alt Hacker NewsWhatsApp introduces ads in its app
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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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s something particularly paternalistic about this statement from the PM: “Your personal messages, calls and statuses, they will remain end-to-end encrypted”.
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?
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.
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?
Brian Acton must be rolling in his grave
...oh wait
Great. It's then time to drop it and move on.
Would be nice if these kinds of articles would at least take a paragraph to plug some alternatives, such as Signal.
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.
And the enshitification continues...
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.
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.
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.
This post was no.5 on hacker news, minutes later I’m surprised it is now somewhere around 67.
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?
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?
YES!
finally people will start to move out of whatsbook!
....i hope
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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.
https://archive.md/L3W74