[d3vmax]

Alice Newton-Rex, head of product at WhatsApp: “Alongside of private messaging, people were saying they wanted to hear more about topics, teams and organizations across WhatsApp.”

- I am pretty sure NO ONE asked to hear about more topics and organizations across whatsapp.

[_Algernon_]

Translation: After going through a far too large number of focus groups that didn't want it we finally found one that phrased a reply in such a way, that after removing context and playing Chinese whispers up the management chain, can be interpreted as them wanting ads.

[TeMPOraL]

Nah, it's even simpler than that: after shoving enough surveys in users' faces (as they seem to semi-regularly do across all Meta products; I've had at least 2 in WhatsApp alone over the past few months), they've collected enough misclicks and drunk responses to be able to interpret them as lots of people wanting ads.

[imiric]

You think this decision was based on user feedback at all?

The simplest explanation is that they want more revenue, and WhatsApp users were an obvious source they weren't exploiting enough.

[TeMPOraL]

Obviously, but Data Is King, so you need some to wipe and cover your ass even internally.

[PaulHoule]

I was playing a lot of Beat Saber in April and got a survey which asked bizzare questions like “Do I want to use VR to manage my calendar?” They went so far as to ask for times I might be available for a focus group then they ghosted me.

[averageRoyalty]

Australian?

We're one of only a few countries[1] who call the game Chinese Whispers.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game

[ben_w]

Not the OP, but FWIW I'm British and we also called it that in the late 80s.

[arrowsmith]

Don't we still call it that now?

[ben_w]

Dunno, the people I know only played it in primary school. And I left the country in 2018.

Words can change meaning a lot in a lifetime. Not too long ago, someone here called me out for saying "transvestite", which was a surprise given one of my favourite comedians called themselves an "executive transvestite": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dress_to_Kill_(Eddie_Izzard)

And my mum, when her Alzheimer's was already bad but not quite bad enough she couldn't live in her own home, referred to the cupboard as a "glory hole" — I'd never been aware of meaning #9 until she used it so, "(Scotland and Northern England) A deep built-in cupboard under the eaves or stairs of a house used for general storage, particularly of unrelated or unwanted items stored in some disorder": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glory_hole

Still, could be worse, as I found out when my grandmother used the word "Irish" in the derogatory sense: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Irish#Adjective

[megaloblasto]

It's telephone now

[arrowsmith]

I'm 34 and I have never heard anyone in the UK refer to this game as "telephone" (although I'm aware that that's what Americans call it.)

Is this what the kids say now? Am I getting old?

[tialaramex]

As with "Chinese Fire drill" (referring to disorganised and chaotic efforts) the problem is that it's racist. Not like mid-20th century US "People who look different are the enemy" level racist, but it's still objectionable.

So we should avoid doing this, "Telephone" is a perfectly good name for this idea, and it's not racist. There are lots of small changes we can make, which make the world slightly better for everybody.

[averageRoyalty]

You've made a gross assumption about the etymology of the term. There are multiple theories about the origin, some of the racist and some of them not.

[EbNar]

I'd literally PAY for a mod taking away the "updates" tab. I don't care about stories nor I want channels shoved in my face. I just need to message someone, from time to time.

[fanwood]

I found the solution by convincing all my friends and family, one by one, to move to Signal. I still use Whatsapp for people who did not migrate, but it's surprisingly possible (if not easy) to convince people to use another app

[sebastiennight]

Same here. The trick is to never mention "privacy", "no ads", or anything similar (which has negative perceived value).

If you talk about that stuff, people will dilly-dally with the usual "well I already have too many apps, I'm not sure I want to install one more"

I tell people that the video calls are better (which was true in my experience, back when I still used WA). Instant install

[HenryBemis]

The fun fact is that those people have 100+ apps on their phones, which run in the background, draining their batteries, tracking the sh*t out of them, never actually use them (get value out of them) and they think zero about their privacy (probably use gmail or the sorts). Someone asked me to install Viber and it had 30 pages of advertisers/data brokers. I won't share a bowl of poop with them (WhatsApp, Viber, etc.) "Meet them where they are" doesn't work if they are in a pool of privacy-poop.

[tialaramex]

I don't know about iOS but a modern Android will periodically delete permissions from apps you aren't using, the app stays installed but it's now just a harmless icon and wasted storage space as I understand it.

[Jach]

You also have the ability to easily setup a "Work profile" that's functionally like a second user with its own apps that don't talk to your normal profile apps, and you can shut the whole work profile off when you don't need it so the apps can't even run until you turn it back on. My preferred way of setting it up is with Shelter installed via FDroid.

[coldtrait]

I only use viber because it is the only alternative for using TrueCaller in my country (India) that I know of.

[jen20]

> The fun fact is that those people have 100+ apps on their phones, which run in the background, draining their batteries, tracking the sh*t out of them,

This is wildly untrue on iOS. Perhaps people have 100+ apps. But the rest, not so much.

[sebastiennight]

You're saying that having all the apps open at the same time won't drain the iPhone's battery?

Because normal people just never close apps. Are they silently shut down/paused after a while?

[alias_neo]

I moved my family over to Signal years ago.

Anyone new who wants to message me, I simply say "I'm on Signal" and if it's important enough, they go and install it; it's been fairly frictionless, after all how hard is it to download an app and go through the fairly minimal registration process; and for someone already using WhatsApp, "one more account" probably isn't a major concern.

I tried various steps in the past to retain access to WhatsApp for a couple of people who didn't move, by having a work account on my phone, with a second SIM, but a one-click mistake one time gave WhatsApp my entire contact list from the "Personal" sandbox account, and I've decided not to even bother again.

[leokennis]

> I simply say "I'm on Signal" and if it's important enough, they go and install it; it's been fairly frictionless, after all how hard is it to download an app and go through the fairly minimal registration process

Genuinely curious. I am in WhatsApp groups for my kids soccer teams (who will be there at the game, can my kid drive together with you to the match), my kids school classes (Johnny lost his headphones did anyone see them), my work teams "social chat" (happy birthday, I am at conference XYZ) etc. etc. In your situation, which of the three scenarios applies?

1 - You are not in such groups

2 - You were in such groups, and the entire group moved over to Signal

3 - You were in such groups, but the entire group did not move over to Signal and now you are not in these groups anymore

[sebastiennight]

Option 1 mostly. I think it's also worth taking into consideration one thing.

People on Signal tend to have much less volume of overall messages and groups. For someone on WhatsApp to forward you the invite is a hassle for them, sure, but it is an infinitesimal unnoticeable increment on how many in/out messages they deal with in a day.

As I mention in another thread, people will complain that they "have too many apps" if you pitch Signal as a privacy app. They would install it instantly if you told them the emojis are funnier or whatever. Because they already installed 300+ apps and one more is actually .3% increment ; whereas for your typical GrapheneOS F-droid person, adding whatsapp would be a +15% increase of apps on their homepage.

It's kind of the same with those WhatsApp groups. There will be 1,000 messages in the group this week/month. 3 of those are the actual invite you need, and if you have actual human connections with folks, someone will send you those.

[jen20]

I've managed to go a very long time - living in both the UK and the US - using only iMessage and (as of around 2017) Signal.

I finally had to install WhatsApp on a trip recently for group coordination, but ensured it didn't get things like contact access, and removed it afterwards.

Kids school may well be an outlier (US), but they send formal communication by email (with an SMS notification or call for emergencies), and the parent group is all on iMessage.

[alias_neo]

It's scenario 1. My children are still young, pre-school and reception so no such groups have come up yet. The odd parent that wanted to contact me has installed Signal or sent me SMS (RCS). For anything else, my wife is still on WhatsApp so she relays messages if/when they come up.

EDIT: re: Work, my colleagues are all on Signal, we have lots of Signal groups to communicate.

[rickdeckard]

So in a nutshell "I have someone else on WhatsApp who keeps me in the loop"

Expect this to scale, in my experience you can move your family over to another service. Groups of families your kid is somehow in contact with, not so much...

[wkat4242]

For me the "one more account" is really a problem. WhatsApp is the standard messenger in most of the EU.

And I don't want to go to signal because it's only marginally better. It's still American and still a walled garden (no third party apps allowed, no federation). It's a slightly less smelly walled garden.

[palata]

I don't get this. Everyone is used to juggling between multiple apps, many of which allow to send messages. People are fine talking over Discord AND WhatsApp AND three others, but somehow "it's unbearable to add Signal". And it's not exactly "yet another app", it's pretty much a clone of WhatsApp. So if everybody moved to Signal, we could just get rid of WhatsApp. Which gets us to your second point:

> And I don't want to go to signal because it's only marginally better. It's still American and still a walled garden (no third party apps allowed, no federation). It's a slightly less smelly walled garden.

This, to me, is downright irrational. "Less smelly" is better, especially if it takes zero effort (you don't even need to create an account with a password, it just sends you an SMS).

If there was a non-American alternative to Signal, surely I would go for it. But there isn't. In the meantime, Signal is by far the best alternative to WhatsApp in terms of privacy.

Not to mention that there is actually a valid reason to not allow third party apps (spoiler: security). Last time I heard a fork of Signal making the news, it was pretty bad.

[wkat4242]

I don't use the others you mention. Only telegram because many communities are there (it's the only chat app with good group chat functionality)

But it's exactly because I already have to deal with too many of them that I don't want to add more.

Also I don't like moxie's attitude but that's more of a personal concern that won't apply to most. Like not allowing third party clients or federation and shooting many suggestions down on github. It's his right to do that but it's also mine to not want to use it. For a "just a little bit better" experience I'm not moving to that.

I use matrix a lot and I think this is by far the best and most open option but most people don't know it. I bridge all the other apps through it now. Also, arathorn is a much nicer person who responds much better to criticism.

> If there was a non-American alternative to Signal, surely I would go for it. But there isn't. In the meantime, Signal is by far the best alternative to WhatsApp in terms of privacy.

But I wouldn't be able to actually move. It would just be yet another one. Not even much better in any way than whatsapp.

> Not to mention that there is actually a valid reason to not allow third party apps (spoiler: security). Last time I heard a fork of Signal making the news, it was pretty bad.

I don't care so much about that (and I work in cybersec). What matters more to me is being in control of my data. Being able to export them wherever I want etc.

I had an issue recently with whatsapp where they locked my account because of "spam". I wasn't spamming but they probably thought my matrix bridge was suspicious. However because of that bridge I could still access my chat data. I couldn't in whatsapp itself. Signal could do the same to me. So I would only use it bridged to Matrix anyway, like I do whatsapp.

And in terms of security: I don't believe neither WhatsApp nor Signal is good enough to prevent a state actor from reading my messages. Even if they can't get in the app they can compromise an endpoint. And even a bad third-party app will be sufficient to prevent drive-by hackers with a pineapple from reading my messages. So I don't see much difference there.

[bayindirh]

This is not about Signal. This about being spread too thin. To be able to keep up with all the work projects I'm involved in, I need to use Slack, Discord, Matrix at the same time. Add WhatsApp on top of that. That's 4, but not all. Add e-mail and ordinary phone calls.

6 methods to just keep up with work. I also have at least three ways to reach required documents and meeting notes. I really don't want to jump like a platformer character from point to point to be able to communicate and get things done.

In my personal life, I prefer "1 task, 1 application" model. Communications, one application. Personal information storage? Everything in one place, etc.

Application hopping has a very big mental overhead, and kills my flow. Many colleagues are in the same boat.

It's not Signal, it's any app, account, for any reason.

[alias_neo]

I disagree wholeheartedly that it's "only marginally better". It's not Meta, and that's a huge improvement.

A European alternative would be excellent (I'm in the UK), but no such thing exists, that said, Signal's server and clients are open-source and can be self-hosted, or even deployed at scale by a European government/entity if they so wish.

I work in the "secure comms" space, and I have reviewed every line of code in the open-source server (as of the revision I last worked on), and built products on it, and though I can't prove they run the same code they publish, I'm "happy enough" with what I see that I'd use it over anything owned by Meta any day.

In an ideal world, I'd host it myself for everyone I communicate with to use, but without federation that's not a possibility, so given a choice between Signal and WhatsApp, the decision is hands-down Signal.

[wkat4242]

> In an ideal world, I'd host it myself for everyone I communicate with to use, but without federation that's not a possibility, so given a choice between Signal and WhatsApp, the decision is hands-down Signal.

If that's the only choice, maybe yes. Though the installed base of whatsapp is so big I could not leave it right now anyway. So Signal would only be extra.

But for me to voluntarily promote an app it has to be a lot more open than Signal. Even if other people around me start using it I'll probably be the last to move.

[mrweasel]

That's amazing, I'm still trying to move our family group chat to Signal... I've moved exact zero family members.

[tialaramex]

I was pleasantly surprised one evening, out with friends, as for some reason the entire group decided they ought to mutually verify on Signal. I'm not certain that "Very drunk people" are the best possible to perform the verification step in Signal, but it's certainly true that you'd have to be a very determined and skilled imposter to show up to somebody's birthday, drink and smoke for several hours in that company and then go through this elaborate verification ritual.

Over time such verification "decays". People buy a new phone, that sort of thing, but it was a healthy boost in one inexplicable moment.

[volemo]

Is there no way to transfer verification in Signal when changing devices?

[random_savv]

The fact that this didn’t work seamlessly for my chat history is why I stopped using Signal

[sebastiennight]

Are you still on WhatsApp? If yes, then that's the reason. Trying to move a whole group over when you're willing to compromise is a recipe for failure because everybody would get inconvenienced for something that's only somewhat important to you.

It's like: should we all go to a vegan restaurant instead of the usual steakhouse because you decided you want to "try" being vegan this Friday night, of all nights. Just try it out another day and let us have our fun, Fred.

If you were not on WhatsApp at all, then it becomes a balance of : tiny per-person inconvenience versus 100% clear-cut decision on your part. Oh you've converted to whatever religion and can't have pork anymore? Now we have a choice between not inviting you at all, or trying the restaurant next door.

[mrweasel]

> Are you still on WhatsApp?

That would actually be marginally better. No everyone is on f-ing Snapchat. I'm in Denmark, which like the US is pretty big on iMessage, so originally we where using that. Then my sister got an Android phone, and the group chat obviously broken, because no RCS back then.

Everyone has SMS, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger and Instagram (except me for Meta products). So no one is really keen on adding a fifth app, where for me it would remove Snapchat, bringing me down to just SMS and Signal.

[guappa]

If only signal had a proper (electron is not proper) desktop client…

[zelphirkalt]

I mean, I try every now and then to get someone to write me on Signal, because they won't find me on Whatsapp, but even once close friends don't seem to find it necessary and continue to use Whatsapp. Guess I am not important enough in their life. Others are a little misinformed, they think using Signal is just a German thing, but are willing to try. Others have their entrenched messenger being Whatsapp and they will take that to their grave with them, before they try anything else for a person they don't know well yet.

With some people it worked though and we are using Signal for some time now. Maybe it is too much to expect a 100% success rate for switching.

[noname120]

Well you're in luck because it's in the GreaseMilkyway filters out of the box: https://github.com/kasnder/GreaseMilkyway/blob/main/app/src/...

[torben-friis]

Thankfully it’s not intrusive - you can pretty much ignore the bottom menu and have adfree chat, I’ve been doing it for years.

The moment they start placing calls to action and distraction in that view is the moment people will move - telegram is a drop in replacement with more features, I won’t argue it’s the ideal choice but at least it keeps meta on their toes as a potential competitor.

[purerandomness]

Telegram introduced ads in 2021.

[torben-friis]

I know. My point is that they act as a bottom for how much WhatsApp can be enshittified. Once they go below there’s not a lot of friction against switching.

[gbalduzzi]

Exactly. I just never open that tab

[dotancohen]

You'll love Telegram, then.

And I fully expected to be contradicted by people telling me that they can't live without WhatApp because their contacts use it. I've never installed WhatsApp and my contacts can either contact me on any non-spyware app they choose, or by SMS. It actually works, telling people that you don't have WhatsApp.

[EbNar]

I actually love and use Telegram (even if it's slowly enshittifying as well) and most of my IM is done on Telegram. Like it or not, UX is way ahead of Signal.

But I have a bunch of close (to hearth) and very far (geographically) friends who arent techies and who couldn't care less about ads or privacy related stuff. So, Whatsapp is unfortunately still needed.

[barrell]

The questionnaire that produced these results:

Would you like to hear more about topics, teams, and organizations? If no, please explain using at least 1000 characters (required)

[ ] yes [ ] no

[jasonjayr]

pretty easy to copy and paste the question about 100 times to get the 1k char minimum :)

[pfortuny]

"People"->Management and C-suits.

[camillomiller]

How do one cope on a day to day basis with this level of blatant bullshittery, apart from justifying it with a golden salary? Is this person aware that her role is to enact a farce, or even engineer such farce?

[Bluestein]

(And, to begin with, the whole notion of them having to/having had to focus-group these decisions - so as to, perhaps - give them a "veneer" of grassroots pseudo-democracy is preposterous.-

Why don't they just come out and say "because, profit!" or some good ol' fashioned BS about "value-creation" or some other American thing like that ...)

[JohnKemeny]

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

[yard2010]

It's either "if you can't beat them join them" or "kill it with fire".

[yarekt]

Pay for services that you use instead of forcing companies to rely on ad revenue to run their useful service?

I get it though, no one wants to pay for 100s of little free marginally useful things we use every day, but if you look back at what whatsapp did in the beginning, the £3 a year they were asking is so worth it

[rkachowski]

> forcing them to rely on ad revenue to run their useful service?

Corporate advocates love to whine about cost yet seem to be blind to the context of the situation.

Meta captures enough of the entire global spend on ad revenue to be considered the biggest player in ads, yet we should spare sympathy for the poor servers of whatsapp - famously optimised to scale to 1B users with 50 engineers - which are now compelled to resort to inserting ads in order to cover the costs to run operations and keep the lights on.

These users just don't want to pay for anything, shame on them for using free services subsidised by massive corporations that undercut the market with the explicit aim of expanding the audience and clawing it back later. It's not Meta / Whatsapp's fault that they're exploiting this situation they've shrewdly developed over years, it's the individual moral failing of each user of the service.

Meanwhile ragebait / propaganda / angry racist uncle news is free on Facebook and shared in various forms, and meaningful news + journalism is locked behind various paywalls and other costs. Why won't these people just pay???

[camillomiller]

Oh my God, thank you SO MUCH for this comment.

[avhception]

I remember when it was 1€/year. Absolutely totally worth it! And I'd gladly pay again if they would only let me!

[mrweasel]

It felt a little weird that they didn't differentiated pricing. Charging 1€ is adds a little to much overhead per transaction, and maybe not everyone has a credit card. It seems to me that an alternative would be to charge e.g. 5, 10 maybe even 20€ per year in western countries, then step the amount down depending on the economy in each region, bottoming out at e.g. 5€. Then just let the app be free in the rest of the world.

That way a user in Europe could "subsidize" 4-10 users in the developing world. Maybe that's a little to social democratic for a corporation.

[whiplash451]

They will make so much more than 1€/year/user with (y)our data.

[TheAceOfHearts]

This fails to account for network effects, where most people are already using a specific messaging app and people are unable to migrate elsewhere without sacrificing a ton of contacts. Even if someone is willing to pay, that won't magically transfer over their contacts.

In order to truly solve this problem there has to be some kind of federation and cross-platform standards so that alternatives are able to rise up and compete with big tech.

[chii]

at the beginning, they "charged" $1 (or £3 as you said), but this "fee" was often just waived. You never really had to pay it to use whatsapp. The money was there as a form of advertising, to differentiate whatsapp from the others - because by making it seem more premium via attaching a price, it makes the people using it feel more superior and thus the platform more easily propagates; and it's also why they "secretly" let you use it for free if you refused to pay.

[dontlaugh]

FWIW, £3 is closer to $4.

[lynx97]

Nah. I only use WhatsApp because friends and acquaintances of mine use it. I have NEVER had the need to send a video, nor a photo to anyone. I would be totally happy using iMessage or even SMS. The ONLY reason I have WhatsApp installed is peer pressure. No need for any of its features. No need to pay for it either.

[mrweasel]

Agreed, iMessage and SMS are both free, so why would I pay for WhatsApp again? With RCS starting to work better, I don't really see a need for 3rd. party messaging apps. I do like Signal, but honestly I don't have a need for it.

[Yeri]

SMS is definitely not free. You may have a bundle that includes X (or unlimited) amount of SMS, but there are plenty of subscriptions out there (maybe not in the US) that charge by the SMS, or come with bundles of only having, say, 50 free SMS per month.

In all fairness, no one uses SMS, and no one uses iMessage (outside of the US maybe?).

WhatsApp is omnipresent in Singapore. For example, every business, every support channel, every delivery company uses WhatsApp. WhatsApp QR codes are everywhere (similar to QQ/wechat in CN).

Most iPhone users I know in Singapore never even set up their iMessage (which is also only available on iOS and is a total pain to get to work if you're dabbling in various sim cards, as is very common in SEA). So yes, there's a very good reason WhatsApp is very popular in some parts of the world (similar to BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) until quite recently in Indonesia). It's become too big to fail and took over a very very big portion of (private/business) communication in many parts of the world. And it 100% needs more regulation.

[mrweasel]

It's obviously very area specific. The only difference in the subscriptions I have available is the amount of data included. They all have unlimited SMS and calls, it's been that way for years.

I do get that I'm probably in one of the few areas outside the US where iMessage is pretty big, but even then SMS (probably RCS now) is how you communicate with Android users.

It also doesn't chance the fact that it make no sense for me to pay for e.g. WhatsApp, when I have the SMS available at no additional cost.

[guappa]

Not like whatsapp works decently if you have 2 sim cards… you can use 1 phone number per phone and the other one is just ignored.

[dzonga]

in a lot of countries not called America / Western Europe SMS costs are high. Hence why Whatsapp took off. Even phone calls there's nothing called unlimited mins / unlimted sms everything is metered - off-net / on-net data sold by bundles etc with some carriers you can even buy whatsapp "bundle" where you can access whatsapp but not regular data

[Al-Khwarizmi]

I guess it feels worth it if you actually like it.

I've always hated WhatsApp but use it due to network effect: in my country you pretty much can't have a normal social life without it (and even things like customer service often use it as well).

When they started threatening with charging money, it felt like a punch to the gut. So I'm using this product I hate because I'm pretty much forced, as I'd rather be using Telegram or various others that I strongly prefer, and now that they've captured entire societies and communities with their free app, they're going to make ME pay?

My feeling is that capitalism is just not a good model for messaging apps with network effects. Regulation is sorely needed, at the very least for interoperability (like the phone network), and maybe more.

[sebastiennight]

I think your chronology is wrong.

It is extremely unlikely that you used WhatsApp "before they started threatening with charging money" but would have preferred Telegram at the time.

Why?

1. Because WhatsApp was a paid app from the beginning ($0.99 after the first year of using it)

2. Because WhatsApp was bought by FB in early 2014, who made it free.

3. Because Telegram was founded in late 2013

[Al-Khwarizmi]

I have bad memory in general, but of this in particular, I'm very sure. Because I remember that some people actually switched to Telegram upon receiving the message saying they had to pay before some deadline or they would lose access to WhatsApp, and I thought "at least this is a silver lining, some people are switching to Telegram".

I also distinctly remember that I didn't pay by the deadline (although I planned to cave in later) but finally the threat didn't materialize and I didn't lose access (or maybe I did, but for a day or two). Some people did pay and didn't get any advantage over those of us who didn't.

This was in Spain, so maybe the issue is that the specifics vary per country. In particular, I think your point 1 wasn't really true here. WhatsApp monopolized messaging (including even elderly population) because it was free. You wouldn't convince most people here (and especially the elderly) to pay for an app, it would be dead on arrival. Perhaps the charge after the first year you mention was somewhere in the official small print, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure everyone was using it under the assumption that it was free. They only tried charging a fee that single time I'm mentioning, and they backtracked fast.

[ta8903]

It's definitely not unlikely because I very clearly remember WhatsApp being a paid app from the beginning, but I also remember no one actually having to pay for it. Couldn't tell you how exactly it worked but I've used it since I was a kid to talk to my friends and family, while we didn't even know how to do online payments.

[jorl17]

While I definitely oppose ads in WhatsApp, I do know several people who use WhatsApp as a tool to get news, know what's going on in their town and/or community (sports club, etc), among other things. It's their way of being in the know, their reddit, RSS feed, news client, etc. I am sure that no one asked for ads and that people will get very little value out of having ads shown to them. Also, no one went around "asking for ads". Nonetheless, I am also pretty positive many people do want to “hear more about topics and organizations across WhatsApp". In fact, until a year ago I wasn't really aware of just how much people live in these WhatsApp islands/bubbles, but clearly they do!

[whiplash451]

It's the usual Facebook trick: run an AB test with and without ads, observe CTR and sales without too much drop off on one side and conclude that "everyone is better off with ads" (without really trying to filter out bot traffic)

[a4isms]

They had Sir Humphrey Appleby run a poll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks

[higeorge13]

TBH the product team in whatsapp needs to find some way to be meaningful. What could justify being a head of product or product manager in a chat app? New emojis? Gif support? New backgrounds? No, let's just make whatsapp like instagram. She's going to get a promotion now or move on to some new business as chief product officer.

No offence to the product team, i know that this is how it works in tech. It's the same for engineering and design teams in every single b2b/b2c business. There is no concept of feature completeness anymore, every single service has to copy from others or be something instead of 10 other services.

[cout]

I did appreciate the ads on Facebook circa 2010. They were often for niche products I had not heard of and were genuinely interested in. I can't say it's like that anymore, sadly, but I can imagine someone genuinely appreciating exposure to something new.

[heresie-dabord]

From TFA:

"Meta’s ad business is “in as strong a position now as it’s ever been,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst and founder of the consulting firm Madison and Wall. The company’s share of the global digital ad business is around 15 percent, he said. Last year, almost all of Meta’s $164 billion in revenue came from advertising."

TL;dr: Advertising business injects more advertising.

[storus]

People = upper management in this case. They are people too (at least until they get automated away by some LLaMA in the future).

[mirekrusin]

She didn't mean "users", she meant "people at her work".

[zuppy]

these guys don’t use their own product. everyone i know uses only 2 things: direct message and group chats.

everything else is just noise.

[anshumankmr]

How long before they make it into a Slack/Teams competitor?

[mirekrusin]

I've never seen ads in slack?

[volemo]

Because you probably (or more likely your employer) pay Slack.

[statictype]

The free version doesn’t show ads. Come on.

[konha]

The free version is a loss leader to build mindshare amongst people who are (later) in a position to buy licenses.

[arccy]

They do try to upsell you hard though... 1st party ads are still ads

[parthdesai]

How is that an ad? You get limited set of features for free, if you want to use other features, they tell you it's only available in paid version.

[anshumankmr]

>Alongside of private messaging, people were saying they wanted to hear more about topics, teams and organizations across WhatsApp.”

That was in response to this.