WhatsApp head confirms ads in the messaging app are still in the works
Would you mind ads in WhatsApp as long as they’re not in your inbox?
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
Telegram has some nice features and I can understand that people want to go away from WhatsApp, but as you said it doesn’t even have end to end encryption and additionally belongs to some Russian. How’s that a beginning?
If you’re already switching, why not go to matrix or signal instead if they are, as you said yourself, most likely the better choice? If you’re switching because of the features, okay. But switching, because of privacy concerns or the company behind it makes absolutely no sense imo.
SimpleX uses Signal's protocol but requires no phone number or sign up.
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?
Nope. Ease to use will always triumph over open source
We've got all these devs volunteering time to these FOSS projects but rarely do we have people whose role is to figure out what users want. Devs tend to design from the perspective of "what features do "I" care about" which isn't always aligned with what users care about.
You know what's funny, Snapchat is and always was a confusing mess of a service. Didn't stop it.
It's not ease of use that closed-source brings, it's a brand image. Companies like Apple, MS, Amazon, spend millions annually on shaping their brand. That image makes people feel at ease. It provides context, trust and a sense of familiarity and security because "why would Apple ever spy on me, they are a publicly traded company used by billions?" is more favourable than "oh some geeks made this thing in their basement and can watch me??"
I dont think so, Apple Google Meta and Microsoft have to grow their revenue so they will have to make their service either more expensive or crappier. And I think, at some point, this will drive people to open source alternatives. Or atleast I hope so
I want to add "federated" to your list, as the only thing that actually matters long term. Signal checks your requirements but has already started to turn user-hostile (e.g. it mandates its own client so you get to have crypto payments whether you like it or not), and, as the single point of control, is an easy target and a single major liability.
Remember the days when WhatsApp was nice to its users? There is no technical guarantee that other centralized systems won't go the same path, which is largely mitigated when the network is made of smaller interoperable actors (i.e. a federation).
I would love to see XMPP be rediscovered and massively adopted as that next gen messenger. I don't trust Matrix to ever be reliable or get past their neverending funding troubles.
Why do people still have faith in this broken system? Companies the size and reach of Meta, do not "fail". Big companies like these have enough control and power to quash or simply buyout future competitors that would usurp them.
There is no system where people vote with their wallets and we can shift control by way of consumer revenue alone. That dream died some 100+ years ago when companies grew large enough to overthrow governments (Chiquita Banana), shape societies (Walmart & McDonald's) and build monopolies so resilient, they will control us into the next millennium (Google).
If you're all banking on the freedom of economy and capitalism self correcting, man is that a long wait for a train that won't come.
There are many people on the privacy communities that will preach about Telegram. Those are supposedly "privacy conscious" folk. Bro, most people just need a slick looking interface that makes them feel cool. Hating on Meta is also somewhat cool at the moment, and those two reasons are why most people switch.
There is no hope.
Telegram doesn't even support encryption for group chats!
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.
They won't. Most people just don't care at all unfortunately :(
"Privacy conscious WhatsApp users" 😂 My sides.
WhatsApp could flip on ads right now, right in the middle of messages and the majority wouldn't switch.
They put ads in I'm switching. People can send me SMS for all I care
There'd be at least some Whatsapp users that chose to use it because it's end-to-end encrypted using Signal Protocol
Please do it! That would help me convince my reminding friends to move to Signal.
But how is Signal going to make enough money to support a massive user base?
Also, the article says
Cathcart responded that WhatApp will not have ads within the inbox or in the “messaging experience.”
So it seems they're just going to be added to the extra features that most people don't care about. Of course they could always change their mind, but that seems like a suicide move.
My exact thought.
And perhaps this will force the eyes open of many companies that use that garbage to circulate private and delicate communications.
For the people who suggest users just change apps. Imagine I just ban all your current forms of text communication (you can still have e-mail), but only you, your family and friends will keep their ecosystems. Do you care you won't talk to them anymore? Can you convince them to use a new app? Does it affect your life beyond social interactions? Is it worth making your life harder?
Signal has a feature that tells you when done of your contacts starts using it. So I know for a fact how many of my friends have the app and let me tell you, it's a lot more than I thought. At least 50-60%, which means it wouldn't be that hard to tip the balance if Whatsapp pulls something truly stupid.
I can't speak for everybody obviously but from what I've noticed people around here aren't overly attached to any particular messaging app. One app, two apps, three apps, it doesn't really matter, you use what you need. There's nothing stopping you from keeping Whatsapp around for the chat history but doing your future chatting on Signal, or mixing the two. It doesn't have to be all or nothing and it doesn't have to be a hard switch all at once.
There's no reason to trust Signal more than WhatsApp long term: the flaw isn't whether it's opensource or not, or whether it operates as a nonprofit today or not. The core issue is centralization: as soon as you accept that a single organization owns the whole network, you lose all leverage and freedom, and you should only expect that it will eventually turn against your interests with no recourse. Favour federated protocols (e.g. XMPP) which are by design largely immune to this, if you search for a stable and safe place for the long run.
Telegram is the same. It's the app people will migrate to because it's the app people learned to use when WhatsApp can't operate for some reason. Not many people there. People here are overly attached.
YES PLEASE BRING ADS. It will be one more reason to convince people to get off the platform.
Isnt the EU working on something requiring Whatsapp to open up cross messaging for Signal and co.? If they do, there is no reason to be on wa anymore.
No I think they're pushing for RCS, that SMS successor thing that's supposed to be a standard on Android phones (which it is, only caveat for now is you can only use the Samsung and Google Messages app), but Apple is the only one not using it. I believe they did manage to force Apple to get working on ditching iMessage for RCS by mid-2024.
Yes the DMA. WhatsApp has the skeleton code for it in place I think
The thing is... I still wouldn't want to send private messages to a WhatsApp user, because that would mean those messages are also handled by a service I specifically meant to avoid by switching to Signal.
But then again, Signal spoke out against it anyway, precisely for that reason.
The day that happens I can hopefully uninstall this thing already. Most of my friends use it, they're really big here in Europe. Pretty hard to move to another app.
If that doesn't convince your friends, nothing will.
I use iMessage to text my close friends. But I live in a country where WhatsApp is a verb.
So I do end up using WhatsApp and in my experience, it’s already riddled with
I don’t see how it can be any worse tbh. Instagram ads are way better imo.
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary WhatsApp might still deploy ads on the platform alongside the app’s Instagram Stories-like Status feature, company head Will Cathcart recently said in an interview.
As pointed out by TechCrunch, Cathcart stated that WhatsApp ads could show up in different places within the app, including the newer Channels feature and statuses, though no timeline was provided for the change.
In the Brazilian publication Folha De S.Paulo, the interviewer asked Cathcart if WhatsApp would continue to be free and without ads.
Cathcart responded that WhatApp will not have ads within the inbox or in the “messaging experience.” Cathcart also added that Channels could charge people to subscribe, and the owners could promote ads for it within Channels.
The Meta-owned messaging app has looked for ways to plaster ads in the app starting as early as 2018, when the company (then known as Facebook) looked to put ads in the Status feature.
However, in 2020, it seemed there was some internal fear about flipping the switch on ads and how privacy-focused users would react, so the delay continued, but plans for ads in the feature remained on the docket.
Saved 0% of original text. :::
One more program to delete.
boooooo
Ugh and I just got my dad to use it instead of SMS
(No he will not use Signal)
