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This article seems a little unfair to the WhatsApp founders when it suggests they should have known that any assurances Facebook made to them as part of the acq

This article seems a little unfair to the WhatsApp founders when it suggests they should have known that any assurances Facebook made to them as part of the acquisition were obviously lies. Sure in 2018 it might be obvious to most of us that nothing Facebook says or promises can be trusted but I don't think that was necessarily as obvious when the acquisition happened and they can be forgiven for thinking they weren't being lied to.

senorjazz 8y ago
sorry, but that is very naive of you 2018 / 2010 / 1990, no business can be trusted to tell the truth if it is not written down in a legally binding way. They will always do what is in their best interest when it is in their interest to do so
scarface74 8y ago
What year would it be ok to be naive enough to think that any for profit company’s main motivation is not to make as much money possible?
- hoorayimhelping 8y ago
  According to this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation#History I'd say around 2010.
- cd_et_toss 8y ago
  It hasn't been always true, historically, that for-profit companies seek only to enrich their shareholders at all cost. https://www.boston.com/news/policy/2018/08/16/elizabeth-warren-capitalism-bill https://www.boston.com/news/policy/2018/08/16/elizabeth-warr... "Warren attributes those problems to a shift, which she says dates back to the 1980s, in the obligations of corporations — from balancing responsibilities to all their stakeholders — including both employees and stock owners — to prioritizing their financial return to shareholders only." (That's not exactly responsive to your point on maximizing profit, but the body of work on this topic shows that when companies care about long-term return, and about employees and other stakeholders, they aren't solely focused on maximizing short-term profit over all else.)
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    or in other words, we can thank the stock market and pressure on public companies to focus on quarterly growth at all costs over long-term sustainability and a balanced approach.
    - WillPostForFood 8y ago
      Philadelphia Stock Exchange was founded in 1790, NYSE in 1792. If something changed in the 1980s, it wasn’t the stock market.
      - nostrademons 8y ago
        The doctrine of what the purpose of business is changed in the 1980s. During the post-WW2 era the prevailing view was that the purpose of business was to "create a customer", and as a result, corporations existed primarily for consumer benefit. Read Drucker for elaboration on this, and it's also still assumed in many economics textbooks of that period. Starting in 1970, Milton Friedman argued that the sole purpose of a corporation was to increase shareholder value, and all of its other activities - providing jobs, fighting pollution, enhancing social justice, even serving customers - were subservient to that, to be engaged in only if they also helped profits. It took a while for this view to catch on, but following Reagan's election, it gained a lot of popularity in political & legal circles, and was firmly entrenched among business leaders by the mid-80s. The problem is that we've since discovered a number of ways that corporations can enhance shareholder value (as measured by stock price) without actually benefitting customers, and most of them involve strip-mining value built up over the long term at the expense of the future. And so a significant fraction of the population is just engaged in financial games while they get busy firing everyone who does actual work.
        jjeaff 8y ago
        I don't think anyone "came around" to that sort of thinking. And Milton Freedman was not prescribing a strategy as much as describing a winning strategy. A strategy that has slowly taken over and beat out those organizations that either don't espouse it or have failed to adopt it.
- mattnewport 8y ago
  That's not the issue, the issue is whether assurances that were made to them, with or without some legal backing, could be trusted. Companies can be motivated by profit and still be honest.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    What if the person who made the promise to you even in good faith later was overruled by the board/shareholders, etc? You should never “trust” anyone who you do business with outside of a contract.
    - johannes1234321 8y ago
      If they don't have the support from their stakeholders they shouldn't give such a promise. In this specific case Mark Zuckerberg holds controlling amount of the stock.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        In corporate America, you always get support as long as things are going well. As soon as things go badly, people look for scapegoats. I’ve had a manager before who supported everything I was doing but when he was let go, I was left hanging in the wind. I’ve slso had a manager who wouldn’t listen to me (I was the Dev lead), everything failed in just the way I warned it would and I could see he was going to blame me. Never trust a company - and by extension your manager who represents the company to his reports. That’s about like the people who trust HR.
        johannes1234321 8y ago
        There is a difference between a low tier manager telling stuff on day to day business and negotiations during a multi billion acquisition.
        scarface74 8y ago
- cowpig 8y ago
  There is such a thing as business ethics. Facebook's complete disregard for them should not be the norm, even if it, sadly, might be more often than not.
  - LeoNatan25 8y ago
    It has been the norm in Silicone Valley for many years, unfortunately. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be appalled by it anyway, but perhaps just more cynical.
    - bsder 8y ago
      Where can I get tickets to Silicone Valley? (Presumably Las Vegas, Los Angeles, or Houston ... possibly Atlanta) I suspect it is very different from Silicon Valley.
  - 394549 8y ago
    >> What year would it be ok to be naive enough to think that any for profit company’s main motivation is not to make as much money possible? > There is such a thing as business ethics. > Facebook's complete disregard for them should not be the norm, even if it, sadly, might be more often than not. It's alarming how businesses' lack of business ethics is getting normalized by comments like the grandparent's. We should require that companies be ethical and condemn them when they aren't. Yes, we'll often be disappointed, just like we're disappointed with the fraction of humanity that becomes criminal, but that doesn't mean we should lower our standards.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      The "normalization" slur is too often thrown at those who just have their eyes wide open. Yes, we should require them. The WhatsApp founder didn't attempt that, he just hoped they wouldn't.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        Yes and the only way you can “require” anything when doing business is through a written contract with clauses that specify what happens when the contract is breached and the jurisdiction where the breaches will be adjudicated.
- iagooar 8y ago
  Many companies take pride in serving their customers, more than making as much money as possible.
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    It's hard to take pride in your company when even the largest shareholders have small percentages. Your identity is no longer tied to the company and the only thing left is how much profit per share. It's sort of like a microchasm of socialism or communism. If you own 9% of apple, people don't blame you personally when apple misbehaves.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    “Serving customers” just gives them an advantage in their ultimate aim - making money. Any public company that is not majority owned by one person and is not maximizing their profit is a target of a Carl Icahn type of investor, who will buy up enough shares to force them to maximize profits.
- prostoalex 8y ago
  The mechanisms can differ as attention-driven businesses have to walk a fine line between revenue maximization and user discontent. For example, Facebook could've over-induldged on overlay full-screen ads or "watch this video for 30 seconds before proceeding" ads, but they chose not to.
tumetab1 8y ago
Then knew what Facebook would try but they choose to believe it woudln't work. It's easy to choose that with that much millions of incentive. It's not their fault as it was not their responsibility to provide a private message service for free to millions of people. This is just how it works, if want to be principled you can't make agreements with the devil.
abalone 8y ago
Come. On. You don’t get to that kind of valuation with a basically free product without ad targeting. An accelerated vesting clause is not an assurance. If they wanted assurances they could have made it a condition of the deal, ok? They didn’t. Accelerated vesting just means they were telegraphing that they wanted to leave before the shit hit the fan.
- ozgune 8y ago
  Pre-Facebook, WhatsApp's monetization strategy has been to charge users a nominal fee for usage ($1/year). And $1/yr with 1B users doesn't justify the price tag for Facebook. So Facebook wanted to introduce advertising. PS: I'd be happy to pay them $1/month because a significant part of my communication happens over WhatsApp. The challenge is $1/month is probably too pricey for most of their user base.
  - sp527 8y ago
    If you think that even the friction alone of charging $1/yr isn't enough to shove the vast majority of users off the app, you haven't been paying attention to consumer expectations.
    - s73v3r_ 8y ago
      But that's what WhatsApp was doing before.
      - sp527 8y ago
        No they were not. This is a complete falsehood. They sold the company well before they could roll out their monetization plan widely enough for it to impact user retention. They were also much smaller at the time.
    - ozgune 8y ago
      I agree that $1/yr would shove off majority of users off the app. That said, I think WhatsApp could get to revenues of $1-3B per year because of the following: * I pay $60/mo for my AT&T line. I do the majority of my communication over WhatsApp. In that sense, WhatsApp adds more value to my life than AT&T. There are a group of users who'd be willing to pay more for that value. * For most users, WhatsApp is an integral part of how they communicate with friends, family, doctors, coworkers, etc. As a consumer, it isn't just an "app" but an integral part of their communication flow. * WhatsApp is respected by international telcos. I know at least for the telcos in my home country that they'd be happy to charge for WhatsApp subscription as part of their packages. I think the primary problem was that even if WhatsApp could monetize $1-3/yr per user on average, it still wouldn't have met FB's revenue expectations.
snthd 8y ago
The "dumb fucks"[0] thing came out in 2010. The WhatsApp acquisition was in 2014. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im...
- icebraining 8y ago
  I dislike FB and try to push people to stop using it, but I disagree with this typical interpretation. Zuckerberg was totally right, they were dumb fucks, and that would be true even if he was virtue incarnate, because they didn't know that. Showing contempt for stupid actions doesn't mean one will take advantage of it.
  - jiveturkey 8y ago
    that’s a bit of silly wordsmithing. you are technically right in the general case, but in this case we can indeed infer bad intentions. one doesn’t need to imagine good or bad intentions, one can simply look at the facts in the ground (even at the time, not later in hindsight). he was preying on people’s naivete and admitted as much.
  - snthd 8y ago
    I basically don't agree - I think mocking deliberate vulnerability (and people trusting you) shows poor character. It's the whole punching up, not down, thing.
dasil003 8y ago
Nah, 2014 makes no material difference. It's not the recent scandals that have somehow revealed Facebook to be the spiritual successor to Microsoft's "embrace and extend" strategy; this has been obvious for at least a decade. Maybe the public didn't realize it yet, but anyone in tech, especially a successful founding team would have been well aware. That said, I'm not going to demonize these guys. Brian Acton clearly is repentant and putting his money where his mouth is in terms of supporting Signal, and that's worth a lot more than some principled nobody who never has enough clout to further his own principles in society.
- mort96 8y ago
  I think demonizing the guys behind WhatsApp is entirely warranted. They built up a large userbase around promises of privacy and encryption, and then promptly sold those users to fucking Facebook. Whether they were just gullible and didn't do their due diligence, or if they were malignant, doesn't really make a big difference.
  - throwaway937 8y ago
    WhatsApp didn’t even have encryption until well after Facebook bought them.
  - crispyambulance 8y ago
    It's not like they secretly sold it Facebook. People knew what Facebook was about by the time of the acquisition and either didn't care, did a wait-and-see or switched to an alternative. Perfectly reasonable behavior by everyone involved. Your standard for "demon" is rather low ! :-)
    - pluma 8y ago
      I guess they "trusted" WhatsApp. "Dumb f##ks", right?
  - verganileonardo 8y ago
    How many Whatsapp users care about privacy and encryption? How many chose Whatsapp because of that? I believe most users simply use it because it is the most used messaging app in their country
hef19898 8y ago
Well, yes and no. Back the day, Facebook and Zuckerberg were the shining examples of successful Silicon Valley companies and founders with a good mission. That Zuckerberg, at the young age, managed to retain control of facebook all the way up to, and beyond, the ICO should have given them pause so. That hints a certain personality (no judgement intended in that assessment). But that is 20/20 hindsight which is always easy.
- arthurcolle 8y ago
  *IPO
  - hef19898 8y ago
    Damn, so true! There you see what certain projects can do to your spelling!
- elvirs 8y ago
  Zuckerberg was never known to be a founder with a good mission.
  - seppin 8y ago
    A stolen idea with open contempt for his users. No it was never ideal.
- OhHeyItsE 8y ago
  > the ICO should have given them pause Freudian slip? :)
  - hef19898 8y ago
    Absolutely...
- cortesoft 8y ago
  In 2014? 'The Social Network' came out in 2010, and painted Zuckerberg in a pretty bad light. I don't think he was viewed as a shining example in 2014.
grey-area 8y ago
I don’t know why they trust me... - Mark Zuckerberg in 2003
caseysoftware 8y ago
Facebook's entire business model is ads. Of course, it was going to a) include advertising or b) add more user info to better target ads in other apps. Facebook has been lying to us since at least 2007. People were always okay with it because they perceived it as being okay and supportive of the right people and policies.
jiveturkey 8y ago
are you serious? these guys aren’t dummies. there was an anti-monetization clause in the contract. you don’t put that there out of an over abundance of caution. they knew exactly FB’s intentions. they maybe didn’t expect it to come home to roost so quickly, but they should have. again, these are smart guys. they just couldn’t get past the billions, plain and simple.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  I think at some point you could honestly make the decision that you can do a lot more good with $3B than guarding the privacy of the relatively well off from Facebook's ad machine.
- robszumski 8y ago
  Negotiating that clause in there in the first place is extremely customer/user friendly and I can't believe they were able to do it. I have never heard of this before, especially for such a high profile acquisition...to a known ad company.
madrox 8y ago
That, and I'm sure they thought they could still stay in control of their product. When it's your first buy-out, there's a lot of delusions about autonomy and power post-acquisition.
espeed 8y ago
Let's take a poll ... Who's submarines [0] are these? Who's PR firm is behind this and the originally posted TC piece [1]? What's their angle? And Why? [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-founder-brian-acton-says-facebook-used-him-to-get-its-acquisition-past-eu-regulators/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-founder-brian-act... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18076008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18076008
baxtr 8y ago
Wait a minute... FB had exactly the same business model in 2014 like today. Of course they understand the mechanics of that business model already back then. Shouldn’t they have known better?
BinaryIdiot 8y ago
To be fair acquisition assurances are always temporary at best. They are buying the company for a reason, not to leave it alone forever. I've been a part of two acquisitions over the past decade and most of the devs I know have been in at least one. The assurances are never more than temporary. This seems less Facebook specific and more "that's simply what happens with all acquisitions".
- mcny 8y ago
  > To be fair acquisition assurances are always temporary at best. They are buying the company for a reason, not to leave it alone forever. I've been a part of two acquisitions over the past decade and most of the devs I know have been in at least one. The assurances are never more than temporary. > This seems less Facebook specific and more "that's simply what happens with all acquisitions". I don't know what was going through their heads but as an outsider with no insider knowledge, I justified this as Facebook making sure nobody else gets hold of Whatsapp's user base. It made sense in my head back then.
- macspoofing 8y ago
  >The assurances are never more than temporary. Yep. 2 years. That's usually the amount time that an acquirer will leave you be.
colordrops 8y ago
The movie "The Social Network" came out in 2010 for goodness sake. It was already mainstream knowledge among non-tech people in 2010, let alone successful tech billionaires in 2014, that Facebook was an organization run by sociopaths.
windows_tips 8y ago
>Zuck: They "trust me" >Zuck: Dumb fucks [0] [0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
steve1977 8y ago
It was obvious you couldn't trust Facebook back in 2008 already.
konschubert 8y ago
When I heard about Facebook's assurances in 2014 and heard that they would remove the subscription fee, I asked myself "Then why did they buy it?" I had 0 knowledge about business back then and even u could figure out that something didn't add up.

senorjazz 8y ago

sorry, but that is very naive of you 2018 / 2010 / 1990, no business can be trusted to tell the truth if it is not written down in a legally binding way. They will always do what is in their best interest when it is in their interest to do so

scarface74 8y ago

What year would it be ok to be naive enough to think that any for profit company’s main motivation is not to make as much money possible?

hoorayimhelping 8y ago
According to this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation#History I'd say around 2010.
cd_et_toss 8y ago
It hasn't been always true, historically, that for-profit companies seek only to enrich their shareholders at all cost. https://www.boston.com/news/policy/2018/08/16/elizabeth-warren-capitalism-bill https://www.boston.com/news/policy/2018/08/16/elizabeth-warr... "Warren attributes those problems to a shift, which she says dates back to the 1980s, in the obligations of corporations — from balancing responsibilities to all their stakeholders — including both employees and stock owners — to prioritizing their financial return to shareholders only." (That's not exactly responsive to your point on maximizing profit, but the body of work on this topic shows that when companies care about long-term return, and about employees and other stakeholders, they aren't solely focused on maximizing short-term profit over all else.)
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  or in other words, we can thank the stock market and pressure on public companies to focus on quarterly growth at all costs over long-term sustainability and a balanced approach.
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    Philadelphia Stock Exchange was founded in 1790, NYSE in 1792. If something changed in the 1980s, it wasn’t the stock market.
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      The doctrine of what the purpose of business is changed in the 1980s. During the post-WW2 era the prevailing view was that the purpose of business was to "create a customer", and as a result, corporations existed primarily for consumer benefit. Read Drucker for elaboration on this, and it's also still assumed in many economics textbooks of that period. Starting in 1970, Milton Friedman argued that the sole purpose of a corporation was to increase shareholder value, and all of its other activities - providing jobs, fighting pollution, enhancing social justice, even serving customers - were subservient to that, to be engaged in only if they also helped profits. It took a while for this view to catch on, but following Reagan's election, it gained a lot of popularity in political & legal circles, and was firmly entrenched among business leaders by the mid-80s. The problem is that we've since discovered a number of ways that corporations can enhance shareholder value (as measured by stock price) without actually benefitting customers, and most of them involve strip-mining value built up over the long term at the expense of the future. And so a significant fraction of the population is just engaged in financial games while they get busy firing everyone who does actual work.
      - jjeaff 8y ago
        I don't think anyone "came around" to that sort of thinking. And Milton Freedman was not prescribing a strategy as much as describing a winning strategy. A strategy that has slowly taken over and beat out those organizations that either don't espouse it or have failed to adopt it.
mattnewport 8y ago
That's not the issue, the issue is whether assurances that were made to them, with or without some legal backing, could be trusted. Companies can be motivated by profit and still be honest.
- scarface74 8y ago
  What if the person who made the promise to you even in good faith later was overruled by the board/shareholders, etc? You should never “trust” anyone who you do business with outside of a contract.
  - johannes1234321 8y ago
    If they don't have the support from their stakeholders they shouldn't give such a promise. In this specific case Mark Zuckerberg holds controlling amount of the stock.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      In corporate America, you always get support as long as things are going well. As soon as things go badly, people look for scapegoats. I’ve had a manager before who supported everything I was doing but when he was let go, I was left hanging in the wind. I’ve slso had a manager who wouldn’t listen to me (I was the Dev lead), everything failed in just the way I warned it would and I could see he was going to blame me. Never trust a company - and by extension your manager who represents the company to his reports. That’s about like the people who trust HR.
      - johannes1234321 8y ago
        There is a difference between a low tier manager telling stuff on day to day business and negotiations during a multi billion acquisition.
        scarface74 8y ago
cowpig 8y ago
There is such a thing as business ethics. Facebook's complete disregard for them should not be the norm, even if it, sadly, might be more often than not.
- LeoNatan25 8y ago
  It has been the norm in Silicone Valley for many years, unfortunately. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be appalled by it anyway, but perhaps just more cynical.
  - bsder 8y ago
    Where can I get tickets to Silicone Valley? (Presumably Las Vegas, Los Angeles, or Houston ... possibly Atlanta) I suspect it is very different from Silicon Valley.
- 394549 8y ago
  >> What year would it be ok to be naive enough to think that any for profit company’s main motivation is not to make as much money possible? > There is such a thing as business ethics. > Facebook's complete disregard for them should not be the norm, even if it, sadly, might be more often than not. It's alarming how businesses' lack of business ethics is getting normalized by comments like the grandparent's. We should require that companies be ethical and condemn them when they aren't. Yes, we'll often be disappointed, just like we're disappointed with the fraction of humanity that becomes criminal, but that doesn't mean we should lower our standards.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    The "normalization" slur is too often thrown at those who just have their eyes wide open. Yes, we should require them. The WhatsApp founder didn't attempt that, he just hoped they wouldn't.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Yes and the only way you can “require” anything when doing business is through a written contract with clauses that specify what happens when the contract is breached and the jurisdiction where the breaches will be adjudicated.
iagooar 8y ago
Many companies take pride in serving their customers, more than making as much money as possible.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  It's hard to take pride in your company when even the largest shareholders have small percentages. Your identity is no longer tied to the company and the only thing left is how much profit per share. It's sort of like a microchasm of socialism or communism. If you own 9% of apple, people don't blame you personally when apple misbehaves.
- scarface74 8y ago
  “Serving customers” just gives them an advantage in their ultimate aim - making money. Any public company that is not majority owned by one person and is not maximizing their profit is a target of a Carl Icahn type of investor, who will buy up enough shares to force them to maximize profits.
prostoalex 8y ago
The mechanisms can differ as attention-driven businesses have to walk a fine line between revenue maximization and user discontent. For example, Facebook could've over-induldged on overlay full-screen ads or "watch this video for 30 seconds before proceeding" ads, but they chose not to.

tumetab1 8y ago

Then knew what Facebook would try but they choose to believe it woudln't work. It's easy to choose that with that much millions of incentive. It's not their fault as it was not their responsibility to provide a private message service for free to millions of people. This is just how it works, if want to be principled you can't make agreements with the devil.

abalone 8y ago

Come. On. You don’t get to that kind of valuation with a basically free product without ad targeting. An accelerated vesting clause is not an assurance. If they wanted assurances they could have made it a condition of the deal, ok? They didn’t. Accelerated vesting just means they were telegraphing that they wanted to leave before the shit hit the fan.

ozgune 8y ago
Pre-Facebook, WhatsApp's monetization strategy has been to charge users a nominal fee for usage ($1/year). And $1/yr with 1B users doesn't justify the price tag for Facebook. So Facebook wanted to introduce advertising. PS: I'd be happy to pay them $1/month because a significant part of my communication happens over WhatsApp. The challenge is $1/month is probably too pricey for most of their user base.
- sp527 8y ago
  If you think that even the friction alone of charging $1/yr isn't enough to shove the vast majority of users off the app, you haven't been paying attention to consumer expectations.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    But that's what WhatsApp was doing before.
    - sp527 8y ago
      No they were not. This is a complete falsehood. They sold the company well before they could roll out their monetization plan widely enough for it to impact user retention. They were also much smaller at the time.
  - ozgune 8y ago
    I agree that $1/yr would shove off majority of users off the app. That said, I think WhatsApp could get to revenues of $1-3B per year because of the following: * I pay $60/mo for my AT&T line. I do the majority of my communication over WhatsApp. In that sense, WhatsApp adds more value to my life than AT&T. There are a group of users who'd be willing to pay more for that value. * For most users, WhatsApp is an integral part of how they communicate with friends, family, doctors, coworkers, etc. As a consumer, it isn't just an "app" but an integral part of their communication flow. * WhatsApp is respected by international telcos. I know at least for the telcos in my home country that they'd be happy to charge for WhatsApp subscription as part of their packages. I think the primary problem was that even if WhatsApp could monetize $1-3/yr per user on average, it still wouldn't have met FB's revenue expectations.

snthd 8y ago

The "dumb fucks"[0] thing came out in 2010. The WhatsApp acquisition was in 2014. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im...

icebraining 8y ago
I dislike FB and try to push people to stop using it, but I disagree with this typical interpretation. Zuckerberg was totally right, they were dumb fucks, and that would be true even if he was virtue incarnate, because they didn't know that. Showing contempt for stupid actions doesn't mean one will take advantage of it.
- jiveturkey 8y ago
  that’s a bit of silly wordsmithing. you are technically right in the general case, but in this case we can indeed infer bad intentions. one doesn’t need to imagine good or bad intentions, one can simply look at the facts in the ground (even at the time, not later in hindsight). he was preying on people’s naivete and admitted as much.
- snthd 8y ago
  I basically don't agree - I think mocking deliberate vulnerability (and people trusting you) shows poor character. It's the whole punching up, not down, thing.

dasil003 8y ago

Nah, 2014 makes no material difference. It's not the recent scandals that have somehow revealed Facebook to be the spiritual successor to Microsoft's "embrace and extend" strategy; this has been obvious for at least a decade. Maybe the public didn't realize it yet, but anyone in tech, especially a successful founding team would have been well aware. That said, I'm not going to demonize these guys. Brian Acton clearly is repentant and putting his money where his mouth is in terms of supporting Signal, and that's worth a lot more than some principled nobody who never has enough clout to further his own principles in society.

mort96 8y ago
I think demonizing the guys behind WhatsApp is entirely warranted. They built up a large userbase around promises of privacy and encryption, and then promptly sold those users to fucking Facebook. Whether they were just gullible and didn't do their due diligence, or if they were malignant, doesn't really make a big difference.
- throwaway937 8y ago
  WhatsApp didn’t even have encryption until well after Facebook bought them.
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  It's not like they secretly sold it Facebook. People knew what Facebook was about by the time of the acquisition and either didn't care, did a wait-and-see or switched to an alternative. Perfectly reasonable behavior by everyone involved. Your standard for "demon" is rather low ! :-)
  - pluma 8y ago
    I guess they "trusted" WhatsApp. "Dumb f##ks", right?
- verganileonardo 8y ago
  How many Whatsapp users care about privacy and encryption? How many chose Whatsapp because of that? I believe most users simply use it because it is the most used messaging app in their country

hef19898 8y ago

Well, yes and no. Back the day, Facebook and Zuckerberg were the shining examples of successful Silicon Valley companies and founders with a good mission. That Zuckerberg, at the young age, managed to retain control of facebook all the way up to, and beyond, the ICO should have given them pause so. That hints a certain personality (no judgement intended in that assessment). But that is 20/20 hindsight which is always easy.

arthurcolle 8y ago
*IPO
- hef19898 8y ago
  Damn, so true! There you see what certain projects can do to your spelling!
elvirs 8y ago
Zuckerberg was never known to be a founder with a good mission.
- seppin 8y ago
  A stolen idea with open contempt for his users. No it was never ideal.
OhHeyItsE 8y ago
> the ICO should have given them pause Freudian slip? :)
- hef19898 8y ago
  Absolutely...
cortesoft 8y ago
In 2014? 'The Social Network' came out in 2010, and painted Zuckerberg in a pretty bad light. I don't think he was viewed as a shining example in 2014.

grey-area 8y ago

I don’t know why they trust me... - Mark Zuckerberg in 2003

caseysoftware 8y ago

Facebook's entire business model is ads. Of course, it was going to a) include advertising or b) add more user info to better target ads in other apps. Facebook has been lying to us since at least 2007. People were always okay with it because they perceived it as being okay and supportive of the right people and policies.

jiveturkey 8y ago

are you serious? these guys aren’t dummies. there was an anti-monetization clause in the contract. you don’t put that there out of an over abundance of caution. they knew exactly FB’s intentions. they maybe didn’t expect it to come home to roost so quickly, but they should have. again, these are smart guys. they just couldn’t get past the billions, plain and simple.

jjeaff 8y ago
I think at some point you could honestly make the decision that you can do a lot more good with $3B than guarding the privacy of the relatively well off from Facebook's ad machine.
robszumski 8y ago
Negotiating that clause in there in the first place is extremely customer/user friendly and I can't believe they were able to do it. I have never heard of this before, especially for such a high profile acquisition...to a known ad company.

madrox 8y ago

That, and I'm sure they thought they could still stay in control of their product. When it's your first buy-out, there's a lot of delusions about autonomy and power post-acquisition.

espeed 8y ago

Let's take a poll ... Who's submarines [0] are these? Who's PR firm is behind this and the originally posted TC piece [1]? What's their angle? And Why? [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-founder-brian-acton-says-facebook-used-him-to-get-its-acquisition-past-eu-regulators/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-founder-brian-act... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18076008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18076008

baxtr 8y ago

Wait a minute... FB had exactly the same business model in 2014 like today. Of course they understand the mechanics of that business model already back then. Shouldn’t they have known better?

BinaryIdiot 8y ago

To be fair acquisition assurances are always temporary at best. They are buying the company for a reason, not to leave it alone forever. I've been a part of two acquisitions over the past decade and most of the devs I know have been in at least one. The assurances are never more than temporary. This seems less Facebook specific and more "that's simply what happens with all acquisitions".

mcny 8y ago
> To be fair acquisition assurances are always temporary at best. They are buying the company for a reason, not to leave it alone forever. I've been a part of two acquisitions over the past decade and most of the devs I know have been in at least one. The assurances are never more than temporary. > This seems less Facebook specific and more "that's simply what happens with all acquisitions". I don't know what was going through their heads but as an outsider with no insider knowledge, I justified this as Facebook making sure nobody else gets hold of Whatsapp's user base. It made sense in my head back then.
macspoofing 8y ago
>The assurances are never more than temporary. Yep. 2 years. That's usually the amount time that an acquirer will leave you be.

colordrops 8y ago

The movie "The Social Network" came out in 2010 for goodness sake. It was already mainstream knowledge among non-tech people in 2010, let alone successful tech billionaires in 2014, that Facebook was an organization run by sociopaths.

windows_tips 8y ago

>Zuck: They "trust me" >Zuck: Dumb fucks [0] [0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

steve1977 8y ago

It was obvious you couldn't trust Facebook back in 2008 already.

konschubert 8y ago

When I heard about Facebook's assurances in 2014 and heard that they would remove the subscription fee, I asked myself "Then why did they buy it?" I had 0 knowledge about business back then and even u could figure out that something didn't add up.