[athenot]

This is all summed up in one word: friction.

What the big platforms have done is eliminate friction at all the critical parts, to make it easy for users to onboard, easy to share, easy to grow within the platform, and of course hard to leave.

I've been thinking about a low cost but not free platform too. If it ever happens, it will have to be AT LEAST as frictionless and enticing as the existing platforms. The table stakes are very high. Since cost in of itself is a source of friction, that means the rest of the platform needs to be even MORE frictionless.

[decasia]

I think this is exactly right. Users expect a really nice, contemporary-feeling UX. And for something that cost money it would have to be above and beyond.

That said, the fact is that the mainstream alternatives are handicapped by their own success and are afraid to change anything of their core features. Starting a new platform would be an opportunity to revisit many of the original design choices, and perhaps one could do surprising new things at that point.

I think the co-operative model is interesting economically as well because as far as I can tell, there are at least some cases where it does work out to be economically stable on a reasonably long term basis (decades anyway), and I presume it changes things a lot, organizationally, if the main goal isn't just "lowest common denominator software for the sake of maximal mass adoption and growth."

[athenot]

The angle we can exploit is to find all the places where UX is degraded by advertisement, and attack them. With increased competition and shareholder expectation, Facebook will have no choice but maximize the value they can extract out of each user. Right now they are doing a fairly good job at keeping things minimally intrusive, but I think that boundary is going to shift with time.

[sizzle]

I'm curious, can anyone estimate the developer hours it would take to clone WhatsApp's UX, features and functionality? Would it be doable since it's already developed and they solved the hard problems for syncing messages across timezones and it may be feasible to follow their tech stack as a blueprint/starting point?

Facebook and Instagram had no trouble stealing the concept of 'stories' from Snapchat and Facebook also copied their augmented face masks.

Did WhatsApp use a lot of open source stuff under the covers that we could leverage in building our own secure person to person/ group chat platform?

[athenot]

WhatsApp's popularity originally came from how it ran on many WAP phone systems, not just iOS and Android but also all the feature phones. What they did looked crazy from the outside but they effectively re-implemented SMS at a lower cost, for nearly all phones. That was not a trivial amount of effort, but it produced a lower financial friction than competition.

A disrupter would have to have even less friction but would be competing against a product that already has a significant network effect and a very generous backing by Facebook. I'm speculating that FB will eventually nudge WhatsApp users to Messenger, or find a way to gradually merge the services to the point where they are identical, especially w.r.t. advertisement.

In that respect, it was brilliant of FB to acquire WhatsApp: not just for the users, but to make it hard for any newcommer to disrupt things (hard to compete againsts free and frictionless).

[MattJ100]

WhatsApp was originally XMPP, and may still be some hacked up version of it.

There are many (open-source) solutions for building your own secure messaging system, XMPP and others.

I'm happily running (I should also disclose: developing) my own server and talking with friends and family who use e.g. Conversations as an alternative to WhatsApp.

[efields]

Craigslist is an interesting comparison for friction/UX. Still looks like it's from the early 00's, but has stayed just usable enough on all contemporary devices that it never went out of style.

The only friction to the end-user is the same email/password request every other service makes, but you want to use CL because it's the de facto place for listing your apartment or whatever.

[vel0city]

I'm not sure if its true of every area, but in the cities where I've used craigslist it does not require a username or password to create or reply to a listing. It will confirm an email address when generating the listing. The link in the email contains the token allowing modification and deletion of the posting.

[loceng]

Or enough differentiation and/or other enticing reasons to join the network.

The table stakes are another reason why this endeavour won't happen as a small effort.

[Chris_Jay]

The only thing I could possibly see working for what you're envisioning is building it on top of the Neuralink if a version 1.0 ever comes out.

[wolco]

What about a facebook clone with regular ads?