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I still remember the first installation of WhatsApp messenger on an old Samsung device of mine in 2012 as a high-schooler. It was incredibly liberating to final

I still remember the first installation of WhatsApp messenger on an old Samsung device of mine in 2012 as a high-schooler. It was incredibly liberating to finally discover an IM app that enabled me to send unlimited messages to my friends and not get hamstrung by SMS limits that existed in my country; especially one that was resource-light enough to run on my device's 866 MHz processor. I'd largely glossed over Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp back in '14 as just another big tech company eating up a smaller 'potential future competitor,' but in hindsight it looks like it was the beginning of the end of WhatsApp as a simple, reliable and ad-free private messenger. Super glad I quit the platform in 2017 -- never been more tranquil.

cauldron 8y ago
All company need to make money, it's just a matter of when and how, Facebook's resources may have even did them good, as they can stay away from predatory investment funds that otherwise would bite they hard in the end.
- mnsc 8y ago
  Messaging is infrastructure and nothing that any single company should "need to make money" off. RCS can't come fast enough. https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-rcs-messaging/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-rcs-messaging/
  - cauldron 8y ago
    Tell that to Tencent. And their Wechat helped created the biggest misinformation system, the so called self-media.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    I don't get the "messaging is infrastructure" argument. When in the past has this been free? Phone calls, the postal service etc. have always had a cost for the end user.
    - tialaramex 8y ago
      Wait, do you pay for phone calls? For physical mail it makes sense that the cost is mostly for actually handling actual pieces of mail. But for telecoms the main cost is fixed - so it makes more sense to pay for the network and then actually using it is free, or at worst, using it only costs extra if you're such a big user that you increase those fixed costs. I pay £7 per month for this phone service. I believe the number of calls is theoretically limited (I've never hit the limit) but the number of text messages isn't.
      - nicoburns 8y ago
        > Wait, do you pay for phone call? > I pay £7 per month for this phone service. So you pay for phone calls? I don't think the message you are replying to is suggesting a cost per message. Just that it is usual for their to be a cost associated with the service (unlike WhatsApp at the moment).
        tialaramex 8y ago
        I pay for service, and I'd be comfortable paying (though not very much) for my secure text message service the same way. But I underscore that the service is what's important here and that's what I'm willing to pay for, not the calls. Imagine you find that your phone company, without you noticing, actually dropped 20% of your incoming calls. You didn't pay for those calls so who cares right? No, you pay for service, delivering other people's calls to you reliably is part of that service. I pay for YouTube Red or whatever it's called now, same rationale. I pay, I get the service. YouTube doesn't make videos about Minecraft, TLS, US law, or whatever, but the platform I watch them on needs paying for somehow and I'm damn sure I don't want to watch adverts.
      - def_true_false 8y ago
        If your service doesn't charge per unit, perhaps in addition to a fixed price, you are most likely just subsidizing other people's usage.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - gruez 8y ago
    so instead of being owned by 1 company, it's owned by various telecoms that will probably sell your metadata to advertisers and hand over everything (no e2e to law enforcement? I'd rather use centralized Signal.
  - justapassenger 8y ago
    Ahh, yes, telecoms will come to rescue poor users and give them free infrastructure. Current state of messaging across the world is super messy and sucks, but believing that telecoms are the answer is just naive. While sms allows you to communicate cross providers, the amount of money they charge, both historically and even nowadays for that is just insane. Att still charges $0.25 for international text messages, in 2018. Due to fragmentation of the market, the only way for them to stay in the game is to have something that’s shared, but boy, they do plan to make a lot money out of it.
baby 8y ago
What? If anything, WhatsApp has become a better product since its acquisition. It is currently the simplest, most reliable, ad-free messenger out there, which also supports state of the art end-to-end encryption for its millions of users. Let's see how they deploy ads. But it would be a shame that WhatsApp shut downs because Facebook cannot monetize the application. If anything, I'm glad they're going this route instead of charging a fee to use the app.
- abhiminator 8y ago
  Ads are a slippery slope. It might begin with text-only ads in 'Status' but I think it's only a matter of time before they spill over into other, more private sections of the application. And I do not trust Facebook Inc. to put privacy over profits [0] given it's trashy record in this space. End-to-end encryption is a valid point, but WhatsApp was not the first to pioneer it. Scale-wise it just got lucky, and Facebook just threw in a bunch of dollars from its coffers to acquire all that. [0] 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...
  - baby 8y ago
    it does not have to be a slippery slope. Would most people complain of ads in Google or Gmail nowadays?
- f_allwein 8y ago
  > end-to-end encryption Well, they do collect and use metadata, e.g. chat history: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/01/22/whatsapp-facebook-backdoor-government-data-request/#79424ada1030 https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/01/22/whats... There's better options regarding privacy, e.g. Signal, which does not collect metadata.
  - tinus_hn 8y ago
    According to that article WhatsApp provided almost no data except who was in the group and who was sending messages. There is no way Signal can function without having the same data available.
namdnay 8y ago
To be fair, the ad-free honeymoon that you were living in was obviously not a feasible steady state. Your messaging experience was being sponsored by VCs in the expectation of selling you to someone, in this case facebook
- zimablue 8y ago
  Yeah, how could a service like sending text messages from one device to another be free in the long term!? Think of the infrastructure and technology costs. No, wait, most people on this forum could knock up a messaging app in a couple of days and run it on aws lambda for less than pennies per user per year. https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/ I'm being snarky but I really don't get your point, nothing about this is expensive or difficult. Signal case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103877
  - robjan 8y ago
    Signal has a few orders of magnitude fewer users and uses tens of millions of dollars per year.
  - skinnymuch 8y ago
    Do you think Signal doesn’t cost a good amount of money per year?
  - thinkloop 8y ago
    > pennies per user per year Times 1.5 billion users is at least $30m / year, where to get that?
- calv 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure when I joined Whatsapp you could pay to have access for a couple of years, so it had a sustainable model, especially if they just turned the dial slowly on pricing.
  - justapassenger 8y ago

cauldron 8y ago

All company need to make money, it's just a matter of when and how, Facebook's resources may have even did them good, as they can stay away from predatory investment funds that otherwise would bite they hard in the end.

mnsc 8y ago
Messaging is infrastructure and nothing that any single company should "need to make money" off. RCS can't come fast enough. https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-rcs-messaging/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-rcs-messaging/
- cauldron 8y ago
  Tell that to Tencent. And their Wechat helped created the biggest misinformation system, the so called self-media.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  I don't get the "messaging is infrastructure" argument. When in the past has this been free? Phone calls, the postal service etc. have always had a cost for the end user.
  - tialaramex 8y ago
    Wait, do you pay for phone calls? For physical mail it makes sense that the cost is mostly for actually handling actual pieces of mail. But for telecoms the main cost is fixed - so it makes more sense to pay for the network and then actually using it is free, or at worst, using it only costs extra if you're such a big user that you increase those fixed costs. I pay £7 per month for this phone service. I believe the number of calls is theoretically limited (I've never hit the limit) but the number of text messages isn't.
    - nicoburns 8y ago
      > Wait, do you pay for phone call? > I pay £7 per month for this phone service. So you pay for phone calls? I don't think the message you are replying to is suggesting a cost per message. Just that it is usual for their to be a cost associated with the service (unlike WhatsApp at the moment).
      - tialaramex 8y ago
        I pay for service, and I'd be comfortable paying (though not very much) for my secure text message service the same way. But I underscore that the service is what's important here and that's what I'm willing to pay for, not the calls. Imagine you find that your phone company, without you noticing, actually dropped 20% of your incoming calls. You didn't pay for those calls so who cares right? No, you pay for service, delivering other people's calls to you reliably is part of that service. I pay for YouTube Red or whatever it's called now, same rationale. I pay, I get the service. YouTube doesn't make videos about Minecraft, TLS, US law, or whatever, but the platform I watch them on needs paying for somehow and I'm damn sure I don't want to watch adverts.
    - def_true_false 8y ago
      If your service doesn't charge per unit, perhaps in addition to a fixed price, you are most likely just subsidizing other people's usage.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- gruez 8y ago
  so instead of being owned by 1 company, it's owned by various telecoms that will probably sell your metadata to advertisers and hand over everything (no e2e to law enforcement? I'd rather use centralized Signal.
- justapassenger 8y ago
  Ahh, yes, telecoms will come to rescue poor users and give them free infrastructure. Current state of messaging across the world is super messy and sucks, but believing that telecoms are the answer is just naive. While sms allows you to communicate cross providers, the amount of money they charge, both historically and even nowadays for that is just insane. Att still charges $0.25 for international text messages, in 2018. Due to fragmentation of the market, the only way for them to stay in the game is to have something that’s shared, but boy, they do plan to make a lot money out of it.

baby 8y ago

What? If anything, WhatsApp has become a better product since its acquisition. It is currently the simplest, most reliable, ad-free messenger out there, which also supports state of the art end-to-end encryption for its millions of users. Let's see how they deploy ads. But it would be a shame that WhatsApp shut downs because Facebook cannot monetize the application. If anything, I'm glad they're going this route instead of charging a fee to use the app.

abhiminator 8y ago
Ads are a slippery slope. It might begin with text-only ads in 'Status' but I think it's only a matter of time before they spill over into other, more private sections of the application. And I do not trust Facebook Inc. to put privacy over profits [0] given it's trashy record in this space. End-to-end encryption is a valid point, but WhatsApp was not the first to pioneer it. Scale-wise it just got lucky, and Facebook just threw in a bunch of dollars from its coffers to acquire all that. [0] 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...
- baby 8y ago
  it does not have to be a slippery slope. Would most people complain of ads in Google or Gmail nowadays?
f_allwein 8y ago
> end-to-end encryption Well, they do collect and use metadata, e.g. chat history: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/01/22/whatsapp-facebook-backdoor-government-data-request/#79424ada1030 https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/01/22/whats... There's better options regarding privacy, e.g. Signal, which does not collect metadata.
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  According to that article WhatsApp provided almost no data except who was in the group and who was sending messages. There is no way Signal can function without having the same data available.

namdnay 8y ago

To be fair, the ad-free honeymoon that you were living in was obviously not a feasible steady state. Your messaging experience was being sponsored by VCs in the expectation of selling you to someone, in this case facebook

zimablue 8y ago
Yeah, how could a service like sending text messages from one device to another be free in the long term!? Think of the infrastructure and technology costs. No, wait, most people on this forum could knock up a messaging app in a couple of days and run it on aws lambda for less than pennies per user per year. https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/ I'm being snarky but I really don't get your point, nothing about this is expensive or difficult. Signal case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103877
- robjan 8y ago
  Signal has a few orders of magnitude fewer users and uses tens of millions of dollars per year.
- skinnymuch 8y ago
  Do you think Signal doesn’t cost a good amount of money per year?
- thinkloop 8y ago
  > pennies per user per year Times 1.5 billion users is at least $30m / year, where to get that?
calv 8y ago
I'm pretty sure when I joined Whatsapp you could pay to have access for a couple of years, so it had a sustainable model, especially if they just turned the dial slowly on pricing.
- justapassenger 8y ago