have to the contrary is speculation provided you verify the keys on both ends (same as Signal). Facebook might know who you’re messaging but that’s also true for Signal. I’d still 100% trust Signal over WhatsApp given Facebook’s massive conflict of interest, but SMS has been known-bad and collected by the NSA for a decade now. US telecommunications companies also have a terrible reputation for privacy. The only advantage it has over any other platform is portability between providers but even that falls to the side since you can have multiple messaging apps at once.
Please do it! That would help me convince my reminding friends to move to Signal.
deleted by creator
So, if WhatsApp eventually fails, can we accept for at least just this once, to move on to something that is not proprietary and owned by a large company, please? Please, for the love of everything can we please for once move on to something that is open source and for just this once not repeat the same fucking mistake over and over again?
Isn’t Whatsapp owned by meta?
If so, why do people use it?
Find the change. Be the change.
why do people use it?
because it gained popularity in countries where sending SMS used to cost money at the time, years before Facebook has purchased it, became the main means of communication, and it turns out that moving an entire country’s (or even continent’s) population away from a messaging app has proven to be difficult.
Also because MMS was/is dogshit and sending photos etc through WhatsApp was much better
Ironically, it got popular when it still tried to get users to subscribe to a monthly payment. And as it was one of the few messaging platforms to be (in the future) paid at all, I cannot understand why it ever got popular…
Well, sure, Meta cancelled the subscription plans later but to me it sounded a red flag in the first place.
Whatsapp became popular because it was the only app that ran on everything in 2010, it ran on the newly appeared smartphones as well as on featurephones. Nokia, Blackberry, Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, you name it, it was supported.
Okay, that is a very good point that I did not realize.
And as it was one of the few messaging platforms to be (in the future) paid at all, I cannot understand why it ever got popular…
Because that way people thought they were directly paying for the service they were using, instead of being the product of said platform, having their personal data harvested and sold to the highest bidder?
Well, sure, Meta cancelled the subscription plans later but to me it sounded a red flag in the first place.
The red flag is to look at a free meal and not wonder what the catch might be. Especially to this day, with all we learned about what the tech majors do with all the data.
Because that way people thought they were directly paying for the service they were using, instead of being the product of said platform, having their personal data harvested and sold to the highest bidder?
Are you saying that people perceived WhatsApp as better than SMS or better than Facebook?
The red flag is to look at a free meal and not wonder what the catch might be. Especially to this day, with all we learned about what the tech majors do with all the data.
That’s not my point. My point is why would the majority of the world do this when they knew it was going to be paid.
I can’t think of other product examples where people would so gladly accept trial versions of otherwise free feature-equivalent services. Maybe WinRAR, but that could be replaced with any other product instantly anyway (no network effect), should it ever get enforce its trial.
Because that way people thought they were directly paying for the service they were using, instead of being the product of said platform, having their personal data harvested and sold to the highest bidder?
Are you saying that people perceived WhatsApp as better than SMS or better than Facebook?
As it happened, both.
The red flag is to look at a free meal and not wonder what the catch might be. Especially to this day, with all we learned about what the tech majors do with all the data.
That’s not my point. My point is why would the majority of the world do this when they knew it was going to be paid.
Back then, the norm was to pay for a service. When it’s good and the price is fair, people use it, especially when the alternative was feature-limited SMS paid by the message at inadequately high cost. And Facebook isn’t free: you trade privacy and exposure to customized ads in exchange for access to the service, so your comparison is biased.
Whatsapp was a paid service in some areas, but only $1 per year.
Ugh and I just got my dad to use it instead of SMS
(No he will not use Signal)
Can I ask why he wouldn’t use Signal?
Every single person I know or meet uses WhatsApp. About 90% of the businesses I interact with use WhatsApp Businesses. My whole family uses WhatsApp.
Moving to another system is going to take a lot a lot of work.
Say it with me… M O N O P O L Y
In business there isn’t a monopoly just yet teams and slack are way more common
I left WhatsApp and convinced my entire circle to switch to Telegram, it may not be matrix or signal and it may not have end-to-end encryption but it’s a beginning.
Here in Germany in my circle (which has people from mid-twenties to 60+, from the North to the center), most people use Signal, with Telegram being a rare outlier. WhatsApp is what everyone uses, though.
