We're talking about people willing to kill. It seems obvious to me that these are the kind of people that are motivated enough to tap on their phone 10 more times.
Only a minority are willing to kill. The rest just lazily contribute to spreading false rumors. If you stop the lazy ones, you may stop the rumor from going viral and reaching the killers.
Still doesn't help in the case when you are a member of groups with a lot of people. They should limit it as one group or 5 individuals. It is restrictive but I consider most forwards as spam as it is.
Because it's a useful feature. Don't forget that WhatsApp isn't designed much as a social media platform as a utility.
I use it all the time. For example, some parent from school sends me a message if their kid can play with my son tomorrow. I forward it to my wife so that she's in the loop. Super handy.
My sister sends me a nice photo of my kids. I forward it to the in-laws' family group (who live far away). They love getting pictures of their grandchildren. Super handy.
I suspect that it's stuff like this that the feature was designed for. I think it's hard for UX designers to imagine that there are millions of people who will believe anything they're sent and who will forward it to everybody. And that it's somehow the app's fault if people do it.
I mean, I'm no big fan of Facebook Inc, but where were the outraged news paper articles when people forwarded extremist nonsense, scams and viruses to their entire email contact list? Why didn't they demand action from, eh, whoever designed SMTP, immediately?
WhatsApp has no fancy engagement-maximizing algorithms that we can get angry at. It's really just texting with groups and mixed media. Forward something to 100 people, 100 phones are going to buzz.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that people in the US don't use WhatsApp because texting is free. Do people in America get angry at telcos when people send violence inducing bullshit text messages to each other?
May help with general spam. I think regulating groups would be a much better idea:
Possible limit of messages per day/hour/minute
Possible limit to certain members as "viewers"/"spectators"-only
Possible threading (otherwise responses about a certain information are just buried / mixed)
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 67.8 ms ] threadhttps://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-de...
I use it all the time. For example, some parent from school sends me a message if their kid can play with my son tomorrow. I forward it to my wife so that she's in the loop. Super handy.
My sister sends me a nice photo of my kids. I forward it to the in-laws' family group (who live far away). They love getting pictures of their grandchildren. Super handy.
I suspect that it's stuff like this that the feature was designed for. I think it's hard for UX designers to imagine that there are millions of people who will believe anything they're sent and who will forward it to everybody. And that it's somehow the app's fault if people do it.
I mean, I'm no big fan of Facebook Inc, but where were the outraged news paper articles when people forwarded extremist nonsense, scams and viruses to their entire email contact list? Why didn't they demand action from, eh, whoever designed SMTP, immediately?
WhatsApp has no fancy engagement-maximizing algorithms that we can get angry at. It's really just texting with groups and mixed media. Forward something to 100 people, 100 phones are going to buzz.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that people in the US don't use WhatsApp because texting is free. Do people in America get angry at telcos when people send violence inducing bullshit text messages to each other?
Also wary of making companies responsible for solving social issues.