[save_ferris]

Culturally, we aren't taught to think critically enough about how businesses operate. In an environment that espouses entrepreneurship to the max, we don't spend enough time talking about if companies lie to us or not, how do they plan to monetize, etc.

There's just no way that Facebook wasn't planning to monetize this platform when they wrote this article. Frankly, situations like this should be treated like deceptive advertising practices.

Just like in the political arena, there are very few consequences to just flat out lie to people, and that's unacceptable.

[landhar]

This article was written before FB acquired whatsapp back when it was still its own company.

That being said, it was "only" 20 months later that FB acquired it, so it's hard to believe that the ideals discussed in this article were no longer in the founders' minds when they accepted the deal.

[gitpusher]

IIRC, the WhatsApp founders had an agreement with Zuckerberg to keep WhatsApp ad-free. I'm not sure whether that agreement was written, or merely verbal. Nevertheless, Zuck appeared to honor that agreement for a time.

But of course, all roads at Facebook lead to ads – and they were pressured relentlessly to monetize. This is why they both left Facebook, and even left a large pile of $$ on the table:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive...

[soperj]

Didn't they refuse facebooks offer multiple times, which is why the actual price of acquisition ended up being something crazy (like $20 billion?)

[landhar]

If anything, one could argue that makes it even _more_ clear that they knew what FB was intending to do with whatsapp and that it wasn't aligned with their principles.