[MOUNOPANO]

How is it possible for this answer to be first... Really HN? WhatsApp is critical infrastructure??

Excluding company ownership, what is the crucial difference between all IM listed?

There's LITTLE DIFFERENCE, they all serve the same purpose, feature parity is pretty much there.

When you add company ownership to the mix, WhatsApp is owned by fucking Facebook. Let that sear in your mind.

[apexalpha]

>Excluding company ownership, what is the crucial difference between all IM listed?

The crucial difference is that in my life everyone is on WhatsApp, and no one is on any of the other IMs. That is the difference.

And I don't use the word everyone here lightly, I mean it (99,9%) literally. My family, my parents, my friends, my colleagues, my 91 year old grandmother, my potential clients, my actual clients, the support line for the webshop I order from, the support line for my supermarket, etc... Everyone.

I can't speak for other countries, but in the Netherlands WhatsApp is undeniably a part of your social infrastructure.

It doesn't matter if any of those other IMs have feature parity, better security or stricter privacy. There's just no one to message.

[aden1ne]

This.

There is no way to socially untangle yourself from Whatsapp in the Netherlands, unless one wishes to live as the modern version of a hermit.

[marc_io]

> I can't speak for other countries, but in the Netherlands WhatsApp is undeniably a part of your social infrastructure.

It is in Brazil too, without a shadow of a doubt.

[pelasaco]

big words, unfortunately little common sense.

I can give you some scenarios:

- Practically every school (elementary school) in Germany uses WhatsApp for communication among Parents and Teachers. If you don't have WhatsApp, you have go to the school and read the official announcements in the wall. Lot of important information there, for example Teacher short-notice absence, protocol from meetings, etc.

- The favorite communication channel of my university is via Whatsapp. There are lot of tools to consolidate and do the customer relationship via WhatsApp.

- Back in the normal days, every single airbnb host that i contacted, were using WhatsApp

So to make it clearer, the main difference between all IM listed are:

- the user base itself (two billion users for WhatsApp[1])

- The number of 3rd part tools offering integration with that tools (zendesk, salesforce, etc).

References:

[1]: https://www.messengerpeople.com/global-messenger-usage-stati...

[dan-robertson]

WhatsApp serves the purpose of talking to my friends and family. Signal serves the purpose of talking to myself

[Algent]

Yep exactly, "critical social infrastructure" is on point. Here almost everyone is on WhatsApp and some are on messenger, meanwhile the other apps are only used by a few.

Last year I even had to register on FB to not be out of the loop concerning a sport club I got in.

[random42_]

I've seem this kind of reaction coming from my friends and colleagues here in US, because they are still using SMS (or Apple's Messages when they have an iPhone) for messaging. And there is rarely a thing like "I'll text that store to place an order for delivery" or many of the other uses WhatsApp get in other countries.

I wouldn't say this is on purpose but they are unaware of how WhatsApp is used everywhere else.

[criley2]

"WhatsApp is owned by fucking Facebook. Let that sear in your mind"

You might have good arguments for your white-hot searing hatred of this company, but I will confess, it makes your position look much worse when you represent it with hotly charged emotional statements instead of reasoning.

For example: I find it trivial to understand why someone would call a Facebook service "Critical Infrastructure", thinking about how we don't control how families and communities choose to meet up.

Your childs little league sport uses facebook, your aunt and uncles have organized the family into a whatsapp channel, your President incites riots on Twitter... we don't get to choose which networks are the critical ones, and sometimes, we make the binary choice of "Be apart of society" or "Don't".

Just my 2c, it doesn't seem that hard to understand why he would call these things critical, when you actually take a few moments to think it through honestly.