I think most people know about the collecting data thing. But WhatsApp/Facebook made a big mistake by forcing longtime users to accept the new rules or otherwise to get excluded from the community. This creates a very bad feeling because it’s like someone puts a gun on your chest. Take this or die! Ashole move...
"Ooops, we are sorry you noticed but not sorry about the changes, here we will delay it a little bit for you". Gotta give the people some time to get over the hype and then they will push forward anyway.
Some execs realized they weren't gonna get their bonuses anymore and, since they started bleeding users, went in full damage control mode to save their own asses.
Hmm, I hate this concept of "bonuses" because in my experience this isn't really how things work.
However, I do think the incentives internally probably were structured in a way to encourage this change, and I doubt anyone is being seen as being "more successful" due to a rollback.
There are directors/executives that sit on compensation committees that also wind up deciding their own pay. And if you decide your own pay it isn't much of a leap to also decide bonus amounts and criteria.
Some quotes: waive a shareholder’s right to sue the directors for violating their duty of loyalty regarding setting their own pay and For directors setting their own pay, the ruling suggested that a blanket waiver etc.
Consolidating, strategical changes like these sure are introduced and orchestrated by the top, not by the lower/mid level management who want to be noticed.
I know this is going to get a lot of hate here, but sometimes I wonder whether these execs consider anything besides their fat bonuses or anything which is not related to their bonuses?
Trump has a huge base that shares his beliefs. I am not convinced that Zuck has any other then those he pays at his company. Everyone that has ever worked with him in his early years and those he acquired (Instagram/ Whatsapp) have distance themselves the moment they vested their equity.
I felt like he was doing a lot of personal PR and a presidential run felt like it was in the works for 2020, but Facebook soured pretty quickly well before that could be realized.
I don't think he would have done particularly well either, due to lack of charisma.
He did a tour of America to "meet folks" and did internal polling regarding how he was received (poorly, which tempered expectations) but wouldn't be surprising if he still harbors ambitions in that realm.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/new-data...
Zuckerberg made incredible effort without announcing.
* He restructured of Facebook stock trough the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative so that he can run for a office and maintain control (also for tax and other reasons).
* He started with "I'm no longer an atheist", now believes religion to be “very important.”
* Hired Obama's campaign manager (David Plouffe)
* Hired former GWB campaign manager and RNC chariman (Ken Mehlman)
* visited 50 states "to meet people".
* hired more even more political strategists who worked for Obama's and Hillary's campaign. He had something like 150 people working just for his PR according to some sources.
No amount of turd polishing with unlimited money and PR talent was able to make people to like him. Trump is horrible but at least he raises emotions in people.
He doesn't need to be likeable to win the elections. Biden is going to implement extremely inclusive policies that large swaths of americans, especially on the south, are allergic to. So in 4 years, Zuck will simply promise to undo all these policies and those americans will have no other choice but to vote for him.
It's gonna eventually come. Billion user services just don't pay for themselves. I don't say this to defend Facebook, because if even they sell it, the next person down the line will still be faced with the same monetization issues.
They were supposedly charging that, but the first year was free, and then every time you were close to running out of free time you would get x more free months. I chained those free months for years until it became completely free. So it was actually free to use.
Too bad google can't just change back to how they were in the beginning. At least just actually hold their old motto above greed and money every now and then.
I was presently surprised at how easy the transition from Chrome onto Brave was. Multiple profile support with a great import tool. Switched to from GMail to ProtonMail as well.
The only thing I can't figure out is how to get off google calendar.
Funny enough, as i've been looking to move away from G, i thought calendar element would be easy...but its not. (Well, its not s tough, just not a direct nor free transition.) The default android claendar app doesn't connect to a calendar via, say, nextcloud (calDav if i recall correctly)...One has to actually get/use a different app. I think the one that most folks recommmend for nextcloud is not free. (It is not expensive, so that is not the challenge.) Its fine for me since i am moving away from G apps...but my partner, she is meh-ok with some of their default apps...like the default android calendar app, though she would like to connect that app to our nextcloud cal...Again, nothing major, but just all these little annoyances that exhibit the super tight integration that was built into android with G services. Anyway, yeah calendar is annoying to ween off from G. Yuck!
If you install fDroid via the APK on their site you can install DAVx for free, which is likely the for-pay app you talked about for bringing your calendars in from a CalDAV server. Still not as easy or native as installing a Google Calendar account, but it does work and generally works quite well.
Ok, DAVx must be the name - i see to recall the mobile app having "dav" in its name. Thanks!
Actually I'm quite ok paying for this app...I like to support developers, especially if an app is open source. But, my annoyance is less about paying for an app, and more about google's calendar - which is forced upon an android user - not playing nice with caldav...And forces a person to sidestep things.
I was a really big fan when android first came out, thinking i would have plenty of freedom (or at least a reasonable amount of freedom) of bending my phone's OS - at least when compared to Apple's ios very restrictive approach...Wow, how things have changed! I feel like android is too locked down. Ok, some might think that ios is still more restrictive...But, to me, both ios and android are tech prisons just different colors of paint on the wall. I say that last statement with my fingers crossed and praying for pinePhone and other linux-y type phones to really make it mainstream!
> I was presently surprised at how easy the transition from Chrome onto Brave was
Mine was the move from Chrome/Firefox back to Opera.
I'm still puzzled what happened to Firefox. I was using the Developer Edition and the last two years the performance is really suspect. I don't have a million tabs open, don't have a ton of add-ons running and it still lags horribly, crashes and new tabs take forever to open
I thought at first it was either my network connection or maybe a system issue. Switched to Opera and was like, "Nah man, it was definitely the browser."
I'm in the same book with my calendar. I have multiple calendars several family members share. I tried using outlook.com calendars and although I prefer their UI, it wouldn't import Google calendars.
If you have any recommendations, I'm all ears. Its the last thing I need to rid myself of Google.
Well, I don't use Chrome or Google search (for most part). Had moved to iOS from Android last year..
I'm finding Gmail to be most difficult to transition off of. I do have personal domain and use Zoho with it, but I think there is this mental block.. It will happen..
I migrated my mails from Gmail to fastmail.com two years ago and never looked back. Imported all my google mail, so I did not loose anything. What I love about fastmail is their pure focus on mailing. It’s a beautiful product with many useful features. For instance you can create as many alias names as you like (although I heard there is a limit, but I haven’t hit that yet). I create an alias for any new website I sign up. I also have aliasses that serve as a base-name (for instance mypurchases@fastmail.com) and can be used multiple times like so for instance: amazon@mypurchases.fastmail.com.
Edit:
I am also using my personal domain instead of @fastmail.com You never know when / if you need to leave a service provider again, and you don‘t want to change your email address again.
I'm sold. If I pay $3/month can I migrate all of my dozen Google accounts? I have an email for each product in my portfolio and switching back and forth.
I would gladly pay a subscription fee if it means Google isn't reading my emails to sell me ads.
I had four gmail addresses. Imported a ton of emails from these accounts into my fastmail account. The alias feature is something I haven’t seen anywhere else, at least not so polished. Previously I hated signing up with my personal email address on sites I‘d use only once to shop for bicycle parts or whatnot.
can you explain more about the alias feature? what makes it special? Because I think this could be a killer feature as I have that exact same problem when signing up to websites
Very easy: After signup you go to Settings > Users and Aliases. There you see a list of your alias names. And you can create a new one with a click. Underneath the alias name you select which email address to forward to (I manage several email addresses for my family). That‘s it. You can even setup aliasses in a way that you can send messages from them, so they do not serve for receiving emails alone.
Their service is excellent. You get answers from real human beings within 24 hours (unlike trying to get help for Gmail; won‘t work).
FastMail is also one of the last providers with a push notification certificate for Mail.app, last I checked - which makes it feel right at home on iOS.
I've been a long time fan of Android but I still cannot be forced to swap it for the Apple ecosystem which really is no better than Android.
What I would like is a hardened, privacy focused distro of Android that is guaranteed to be independent from Google. Sounds like a tall order but here's hoping Samsung will come up with their own mobile OS although how unlikely this will be.
I’ve got a bunch of older Android devices (mainly Samsung s3, S4 and s6s) that run lineageOS. Some of them are completely degoogled, but it makes life really difficult to use them as “regular phones” without access to google play store. Way too many apps most people want to use are not available any other way.
Samsung have not demonstrated being any more user friendly than google in my opinion. My S6Edge ran out of OS updates about 3 years after if was released. I have iPhones several years older that are still getting updated to the latest iOS. And there’s a whole bunch of crap undeletable Samsung software on their devices that I trust even less that Google’s apps.
I tried this for 2 years. Eventually I ended up with 2 phones - the google store one (with a burner number) and the non google store one. Things like being able to order uber (you used to be able to order on the mobile browser) made life difficult. Eventually I gave up.
Current strategy is to only have a burner google account on the phone and rotate gmail accounts every year (on phone refresh). Keep personal google accounts off the phone (using linux desktop) with a vpn and in firefox with privacy settings.
Use containers on the browser - never mix google, whatsapp facebook and other activities.
Use a phone registered in EU for privacy settings. Use a paid burner gmail account (again I figure it is better for privacy).
Annoyingly I also need an iphone for i-message with family members.
I would never trust Samsung for this. You'd still end up using a closed OS, just one published by a different company. And in this case the company you're substituting has an appalling privacy record. Vastly worse than Google
I'm most impressed by people who can quit Google maps. If I'm on the highway driving, or if I have to get somewhere in a hurry or it's an urgent situation, I just cannot trust another platform.
One time my friend was driving and he asked me to navigate. The exit was coming up, meanwhile I'm stuck trying to get OSM+ to understand what rounte we are on. That was an unpleasant few minutes. Despite trying to stick with it, such moments kept coming up again and again. It made me realise that Maps is mission critical to me.
By contrast, Gmail was easy. Fastmail ftw, forward all google mail to it, and the fact that most of my email use is work email, which is on its own domain anyway.
See I find driving to be about as good with Apple Maps and Garmin maps as Google Maps. (And they don’t have ads like Google Maps.) The stickiest point of any Google product for me are the Google Maps reviews. Yelp isn’t really a thing in Canada, so since the death of Urbanspoon, if you want restaurant reviews, Google Maps is it.
I think things might be better across the Atlantic than here in Europe wrt Apple Maps. I can't confirm since I don't have Apple Maps on Android. I agree, though, that the reviews and the opening hours are very useful.
I wholeheartedly agree. When I had 25+ minutes added to a trip while I needed to use the bathroom because OSMand told me to drive off a bridge, I just gave in :/
Yep. It was laughably easy. In fairness, I replaced it with shopping.google.com for a bit. It helped, however, that I value minimalism a lot, and I also kept an eye out for where I was buying electronics from, where I was buying household stuff from etc. Slowly I just started going directly to the source.
I tried this locally. The COVID-reduced workforce at the local grocery chains screwed up every order I tried to make, and Walmart is a greater evil in my book than Amazon.
This is just going out of the frying pan and into the fryer. (I assume you mean stock/Google powered Android here.) Replacing one user-hostile walled garden with another user-hostile walled garden is hardly an improvement.
I'd suggest Google Android -> Open-source Android ROM, though I know it can cause issues with some banking apps, annoyingly.
I'll have to disagree, iOS and Android are far apart.
In end, as I said above, it's about reducing the footprint. Eliminating Google is a very difficult undertaking which I'm not really sure is even possible..
I've been happy to switch back to a BlackBerry Q20.
1) I find the use of the BlackBerry hub to really help with decreasing the intermittent reward that having to switch between applications to see your messages gives.
2) It is refreshing to use a device that is more purely focused on its intended purpose. (Communication)
3) I can still sideload most Android APKs if necessary.
Some out of the box thinking is in order here. Duringe the initial lockdown, I signed up to pay for Coursera's courses. I found out that what I craved wasn't shirking from work, but rather distraction. It didn't matter that I had to do some homework for the courses. Since I was _watching_ something, my brain thought of it as the same thing.
But I should note that you haven't addressed the biggest bugbear of mine either, Google maps. It's light-years ahead of everything else, and just does not get replaced easily.
Regarding Youtube it's a little bit more nuanced unfortunately. I tried blocking Youtube via pi-hole and suddenly a lot of educational course work for kids started throwing a fit since a lot of videos are hosted on Youtube.
So I had to grudgingly unblock it.
Yes, I had missed Google maps. I agree it's indeed light-years ahead of others.
In end it's about reducing Google footprint, elimination is extremely hard.
Indeed. Making peace with this fact has helped me a lot. I don't actually pay Google with anything other than my attention. All of my entertainment is via a uMatrix/uBlockOrigin protected Firefox, so things could be worse.
For me it was very easy to stop watching youtube when they started to show more and more commercials - I just couldn’t stand it, it was too frustrating. Occasionally I find something useful, download it using youtube-dl and (re)watch offline.
I have a dumb tv from 2006 that we still use and we are happy with but it works because we also use a roku. An old roku.
At some point however not sure how but my roku updated and im pretty sure its monitoring all my stuff (mostly yt)
Ive read about router hacks etc to dumb down the roku and prevent it from calling home but it seems super hard. I was barely able to use my own domain with proton.
Neutering roku seems like mission impossible for a non sysadmin. Is there a simple solution to this with or without roku?
Pi-hole can suck up all of Roku's badness. It's pretty cheap and pretty easy. But it can interfere with some apps, for example Roku's PBS app doesn't work when my Pi-hole is on.
For maybe the first time I can recall I wasn’t able to locate a webpage via google search yesterday.
(Described in my last comment if anyone knows the source)
Seemed like every attempt to better describe it as a query took me further from what I was looking for.
Results were all (from my perspective) SEO hijacking, clearly having nothing to do with my search. And that was behind the wall of advertisements and their own google cards of noise they plug up front. Going to the next page of results was surprisingly difficult.
First time I’ve considered, maybe this is the wrong tool for traversing the memory palace of one’s interactions with the internet.
Honestly I've stopped using Chrome and always use DDG, and Firefox is my default web browser now. I've ditched Chrome for good as Firefox is just as good and I feel less creeped out.
I think the era of "free stuff for your data" is over. People have witnessed the true cost of a zero barrier social network services which is the division of society and people creating their own realities and clashing with others (ex. flat earthers, trump etc.)
Going forward I expect lot of these decentralized, run-by-donations services to trend upwards. We will still have FB, Google, and the likes but as they lose users their pervasiveness will have to increase to compensate for the loss in users.
This is good. This is what blockchain should've been but couldn't.
I used to love Firefox so much before but recently its starting to feel less user friendly than freakin' Chrome the way it shoves changes down my throat. I still cant even stand that huge address bar that goes down to my taskbar, that was one of the major reasons I moved away from firefox just because of how ugly that and the address bar zoom was
> I think the era of "free stuff for your data" is over.
I don’t think it is, but I share your optimism that perhaps people are starting to realise and understand the real cost of “free stuff” from advertising companies.
Based on my experience on search engines recently, it seems like SEO hijacking has gotten easier recently. Queries that would pull up the page I was expecting are now delivering 5 or so copycat pages before the actual one I'm looking for.
I've switched to DDG several years ago and don't miss anything. I still use gmail but only because of inertia. I could switch to some other provider but haven't felt the need yet.
The hardest replacement for me is Maps. Their search and traffic data always work for me. They have a webapp and mobile app that are excellent. I could do without the ads but recognize it's the tradeoff for using their app. Nothing I've tried gets close to a replacement. (I've heard good things about Apple Maps on iOS, but I have an android phone)
As someone who's been using DDG for the past three years, I'd love to nudge more people toward it, but when I think of how often I have to prefix my search with !g to find what I'm looking for, I don't think DDG is quite there yet. The only thing keeping me from going back to Google is that I despise it more than I'm annoyed with DDG.
Technically you don't ever have to prefix with "!g"; you can put it anywhere in the search box. I find DDG gives me what I need >90% of the time, and often when it fails, Google fails too.
I often find I get better results from Google when I'm making purchasing decisions, identifying where I can buy a product locally or for a good price, which disappoints me because that's data I definitely don't want Google to have about me.
Using Google some of the time is better that using it all of the time.
DGG has been my default search engine for years now, and like you, I occasionally need to add !g to get the answer I’m looking for. I’m fine with that. I hope DGG uses those failed search followed by a !g search to improve their stuff. (In a privacy preserving way)
Well, saying "you need to put !g if you think google would find the result better than what bing is showing" isn't easy for everyone to understand and adds a lot of friction. Perfect isn't the enemy of good when there's already a service that most people regard as being perfect (at least for the queries they're giving it).
Wean of google is tough and want to do the same. The most problematic being Gmail. Because although its possible now to migrate emails to new service (e.g. Fastmail), I have many accounts created to sites using that gmail address. I seem to recall seeing a Gmail plugin that helped identify signups.
I migrated to Fastmail a few years ago. I set all my mails to forward from Gmail to Fastmail so I don't miss anything. I slowly changed my logins from gmail to fastmail, no rush.
Just a matter of time until WhatsApp have ads or somehow used to datamine the conversations.
Because it would not make sense otherwise, considering how much it must cost them to run something like WhatsApp with millions of users and not get anything in return.
Bruh, I wouldn't even mind these companies datamining me if their ads were even close to being relevant for my needs. It would spare me loads of time I waste online looking for that exact product that fits my needs.
I mean, what's the point of all the data they have from me plus the armies of well paid ML engineers they have on their payroll, when if I order a laptop from Amazon, I'll get bombarded with ads for laptops for the next month. Do advertisers imagine I go through laptops like toilet rolls or something? If this is peak ML, then those who fear an AI uprising can sleep soundly.
I swear there are bots running around on HN just waiting for the opportunity to tell us that we're not the customer. Bot or not, I'll ask: thanks for the insight, how does that tie into parent's point? That advertisers "need" to show you ads for things already purchased? Advertisers are playing the long game, setting up for my next laptop purchase?
The advertisers can tell from cookies etc that you are interested in a product and were looking. They cannot always tell that you clicked 'buy' at some point.
I think they're just saying that it doesn't matter if the end user converts based on the ad, but rather whether the company making the ad decides to put it on FB. FB wants to optimize for companies buying ad slots from them, not whether the end user is influenced.
Attributing conversions to ads is a really difficult problem. There's probably a decent amount of cluelessness and institutional inertia that keeps them spending on ineffective ads. See the recent stories on Uber drastically reducing ad spend without seeing any downstream effects.
That's the dumb ML practice of those companies, not Facebook. Also even an irrelevant ad probably converts through brand exposure alone. They are forced to fork over to compete for limited exposure.
I'm sorry for somewhat cynical response, but... Those customers need to believe they're getting value out of it, and it's all that counts for Facebook's business.
They target something like "people interested in computer hardware" and they get them, including those who don't need a laptop. It's bad but must be somewhat better than completely non-targeted ads, as it excludes people who have never expressed any interest (so, while having false positives at least it tries to save on false negatives). And, of course, there is opportunity for Facebook to tell how their superior ad platform is smarter than last year.
The rest (but maybe even more important than actual value advertisers are getting) is advertising of advertising - all those stories how this machine learning agile blockchain big data is our only future. And many people just believe it, and non-ironically talk how Facebook is that omniscient deus ex machina that knows us better than we do ourselves. As this meme lives, those who have a product to advertise are inclined to believe it as well (and this makes them spend money on Facebook Ads).
So, in the end, the fact you're getting ads you're not interested in is less relevant and is kind of shadowed over by the fact advertisers get somewhat better value or maybe even just believe they do.
There are shouts that the king is naked and memes that modern machine learning has two objectives: classifying data and making predictions^W^W^W^W^W bullshitting investors and raising money... but so far, such voices are in minority.
I don’t know, I live far away from the SV bubble and Facebook has worked well for our local, annual paid event (we advertised exclusively there so attribution was not difficult, in a simple way). 5000 people over 2 days.
Is there another channel that will accept the money of a small business and provide the same results? Even with a compelling event we don’t have the relationships or budget to achieve the same effect through other channels.
I mean, it's not really unheard-of for people to have a Macbook Air as their daily driver plus a gaming PC for enjoying stuff like Cyberpunk or Flight Simulator 2020.
Exactly. Every time I see some new article about how ML is going to mind-control us through perfectly placed ads and Yuval Noah Harari writes a new book about the machines knowing us better than we do I just have to spent five minutes on Amazon or Youtube. I'm not afraid that the machines are too smart but too stupid to be honest.
I'm not convinced that if you went and did an actual scientific study on the efficacy of "big data" teams and ad-targeting and went through every business it would do any better than just regular boring contextual ads.
I spent a lot of energy and time studying applied ML in university. After competing in several contests I realized in most cases a simple linear equation threw shade on the whole carnival. Don't get me wrong there are amazing applications for ML, image recognition, simulated physics, the list goes on. But most of the commercial applications I've seen render a ML model wholly unnecessary. You don't need a heavy handed big data machine learning model to figure out, "people who bought also bought", nor does a crime prediction system need to be more complicated than, "where the cops and poor people were last year". FFS a national convenience store contracted one of our classes to do analysis on 10 years of data and the shocking conclusion most groups arrived at was, "people smoke a lot of cigarettes and drink a lot of beer". A revelation. Maybe if it were required curriculum people would realize you don't need to a hire a warlock to do basic statistics...
I think its possible the targeting works for the advertisers (at some level) while still failing completely for end users. e.g. If I get my hit-rate up from 1% to 2% by moving from contextual to 'give-me-all-your-data'-targeting, then that doubles my return as an advertiser, while as a user I don't see a difference and still think: "all ads I see are terrible".
The lie is telling users that targeted ads are good for them
At my job, there is a problem that's classically solved with a bunch of regexps and run of the mill text parsing.
The ML experts in my company keep telling me maintaining these regexps is too costly dev wise, and that they can use ML to adapt to changes in the real world, and get a better result faster.
After nearly a year of work, buying some fancy new computers with giant GPUs, and countless meetings to describe the problem space, they have something that's around 60-70% as accurate as the current state of the art, and say they're close to closing the gap.
Meanwhile I add a new regexp or tweak an existing one and cause them to go back to the drawing board because I've "changed the entire problem description".
Sometimes I feel like I want the job where the only criteria is that I'm using the fancy new toys. It seems like more fun.
When you lost that you lost everything. Whatever you said would be on record to go after you. May be you can trust your national Gov. but the whole world. Would the record be leaked hacked or even required by the police.
Not believe there is totalitarian is the greatest myth one can have in today workd.
Yep, there are some many simple comments you can make in person or via text that can have huge ramifications on your life if it got out. Sometimes we say extreme things just because we're frustrated but taken out of context, it sounds insane. So if you want to be blackmailed in the future if you have any sort of ambitions, play game and give big tech all your data.
I live in Hong Kong, speak a bit of Mandarin, and just a few words of Cantonese.
YouTube knows my UI is in English, and I've never watched a Cantonese video, and yet it constantly shows me ads in Cantonese. There are a lot of people in Hong Kong who don't speak Cantonese, or at least who are more fluent in English than Cantonese.
"relevant ads" has to be one of the greatest PR/marketing/scam terms ever created. It's a lie to collect data and get small business to spend at least some advertising money even though they never get seen over the big companies competing for the same ad space. There was never an incentive to get actual relevant ads working, development would just be a waste of money.
But if the data isn't even used for the ads... Why do they collect them at all? I thought this was the only reason for businesses to collect data in the first place
It's not used for mass market ads, it's being used for analytics and being sold directly, and also for precision targeting (political attack ads shown only to people in a target constituency considered likely to vote for someone, to discourage them from doing so). Companies pay for "tell me what kind of people are looking at my site, in extreme detail". Scammers pay for "people who use/buy a particular item/service" so they can do targeted scams based on that. Political campaigns pay for targeted attack ads. For mass marketing, that kind of targeting is too expensive and the data is too fuzzy, since you basically want to reach everyone and the selection criteria are limited so you get lots of dumb "would you like to buy the thing you just bought".
Its annoying to get ads for something you bought and wont need to rebuy for many years, its an extra punch in the stomach if the ads show you a lower price than you paid :)
> how much it must cost them to run something like WhatsApp with millions of users
I'd be very curious to know. I don't remember specifics, but they were running a shockingly low number of servers early on in large part because WhatsApp is built on top of Erlang/OTP.
It's not a given that ads or datamining are the only options, they could do in app payments and paid business account. But its not very likely with facebook as parent company...
Whatsapp already supports in app payments and business accounts. In fact the point of the recent privacy policy change was just to enable more features for business uses.
With a splash of governmental assistance, I'm sure they can side step the whole encryption issue - for the normal children/terrorist/organised crime reasons
What they get in return, and the reason they paid megabucks for it in the first place, is that no other social media entity is able to get control of Whatsapp's 100's of millions of users. That's worth while in itself without being able to monetize it. But...since the founders have now left and no one is watching why not add a little monetization to a good deal? Unfortunately with a reputation like Facebook's one little twitch and the herd will stampede.
I can envisage a pivot to a wechat style monopoly on everyday life interactions. If they can hold on to their market share... And we all sleep walk into it.
Bring back the $1/yr charge and keep it private. It'd be a good look. It's really a good product, technically. A pleasure to use and the voice and video quality has been excellent basically everywhere I've used it.
All that said, Signal is making steady progress, and I've had zero resistance getting people to use it. Got 12 people on it this past week. Starting a few group threads helped it stick.
The communication around this change was very poorly handled. This policy update does not affect the privacy of messages with friends or family in any way: https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/answer.... I don't believe that was well understood.
Disclosure: I work at FB but unrelated to WhatsApp
It seemed to imply that from Feb, metadata would now be shared with Facebook (I know, probably was anyway), and a lot of people took a dim view of that. (esp. those that paid for it originally)
I think a lot of horses have bolted, but I'm sure there will be plently left once the gate is shut.
You know, I don't care about the changes to the privacy policy at all. I tried to move to an alternative messenger for years but I was never able to convince enough people. Now that there's enough momentum I tried again and every person I care about was willing to move. Let's see if we can use the network effect for our own good for once.
Oh wait, the time of last login will be shared with facebook family of companies? Despite this blog post showing no sharing icons at all - they ARE sharing and now lying about it by not showing a single icon to reflect this sharing.
Oh wait, we need your phone number for 2FA? Sure. Bam - now you've given us permission to spam you! They lied about that.
Check out signal and get away from the lies. This blog post is such a good example of it, all the things not showing as not shared are probably SHARED! So despite EVERY icon saying nothing is shared, they no doubt are pumping your phone number over to Facebook family of companies.
They are trying to do the fake apple privacy label thing - but only including non-sharing labels, not the sharing labels.
Totally disgusting. I'm signing up to signal today and pushing hard for my network to switch.
Now if only signal used go or something lighter weight instead of a monster java stack they could probably scale a lot better.
From the link you supplied: "WhatsApp does not share your contacts with Facebook"
Wouldn't it be better to just say: "WhatsApp does not share your contacts." or even better "WhatsApp doesn't store any of your contacts especially the ones who doesn't even use WhatsApp"?
Too late. When there is a mandatory requirement to share data with Facebook that is a hard no regardless of the details. I'd be happy to pay or get ads within reason, but to monetize my privacy, no way.
My user experience on Signal has been excellent so far, family switched without difficulty.
Facebook guy tells us that the changes are harmless and that there is nothing to worry about. Nothing to see here I guess.
Amazing what some internal koolaid can do to you (well more than this,it's really probably greed). Please rethink critically the ethics of your employer.
So your rational is: since Facebook was already mining your conversation metadata, people shouldn't be leaving. Did I capture that accurately? Seems pretty flimsy. You're right though, people should have left a long time ago.
Pedantry aside, isn't it? In a thread about the backlash to whatsapp changes, Op said "it's not what you think it is!!!"
The point is, this happened to be a watershed moment. Whether the conditions (mining metadata) were met years ago or in a week or two from now is irrelevant.
Day 1) Users are outraged and company says there will be changes! (Twitter bans Trump)
Day 2) Users are angry and company shows changes they will be making (yup Trumps account is gone.)
Day 3) Users move on to something else and company goes back to whatever they want to do (Trump posts video on twitter, but this one is ok, we'll let this one slide.)
Give it a few days and WhatsApp will be back to business as usual.
My fear is that people will say "Oh, I can now keep Whatsapp around for just a bit longer" and the furore will die down. Luckily, my colleagues, not just friends, have moved over so I can at least delete it after asking them if they mind connecting on Signal.
A lot of people are migrating to Signal. I'm wondering what Signal's monetization model is, as they certainly won't be able to maintain the level of usage forever as a free app.
The key distinction being that loan will need to be repaid.
> The initial $50M in funding was a loan, not a donation, from Brian Acton to the new nonprofit Signal Technology Foundation. By the end of 2018, the loan had increased to $105,000,400, which is due to be repaid on February 28, 2068. The loan is unsecured and at 0% interest.[5]
I'm not then, but if I were them, I would do the opposite. I will immediately do the next shady step (whatever it is ) that Zuck always wanted to do. Because yeah, there is a lot of bad press around the privacy changes. But you better get all the backlash at the same time, than several time a backlash.
And that would be so good because I could be convinced to really uninstall whatsaap
No, because I dont think I act like most people. Most people don't even understand the privacy changes, they just see that 'something' happened on Whatsaap this week
> But you better get all the backlash at the same time, than several time a backlash.
I'm not sure. Bad publicity has a critical point after which people leave and move to other services. When people who weren't concerned about privacy before began to have conversations about whether Telegram or Signal is a better replacement to WhatsApp, Facebook realized that they have pushed it too far this time. They're much better served if people think "Oh WhatsApp is owned by a shady company but everyone I know uses it so I need to use it to".
That, and do it now now now. The backlash is already semi-drowned with the whole world looking at the sociopolitical issues in the US. A perfect crisis that no self-respecting evil megacorp would let go to waste.
I'm surprised they cared enough to delay the changes. I guess they will probably just restructure the changes enough that they can get away with the same stuff in a slightly different way in the future.
Well, they will probably continue ramming this through in other countries where they have a lot more users without having to worry about any privacy implications.
I have wanted to leave Whatsapp for years, but I can't realistically do it since most people assume it's your messaging app of choice here (including coworkers / bosses).
I would actually prefer it these changes weren't delayed since it will also delay the eventual user exodus to Signal / Telegram.
This is just not realistic, and not how the world works. "Oh, you expect me to be available on the app we used to communicate regularly and most people in our circle use? Too bad, I just dumped it and got on this new app, so you guys better install it just to have the privilege to communicate with me."
Umm, no. I use both WhatsApp and Signal (way before this hysteria began) but the "just leave" mentality isn't realistic. Most people don't care about this stuff enough to install a new app and start using it. Even for people who will join it, it takes time. The network effect is still there.
Being on HN too much and/or having social circles full of people who think like you misleads people.
None of the people I had on WhatsApp think like me. They're mostly just my family and relatives. But I told them "I'm quitting WhatsApp, if you need to message me, use Signal". And they all just downloaded Signal because it's honestly not that big of a deal. It's just another free chat app.
"It's not how the world works". Of course it is. Most people downloaded WhatsApp because someone told them to so they could message each other.
It isn't how the world works. For change there needs to a value proposition. Your entire proposition is it fits your personal views. Why do you expect others to change for your personal choices when you aren't willing to change for theirs?
You essentially have a personal disagreement with the practices of a specific company and want to inconvenience others who might not think the same way. It's arguably a selfish perspective, family members may be willing to bend to those demands for an individual. But to expect businesses to indulge every single individual preferences for how they wish to be contacted is impractical.
Everything happens in WhatsApp here. Just moved to a new building and they added me to a whatsapp group for announcements / requests etc. Also, movers, utility people etc would call and ask for a “location”. Not an address. A “location”, meaning sharing a location via whatsapp. Noone even mentions the name whatsapp. It is implied.
If you have children, most schools have whatsapp groups for parents and teachers to get in contact.
I mean I can find much more. Not having WhatsApp is not an option here. It is almost like not having a cell phone.
I live in the subcontinent and 100% agree with you, I don't know most westerners are able to comprehend how much Whatsapp is tied into our day to day lives. It also plays a huge huge hand in spreading fake news here through message forwards, most politicians here pay off journalists who maintain several large group chats where they spread misinformation (exponentially)
An important thing to ask yourself is "Why are you commenting?" This isn't a dig but a real question. I don't mean to belittle you or the GP. Is it just idle ranting or are you hoping to find a solution?
If the former, my complete sympathies. Carrying around this low-level resentment about an app all while having to use it isn't great.
But if it's the latter, then the solution is obvious. Delete the app and then let the chips fall where they may. I guarantee there is a grumpy 60 year old in your life who just never ditched his Nokia and "it works for him". It's clear that you can't have it both ways.
I make this comment because too often on the internet people will comment on a self-help article, or someone sharing their success story, or a piece of advice with "Yeah, but it doesn't work for me because..."
Well, great? Sorry to hear that? This topic, then, is not for you? Carry on and good luck? It's just too many people expect universal solutions that MUST work EVERYWHERE without exceptions.
Your message seems to boil down to asking people to "get on board or get left behind", and that otherwise they just should delete the app, shut up, and stop complaining.
That may be possible for you, but it isn't for every person, even if they wished it was. "Just don't use it" isn't enough, and I say this as someone who hasn't had Facebook or WhatsApp in over 5 years. That I can go without them is a luxury many don't have.
Lastly, people being outspoken about technology not working for them has led to countless improvements and innovations, often with benefits to the entire population (<curb-cuts-cliche/>). Telling people not to express their criticism and complaints helps nobody.
I thought I was making a wider point about the sort of comment where people dive headfirst into a comment thread with complaints about how the solution doesn't work for them because of XYZ, when the author may never have inteded their solution to be universal in the first place.
I have serious doubts that idle complaining on the internet moves the needle too much. What works instead is voting with feet/dollars. In this instance, it's the mass of people who actually HAVE jumped ship that are causing whatsapp to pause, not the ones saying they can't quit, however justified their reasoning.
So I both agree and disagree. On one hand, yes, one person voting with feet/dollars has a relatively large impact compared to one person raising a complaint. But if we look at the entire ecology of users, the story is different.
Many of the people who end up voting with their feet do so after being exposed to people raising complaints. And on the flip side, people who see their friends voting with their feet may then seek out the explanations and complaints leading to that action.
Just uninstalling an app is very low information density as a signal. It doesn't provide any reason why, it's just a single bit. It's value is more as an action rather than a statement.
I think the ideal is somewhere in between, and we need both concrete action (voting with your feet) as well as public discourse (raising complaints). The former without the latter is inscrutable, the latter without the former is toothless.
It's clear from previous discussions on this topic that a lot of people on HN do genuinely believe that it is possible for anyone to stop using WhatsApp without suffering any social disadvantages whatsoever.
Maybe you are a person that isn't bothered in the slightest when other people have built their opinions based on a faulty understanding of the situation. I wish I was, it must be very peaceful.
Yes, very peaceful. By the same token, it must be deeply burdensome having your own equanimity displaced because "other people have built their opinions based on a faulty understanding of the situation". Quelle horreur!
Previously the only way I've had of keeping in touch with family back home was Facebook, in addition, most of my university life (late 00s/early 10s) was done through Facebook. I got rid of Facebook for a couple years, and nothing fell apart. People were still able to stay in touch with me (through WhatsApp, email and text messages), and maybe I didn't go to as many parties as before, but I still went to more than enough.
Later on, I signed up to Facebook again (for all the wrong reasons), and not much changed in that communication was mostly off Facebook because that's what my acquaintances and I had established.
I got rid of Facebook again not long after. Then a few years ago I moved into a new property where, just like you, the first thing they asked me is if I had Facebook so I can be added to building's group. I politely told them I do not, and what do you know, the landlord was still able to keep us up to date with announcements and everything else.
I'm sure my situations isn't the same as yours, and I do believe that you're in a worse situation than I was in that sense. Certainly, I don't disagree that it's hard to leave a service when everyone else is on it.
However, something has to give.
Your utility provider will find a way to tell you that you owe them money. The movers will find a way to talk to you to get his business. When they ask for a location, and you send the address instead anyway, they'll copy and paste it.
Maybe I have an oversimplified view of the world, because quite frankly, here in the UK, there is a lot of convenience and professionalism.
Regardless, I've messed up a lot when it comes to privacy in the past, and I'd rather not continue those same mistakes. I've come to learn to value my privacy, and I encourage everyone around me to value theirs, so I lead by example. I implore you to do the same, because your privacy is important. It'll be hard, but it'll be worth it.
For instance I am part of a volunteer organisation, that amongst other things runs some Covid-19 vaccination centers. At a local level this is organised through a WhatsApp group with about 50 members. For now, I am nothing special in this organisation, no-one with special skills that would be called upon to do particular tasks, just a worker drone.
If I left the WhatsApp group, the only result is that I would never hear about anything that was going on ever again. I would effectively be leaving the organisation too.
I am thankful they pushed hard because that gave me reason enough to leave Whatsapp, an otherwise wonderful product, but I despised using a product that is associated with Facebook. Left FB and Instagram years ago, only Whatsapp was left.
Edit: Bought a piece of software [1] that perfectly exported five years of messages out of my cellphone, then I didn’t hesitate one day to delete my WhatsApp accout. I felt an incredible relief abandoning the last service I used from Facebook.
[1]: „Backuptrans iPhone WhatsApp Transfer for Mac“
It's historical. IIRC WhatsApp started out as an app for people to post those statuses as they travel, to let know their family and friends their whereabouts. To that effect, the founder of Whatsapp was first talking about it in online frequent flyer forums such as FlyerTalk that he was already a member of. Chat came later.
rolleiflex is referring to the text status along with profile picture. The other new Status feature was added in 2017 when Facebook went crazy adding Snapchat Story like features to all their apps (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp)
> I am actively evangelising my family members to start using alternatives.
Which specifically? I've finally succeeded in showing them the light regarding Signal.
The only usable alternatives that come to mind is Gab for Twitter (or Mastodon but that'd be a stretch for most of them). With respect to Facebook and Instagram, I don't see a clear path to a seamless switch as with Whatsapp and Signal.
I have reluctantly been using Whatsapp to contact non-technical friends. In the past week, all of them have adopted Signal and/or Telegram, and I've deleted my Whatsapp account.
It doesn't matter what they say now; Whatsapp needs to be crushed pour encourager les autres.
I know it's a non-starter for most of these group messaging and social media apps, but it'd be interesting to see one optimize for privacy (i.e. not mine user data/behavior/contacts) and fund the endeavor by charging for the app and/or usage.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 310 ms ] threadHowever, I do think the incentives internally probably were structured in a way to encourage this change, and I doubt anyone is being seen as being "more successful" due to a rollback.
You're right. They're going to pay themselves the bonus regardless of this debacle.
Here's an article from Harvard Law Review about a lawsuit over this - you might be interested in the paragraphs in the "Shareholder Waivers" section: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/09/18/setting-directors...
Some quotes: waive a shareholder’s right to sue the directors for violating their duty of loyalty regarding setting their own pay and For directors setting their own pay, the ruling suggested that a blanket waiver etc.
Use Signal (and donate/make a PR every once in awhile).
Been following Whisper Systems since Redphone and TextSecure, so glad to see them shine.
* To elect a female president, there would first have to be a male POC president
* The president immediately after the first POC president would be the whitest, loudest man they could find.
The only thing wrong about the second prediction is that we got the orangest, loudest man they could find.
I don't think he would have done particularly well either, due to lack of charisma.
Highlights from his hourlong livestream to show how relatable and definitely a human he is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVyLlFezj2E
I really can't imagine him giving a speech on a stage with cheering crowds.
* He restructured of Facebook stock trough the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative so that he can run for a office and maintain control (also for tax and other reasons).
* He started with "I'm no longer an atheist", now believes religion to be “very important.”
* Hired Obama's campaign manager (David Plouffe)
* Hired former GWB campaign manager and RNC chariman (Ken Mehlman)
* visited 50 states "to meet people".
* hired more even more political strategists who worked for Obama's and Hillary's campaign. He had something like 150 people working just for his PR according to some sources.
No amount of turd polishing with unlimited money and PR talent was able to make people to like him. Trump is horrible but at least he raises emotions in people.
I don't rule it out. Gates managed to pull it off when I didn't think it was possible
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Bill_Gat...
I wonder what the cost-benefit line looks like for PR person versus life coach.
That's a lot of yes-men. Maybe we should bring back Court Jester as a profession.
As a profession or as a title?
At least we got some memes out of that.
I think I read that Brian Acton called out Sandberg on that once. That it wasn't just about profitability, but greed.
Either ways, my WhatsApp was deleted yesterday, FB early last year...
Now I just need to wean off of Google...
That sounds tough.
Too bad google can't just change back to how they were in the beginning. At least just actually hold their old motto above greed and money every now and then.
The only thing I can't figure out is how to get off google calendar.
Actually I'm quite ok paying for this app...I like to support developers, especially if an app is open source. But, my annoyance is less about paying for an app, and more about google's calendar - which is forced upon an android user - not playing nice with caldav...And forces a person to sidestep things.
I was a really big fan when android first came out, thinking i would have plenty of freedom (or at least a reasonable amount of freedom) of bending my phone's OS - at least when compared to Apple's ios very restrictive approach...Wow, how things have changed! I feel like android is too locked down. Ok, some might think that ios is still more restrictive...But, to me, both ios and android are tech prisons just different colors of paint on the wall. I say that last statement with my fingers crossed and praying for pinePhone and other linux-y type phones to really make it mainstream!
Mine was the move from Chrome/Firefox back to Opera.
I'm still puzzled what happened to Firefox. I was using the Developer Edition and the last two years the performance is really suspect. I don't have a million tabs open, don't have a ton of add-ons running and it still lags horribly, crashes and new tabs take forever to open
I thought at first it was either my network connection or maybe a system issue. Switched to Opera and was like, "Nah man, it was definitely the browser."
I'm in the same book with my calendar. I have multiple calendars several family members share. I tried using outlook.com calendars and although I prefer their UI, it wouldn't import Google calendars.
If you have any recommendations, I'm all ears. Its the last thing I need to rid myself of Google.
I'm finding Gmail to be most difficult to transition off of. I do have personal domain and use Zoho with it, but I think there is this mental block.. It will happen..
Edit:
I am also using my personal domain instead of @fastmail.com You never know when / if you need to leave a service provider again, and you don‘t want to change your email address again.
I would gladly pay a subscription fee if it means Google isn't reading my emails to sell me ads.
Their service is excellent. You get answers from real human beings within 24 hours (unlike trying to get help for Gmail; won‘t work).
What I would like is a hardened, privacy focused distro of Android that is guaranteed to be independent from Google. Sounds like a tall order but here's hoping Samsung will come up with their own mobile OS although how unlikely this will be.
Samsung have not demonstrated being any more user friendly than google in my opinion. My S6Edge ran out of OS updates about 3 years after if was released. I have iPhones several years older that are still getting updated to the latest iOS. And there’s a whole bunch of crap undeletable Samsung software on their devices that I trust even less that Google’s apps.
Current strategy is to only have a burner google account on the phone and rotate gmail accounts every year (on phone refresh). Keep personal google accounts off the phone (using linux desktop) with a vpn and in firefox with privacy settings.
Use containers on the browser - never mix google, whatsapp facebook and other activities.
Use a phone registered in EU for privacy settings. Use a paid burner gmail account (again I figure it is better for privacy).
Annoyingly I also need an iphone for i-message with family members.
One time my friend was driving and he asked me to navigate. The exit was coming up, meanwhile I'm stuck trying to get OSM+ to understand what rounte we are on. That was an unpleasant few minutes. Despite trying to stick with it, such moments kept coming up again and again. It made me realise that Maps is mission critical to me.
By contrast, Gmail was easy. Fastmail ftw, forward all google mail to it, and the fact that most of my email use is work email, which is on its own domain anyway.
What makes it so difficult?
Between Android or iOS, I don't see iOS as being much better. At least I can still side-load applications in Android if it gets banned by the censors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinephone
Google Search -> DDG -- Done
Android -> iOS -- Done
Gmail -> Personal domain email (pending, work started)
TV OS from Android -> Dumb TV (very hard)
YouTube -> ? (limited use, very hard)
Google Classroom (for kids) -> ? (very hard)
Google Maps (noted by helmholtz below ) -> ? (very hard)
...
This is just going out of the frying pan and into the fryer. (I assume you mean stock/Google powered Android here.) Replacing one user-hostile walled garden with another user-hostile walled garden is hardly an improvement.
I'd suggest Google Android -> Open-source Android ROM, though I know it can cause issues with some banking apps, annoyingly.
In end, as I said above, it's about reducing the footprint. Eliminating Google is a very difficult undertaking which I'm not really sure is even possible..
1) I find the use of the BlackBerry hub to really help with decreasing the intermittent reward that having to switch between applications to see your messages gives. 2) It is refreshing to use a device that is more purely focused on its intended purpose. (Communication) 3) I can still sideload most Android APKs if necessary.
Some out of the box thinking is in order here. Duringe the initial lockdown, I signed up to pay for Coursera's courses. I found out that what I craved wasn't shirking from work, but rather distraction. It didn't matter that I had to do some homework for the courses. Since I was _watching_ something, my brain thought of it as the same thing.
But I should note that you haven't addressed the biggest bugbear of mine either, Google maps. It's light-years ahead of everything else, and just does not get replaced easily.
Yes, I had missed Google maps. I agree it's indeed light-years ahead of others.
In end it's about reducing Google footprint, elimination is extremely hard.
Indeed. Making peace with this fact has helped me a lot. I don't actually pay Google with anything other than my attention. All of my entertainment is via a uMatrix/uBlockOrigin protected Firefox, so things could be worse.
I prefer Librem 5 or Pinephone instead, not to switch walled gardens.
> YouTube
PeerTube (very hard, but promising)
> Google Maps
https://openstreetmap.org
> ...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17280558
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25380999
I have a dumb tv from 2006 that we still use and we are happy with but it works because we also use a roku. An old roku.
At some point however not sure how but my roku updated and im pretty sure its monitoring all my stuff (mostly yt)
Ive read about router hacks etc to dumb down the roku and prevent it from calling home but it seems super hard. I was barely able to use my own domain with proton.
Neutering roku seems like mission impossible for a non sysadmin. Is there a simple solution to this with or without roku?
(Described in my last comment if anyone knows the source)
Seemed like every attempt to better describe it as a query took me further from what I was looking for.
Results were all (from my perspective) SEO hijacking, clearly having nothing to do with my search. And that was behind the wall of advertisements and their own google cards of noise they plug up front. Going to the next page of results was surprisingly difficult.
First time I’ve considered, maybe this is the wrong tool for traversing the memory palace of one’s interactions with the internet.
I think the era of "free stuff for your data" is over. People have witnessed the true cost of a zero barrier social network services which is the division of society and people creating their own realities and clashing with others (ex. flat earthers, trump etc.)
Going forward I expect lot of these decentralized, run-by-donations services to trend upwards. We will still have FB, Google, and the likes but as they lose users their pervasiveness will have to increase to compensate for the loss in users.
This is good. This is what blockchain should've been but couldn't.
https://www.ghacks.net/2020/04/08/how-to-restore-the-old-fir...
I don’t think it is, but I share your optimism that perhaps people are starting to realise and understand the real cost of “free stuff” from advertising companies.
The hardest replacement for me is Maps. Their search and traffic data always work for me. They have a webapp and mobile app that are excellent. I could do without the ads but recognize it's the tradeoff for using their app. Nothing I've tried gets close to a replacement. (I've heard good things about Apple Maps on iOS, but I have an android phone)
Using Google some of the time is better that using it all of the time.
DGG has been my default search engine for years now, and like you, I occasionally need to add !g to get the answer I’m looking for. I’m fine with that. I hope DGG uses those failed search followed by a !g search to improve their stuff. (In a privacy preserving way)
Because it would not make sense otherwise, considering how much it must cost them to run something like WhatsApp with millions of users and not get anything in return.
I mean, what's the point of all the data they have from me plus the armies of well paid ML engineers they have on their payroll, when if I order a laptop from Amazon, I'll get bombarded with ads for laptops for the next month. Do advertisers imagine I go through laptops like toilet rolls or something? If this is peak ML, then those who fear an AI uprising can sleep soundly.
They target something like "people interested in computer hardware" and they get them, including those who don't need a laptop. It's bad but must be somewhat better than completely non-targeted ads, as it excludes people who have never expressed any interest (so, while having false positives at least it tries to save on false negatives). And, of course, there is opportunity for Facebook to tell how their superior ad platform is smarter than last year.
The rest (but maybe even more important than actual value advertisers are getting) is advertising of advertising - all those stories how this machine learning agile blockchain big data is our only future. And many people just believe it, and non-ironically talk how Facebook is that omniscient deus ex machina that knows us better than we do ourselves. As this meme lives, those who have a product to advertise are inclined to believe it as well (and this makes them spend money on Facebook Ads).
So, in the end, the fact you're getting ads you're not interested in is less relevant and is kind of shadowed over by the fact advertisers get somewhat better value or maybe even just believe they do.
There are shouts that the king is naked and memes that modern machine learning has two objectives: classifying data and making predictions^W^W^W^W^W bullshitting investors and raising money... but so far, such voices are in minority.
Is there another channel that will accept the money of a small business and provide the same results? Even with a compelling event we don’t have the relationships or budget to achieve the same effect through other channels.
If I had the money I would definitely have both.
Bought a Mac recently? How about a new case? Or some discounted software or games? Or how about a new mouse?
Bought a house recently? How about some gardening services? Or some home insurance?
I'm not convinced that if you went and did an actual scientific study on the efficacy of "big data" teams and ad-targeting and went through every business it would do any better than just regular boring contextual ads.
The lie is telling users that targeted ads are good for them
The ML experts in my company keep telling me maintaining these regexps is too costly dev wise, and that they can use ML to adapt to changes in the real world, and get a better result faster.
After nearly a year of work, buying some fancy new computers with giant GPUs, and countless meetings to describe the problem space, they have something that's around 60-70% as accurate as the current state of the art, and say they're close to closing the gap.
Meanwhile I add a new regexp or tweak an existing one and cause them to go back to the drawing board because I've "changed the entire problem description".
Sometimes I feel like I want the job where the only criteria is that I'm using the fancy new toys. It seems like more fun.
Not believe there is totalitarian is the greatest myth one can have in today workd.
"I've got nothing to hide"
YouTube knows my UI is in English, and I've never watched a Cantonese video, and yet it constantly shows me ads in Cantonese. There are a lot of people in Hong Kong who don't speak Cantonese, or at least who are more fluent in English than Cantonese.
I'd be very curious to know. I don't remember specifics, but they were running a shockingly low number of servers early on in large part because WhatsApp is built on top of Erlang/OTP.
Or justify the costs of buying it. Supposedly the infrastructure and tech-stack is pretty lean.
Is it though? What's the actual benefit for WhatsApp?
All that said, Signal is making steady progress, and I've had zero resistance getting people to use it. Got 12 people on it this past week. Starting a few group threads helped it stick.
Edit: and signal is down...
They used to charge about $1/yr before acquisition and had over 500mm users. And I think they had fewer than 30 employees.
So they were bringing in about $500mm/yr and their infrastructure costs were unlikely to have been in the 100s of millions.
Disclosure: I work at FB but unrelated to WhatsApp
I think a lot of horses have bolted, but I'm sure there will be plently left once the gate is shut.
We were told nothing would change.
Oh wait, the time of last login will be shared with facebook family of companies? Despite this blog post showing no sharing icons at all - they ARE sharing and now lying about it by not showing a single icon to reflect this sharing.
Oh wait, we need your phone number for 2FA? Sure. Bam - now you've given us permission to spam you! They lied about that.
Check out signal and get away from the lies. This blog post is such a good example of it, all the things not showing as not shared are probably SHARED! So despite EVERY icon saying nothing is shared, they no doubt are pumping your phone number over to Facebook family of companies.
They are trying to do the fake apple privacy label thing - but only including non-sharing labels, not the sharing labels.
Totally disgusting. I'm signing up to signal today and pushing hard for my network to switch.
Now if only signal used go or something lighter weight instead of a monster java stack they could probably scale a lot better.
Wouldn't it be better to just say: "WhatsApp does not share your contacts." or even better "WhatsApp doesn't store any of your contacts especially the ones who doesn't even use WhatsApp"?
My user experience on Signal has been excellent so far, family switched without difficulty.
Amazing what some internal koolaid can do to you (well more than this,it's really probably greed). Please rethink critically the ethics of your employer.
A Facebook employee making claims about privacy or ethics makes me immediately suspicious of those claims.
The point is, this happened to be a watershed moment. Whether the conditions (mining metadata) were met years ago or in a week or two from now is irrelevant.
Day 1) Users are outraged and company says there will be changes! (Twitter bans Trump)
Day 2) Users are angry and company shows changes they will be making (yup Trumps account is gone.)
Day 3) Users move on to something else and company goes back to whatever they want to do (Trump posts video on twitter, but this one is ok, we'll let this one slide.)
Give it a few days and WhatsApp will be back to business as usual.
Matt Stoller from BIG is right, only jail time for executives guilty of breaking the Sherman Act will stop these monopolies now.
Servers and infrastructure cost money. People's time costs money. You need enough donations for it. If you don't, you have to strategize to get more.
The key distinction being that loan will need to be repaid.
> The initial $50M in funding was a loan, not a donation, from Brian Acton to the new nonprofit Signal Technology Foundation. By the end of 2018, the loan had increased to $105,000,400, which is due to be repaid on February 28, 2068. The loan is unsecured and at 0% interest.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation
And that would be so good because I could be convinced to really uninstall whatsaap
Did you just provide the counterargument to your own argument?
If they backpaddled is likely because there was enough of a negative reaction to raise concern.
I believe it's more likely they are trying to figure out how to announce the next deadline more quietly without breaking too many laws.
A partial exodus doesn't work. With this delay, maybe half of the people who were going to switch won't end up switching.
By boiling the frog slowly, they make sure that a mass exodus never happens, only partial exoduses that end up dying and tiring people out.
I'm not sure. Bad publicity has a critical point after which people leave and move to other services. When people who weren't concerned about privacy before began to have conversations about whether Telegram or Signal is a better replacement to WhatsApp, Facebook realized that they have pushed it too far this time. They're much better served if people think "Oh WhatsApp is owned by a shady company but everyone I know uses it so I need to use it to".
Users have been going to Signal en masse, in their millions upon millions, to the point that Facebook had to back down.
It's a sort of democratic consumerism. I don't want to call it capitalism, but is that what it is?
Either way, it's nice to know that people can make big corporations change their minds sometimes.
I would actually prefer it these changes weren't delayed since it will also delay the eventual user exodus to Signal / Telegram.
Umm, no. I use both WhatsApp and Signal (way before this hysteria began) but the "just leave" mentality isn't realistic. Most people don't care about this stuff enough to install a new app and start using it. Even for people who will join it, it takes time. The network effect is still there.
Being on HN too much and/or having social circles full of people who think like you misleads people.
Oh, but it is. You just need to accept a drop in your social circle.
Saying "i'm on signal" could be totally considered normal in just a few weeks from now.
"It's not how the world works". Of course it is. Most people downloaded WhatsApp because someone told them to so they could message each other.
You essentially have a personal disagreement with the practices of a specific company and want to inconvenience others who might not think the same way. It's arguably a selfish perspective, family members may be willing to bend to those demands for an individual. But to expect businesses to indulge every single individual preferences for how they wish to be contacted is impractical.
Problem solved.
Everything happens in WhatsApp here. Just moved to a new building and they added me to a whatsapp group for announcements / requests etc. Also, movers, utility people etc would call and ask for a “location”. Not an address. A “location”, meaning sharing a location via whatsapp. Noone even mentions the name whatsapp. It is implied.
If you have children, most schools have whatsapp groups for parents and teachers to get in contact.
I mean I can find much more. Not having WhatsApp is not an option here. It is almost like not having a cell phone.
If the former, my complete sympathies. Carrying around this low-level resentment about an app all while having to use it isn't great.
But if it's the latter, then the solution is obvious. Delete the app and then let the chips fall where they may. I guarantee there is a grumpy 60 year old in your life who just never ditched his Nokia and "it works for him". It's clear that you can't have it both ways.
I make this comment because too often on the internet people will comment on a self-help article, or someone sharing their success story, or a piece of advice with "Yeah, but it doesn't work for me because..."
Well, great? Sorry to hear that? This topic, then, is not for you? Carry on and good luck? It's just too many people expect universal solutions that MUST work EVERYWHERE without exceptions.
Your message seems to boil down to asking people to "get on board or get left behind", and that otherwise they just should delete the app, shut up, and stop complaining.
That may be possible for you, but it isn't for every person, even if they wished it was. "Just don't use it" isn't enough, and I say this as someone who hasn't had Facebook or WhatsApp in over 5 years. That I can go without them is a luxury many don't have.
Lastly, people being outspoken about technology not working for them has led to countless improvements and innovations, often with benefits to the entire population (<curb-cuts-cliche/>). Telling people not to express their criticism and complaints helps nobody.
I have serious doubts that idle complaining on the internet moves the needle too much. What works instead is voting with feet/dollars. In this instance, it's the mass of people who actually HAVE jumped ship that are causing whatsapp to pause, not the ones saying they can't quit, however justified their reasoning.
So I both agree and disagree. On one hand, yes, one person voting with feet/dollars has a relatively large impact compared to one person raising a complaint. But if we look at the entire ecology of users, the story is different.
Many of the people who end up voting with their feet do so after being exposed to people raising complaints. And on the flip side, people who see their friends voting with their feet may then seek out the explanations and complaints leading to that action.
Just uninstalling an app is very low information density as a signal. It doesn't provide any reason why, it's just a single bit. It's value is more as an action rather than a statement.
I think the ideal is somewhere in between, and we need both concrete action (voting with your feet) as well as public discourse (raising complaints). The former without the latter is inscrutable, the latter without the former is toothless.
Maybe you are a person that isn't bothered in the slightest when other people have built their opinions based on a faulty understanding of the situation. I wish I was, it must be very peaceful.
Later on, I signed up to Facebook again (for all the wrong reasons), and not much changed in that communication was mostly off Facebook because that's what my acquaintances and I had established.
I got rid of Facebook again not long after. Then a few years ago I moved into a new property where, just like you, the first thing they asked me is if I had Facebook so I can be added to building's group. I politely told them I do not, and what do you know, the landlord was still able to keep us up to date with announcements and everything else.
I'm sure my situations isn't the same as yours, and I do believe that you're in a worse situation than I was in that sense. Certainly, I don't disagree that it's hard to leave a service when everyone else is on it.
However, something has to give.
Your utility provider will find a way to tell you that you owe them money. The movers will find a way to talk to you to get his business. When they ask for a location, and you send the address instead anyway, they'll copy and paste it.
Maybe I have an oversimplified view of the world, because quite frankly, here in the UK, there is a lot of convenience and professionalism.
Regardless, I've messed up a lot when it comes to privacy in the past, and I'd rather not continue those same mistakes. I've come to learn to value my privacy, and I encourage everyone around me to value theirs, so I lead by example. I implore you to do the same, because your privacy is important. It'll be hard, but it'll be worth it.
For instance I am part of a volunteer organisation, that amongst other things runs some Covid-19 vaccination centers. At a local level this is organised through a WhatsApp group with about 50 members. For now, I am nothing special in this organisation, no-one with special skills that would be called upon to do particular tasks, just a worker drone.
If I left the WhatsApp group, the only result is that I would never hear about anything that was going on ever again. I would effectively be leaving the organisation too.
Edit: Bought a piece of software [1] that perfectly exported five years of messages out of my cellphone, then I didn’t hesitate one day to delete my WhatsApp accout. I felt an incredible relief abandoning the last service I used from Facebook.
[1]: „Backuptrans iPhone WhatsApp Transfer for Mac“
The most wonderful thing about WhatsApp was that everyone you knew was there.
Which specifically? I've finally succeeded in showing them the light regarding Signal.
The only usable alternatives that come to mind is Gab for Twitter (or Mastodon but that'd be a stretch for most of them). With respect to Facebook and Instagram, I don't see a clear path to a seamless switch as with Whatsapp and Signal.
It doesn't matter what they say now; Whatsapp needs to be crushed pour encourager les autres.