6 ms·

everyone saw this coming the day facebook bought it, but the real issue isn't ads in status . it's that the platform is now locked into meta's attention monetiz

everyone saw this coming the day facebook bought it, but the real issue isn't ads in status . it's that the platform is now locked into meta's attention monetization engine. the founders explicitly said no ads. now not only ads, but paid channels, algorithmic exposure, and user segmentation creeping in. most people won't switch because of network effects, so meta can keep tightening the screws. this isn't about revenue, it's about control. they’re reshaping a private messaging tool into a broadcast platform with tracking hooks. and most users won’t even notice until it’s too embedded to undo

fouronnes3 1y ago
It is becoming painfully apparent that the cycle of enshittification is truly inevitable, right up there next to the second law of thermodynamics.
- bapak 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - osculum 1y ago
    WhatsApp used to be a paid app, and I paid for it back in the day, as did lots of my friends.
    - avhception 1y ago
      And I'd gladly pay again if they would only let me!
    - bapak 1y ago
      You can't have both a paid app and an app with billions of users. You can use WhatsApp to talk to people across the world, you bet your ass that nobody would be using it in Indonesia and Brazil if it costed one dollar, vastly diminishing its value. If you want a free app that only part of users worldwide can afford there's already iMessage.
      - overfeed 1y ago
        > You can use WhatsApp to talk to people across the world, you bet your ass that nobody would be using it in Indonesia and Brazil if it costed one dollar, vastly diminishing its value. WhatsApp had payments (or a pilot) pre-acquisiton. At $1/year, it was an amazing value proposition even for those earning $1/day. IIRC, this was when WhatsApp had 3-500M users globally. Interestingly, they allowed people to pay the subscription on behalf of a contact, so the Indonesian expat in Australia could pay for friends and family in Indonesia, and the aervice could have reached a bullion users and 500M/year revenue with about 200 employees
        high_na_euv 1y ago
        1 day salary for chat app? Are you nuts?
        triceratops 1y ago
        Phones were more expensive back then. Someone earning $1/day mostly didn't use WhatsApp.
        owebmaster 1y ago
        People pay months of salary for a phone, what's one dollar for the most used app?
        high_na_euv 1y ago
        One day salary for app is a lot. Only web browser justifies that
        owebmaster 1y ago
        I use whatsapp for more than 10 years, it would be quite cheap if it cost only 1 day of work and nothing more. That is not possible, tho.
        overfeed 1y ago
  - b0a04gl 1y ago
    [dead]
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 1y ago
    Wasn’t it like a dollar a year or something way way back in the day?
    - chgs 1y ago
      Sure. Which would easilly pay the actual operating costs of a messaging platform However that’s in a world where you don’t pay people tens of billions of dollars for building a relatively simple messaging platform who manage to get the network lock-in.
  - rhubarbtree 1y ago
    Seem to remember paying for WhatsApp when I first downloaded it. I’d be happy to keep paying. Just not the amount that they can make from advertising. Solution maybe to ban intrusive advertising so they can’t make a lot of money from it that way?
    - upcoming-sesame 1y ago
      I would be happy to pay few bucks a month for an instant messaging service to make sure it's independent. I consider it basic necessity like internet on my phone. The problem is the fragmentation. We need federation first across all providers and then everyone could choose whatever provider they want to pay for
  - piva00 1y ago
    I paid for WhatsApp, USD 1 for year for a few years. They dropped the fee back in 2016. If WhatsApp wasn't part of Meta they would have found a way, even more it was a very small team before the acquisition already supporting hundreds of MAU, promises were made there wouldn't ever be ads but of course that corporate-consolidation doesn't care about any of that.
  - xorcist 1y ago
    Maybe not the best example. Whatsapp started out as a paid service (even if it was comparably cheap, somewhere around a dollar per year comes to mind), but that didn't help them. They have followed the same trajectory as everyone else. No one exists in isolation, if the market values your user base at ten billion then that is what it is. That also indirectly means someone with deep pockets could spend that order of magnitude of resources to compete with you. No one really wants to know how customer acquisition or sausages are made. The best counter example is perhaps wikipedia. But they exist in a very special niche. Lots of people have tried foundations in other places only to be outspent by a loss leader.
    - lou1306 1y ago
      > but that didn't help them What do you mean that didn't help them? They were doing quite fine up to the acquisition, no?
      - aendruk 1y ago
        Didn't help them [avoid this fate] is how I read it; that doing quite fine was tragically insufficient to escape the maw.
      - HappMacDonald 1y ago
        Not well enough to resist being acquired...
  - EbNar 1y ago
    I did. It was something on the like of 1 €/year. I'm usually cheap as fuck, but I'd gladly pay for something useful not to enshittify.
- fsflover 1y ago
  Unless it's an open, federated system.
  - upcoming-sesame 1y ago
    Right. Instant messaging should be considered basic / core utility like ISPs. I can pay a cheap or even a free one and they'll probably sell my data or I can pay more for an ISP that preserve my privacy
    - account42 1y ago
      > or I can pay more for an ISP that preserve my privacy In what alternate universe?
  - klabb3 1y ago
    No system can credibly claim to sustain massive consumer scale until proven in real life. Even if your technical architecture supports scale and federation, these are just some threats off the top of my head: - spam, fraud and Sybil attacks, deteriorating the experience for everyone - infighting, forking among maintainers of core libs and protocols - maintainers get poached by mega corps - hostile takeovers of foundations, trademarks and auxiliary institutions - a single entity within federation gets too large and imposes their own changes that can’t be rejected without losing majority of users or forking (see infighting) - VC/deep-pocket subsidized competition offering free service (say eg video calls) and unlimited marketing, OEM pre-installs etc, to poach critical mass of users I love the idea of federated systems. But I think some of us nerds think too much about tech and too little about the social and economic dynamics of the real world.
    - EuAndreh 1y ago
      Despite its flaws and issues, email is federated and has been working at scale for decades.
      - klabb3 1y ago
- assbuttbuttass 1y ago
  Only if you think Capitalism is also inevitable
TheAceOfHearts 1y ago
The next one to enshittify will be Threads. Right now it's in the honeymoon stage where there aren't any ads so people are encouraged to use it and help grow the platform.
- h1fra 1y ago
  This one I don't mind, there is like 1% of actual posters, everyone else are bots or tweet copy pasters
- anshumankmr 1y ago
  I used Threads for the first day. And seeing occasionally promo pics that James Gunn posts of Superman. But from my ancedotal experience, Threads is already full of bots, escort services, and random tweeters who I have no interesting in following. I feel Threads might be shut down eventually or integrated into Instagram perhaps.
- sebastiennight 1y ago
  Ha! You jinxed it! Introducing ads in Threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44297875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44297875 Just got an email about it today from Meta, inviting us to bid on the new platform.
iLoveOncall 1y ago
> most people won't switch because of network effects, so meta can keep tightening the screws. I don't have high hopes either but people did stop using Messenger in favor of WhatsApp, so they can absolutely stop using WhatsApp too. The "mistake" (if you're evil) those apps make is that they use your phone number as unique identifier, not a login. So if you switch app, you still have the phone number of all your friends.
- SunlitCat 1y ago
  Although those apps are still out there, i really miss those days were all you needed was some kind of unique identifier like a nickname, username or something like that an email address and some fancy password (and you weren't even pestered about to provide a phone number anywhere!). Those were simpler times. :')
bootsmann 1y ago
> most people won't switch because of network effects, so meta can keep tightening the screws Network effects are much much smaller for messaging apps vis-a-vis social networks because there is no problem in incrementally moving your DMs from one place to another.
- whiplash451 1y ago
  There is a massive barrier to switching. In order to switch, you also need to convince your acquaintances to switch. Good luck with that.
  - bootsmann 1y ago
    There is no switching involved, you can have two apps installed at the same time. It's not a social network where posting to one means the people posting on the other won't see your stuff.
    - amelius 1y ago
      You are ignoring chat groups here.
    - swarnie 1y ago
      You're always going to send the message on the app with 100% coverage. I'm not switching apps to send the same message to 50% of people and then again to 100% resulting in some switchers getting it twice. And lets be honest, people dont walk around recommending chat apps to each other. It hasn't been 2010 for at least five years.
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > In order to switch, you also need to convince your acquaintances to switch. Rather: you have to to convince yourself to be willing to make it a little bit harder, if necessary, for these acquaintances to contact you. :-)
  - upcoming-sesame 1y ago
phyrex 1y ago
It's been 11 years. If they hadn't been bought they'd have found a different monetization model long ago
- owebmaster 1y ago
  WhatsApp make billions of dollars but Meta wants it to make hundreds of billions. There's no way to appease the dragon.
  - xeromal 1y ago
    Curious how whatsapp makes any money besides the handful of companies that use it as a customer support portal
    - owebmaster 1y ago
      WhatsApp integrates into the rest of Meta ads machine so it distribute leads from facebook and instagram directly to whatsapp. It also makes money with spam.
      - phyrex 1y ago
        WhatsApp makes absolutely no money with spam. There isn't a per-message cost or however you think that would work
        hermanzegerman 1y ago
        There absolutely is a per-conversation cost for marketing messages. https://business.whatsapp.com/products/platform-pricing?country=Germany&currency=Euro%20(EUR)&category=Marketing https://business.whatsapp.com/products/platform-pricing?coun... See also here >With marketing messages, you pay for each message that is delivered to a receiver you chose within five days of being sent. https://faq.whatsapp.com/178447635241069?cms_id=178447635241069&draft=false https://faq.whatsapp.com/178447635241069?cms_id=178447635241...
        1y ago

fouronnes3 1y ago

It is becoming painfully apparent that the cycle of enshittification is truly inevitable, right up there next to the second law of thermodynamics.

bapak 1y ago
[flagged]
- osculum 1y ago
  WhatsApp used to be a paid app, and I paid for it back in the day, as did lots of my friends.
  - avhception 1y ago
    And I'd gladly pay again if they would only let me!
  - bapak 1y ago
    You can't have both a paid app and an app with billions of users. You can use WhatsApp to talk to people across the world, you bet your ass that nobody would be using it in Indonesia and Brazil if it costed one dollar, vastly diminishing its value. If you want a free app that only part of users worldwide can afford there's already iMessage.
    - overfeed 1y ago
      > You can use WhatsApp to talk to people across the world, you bet your ass that nobody would be using it in Indonesia and Brazil if it costed one dollar, vastly diminishing its value. WhatsApp had payments (or a pilot) pre-acquisiton. At $1/year, it was an amazing value proposition even for those earning $1/day. IIRC, this was when WhatsApp had 3-500M users globally. Interestingly, they allowed people to pay the subscription on behalf of a contact, so the Indonesian expat in Australia could pay for friends and family in Indonesia, and the aervice could have reached a bullion users and 500M/year revenue with about 200 employees
      - high_na_euv 1y ago
        1 day salary for chat app? Are you nuts?
        triceratops 1y ago
        Phones were more expensive back then. Someone earning $1/day mostly didn't use WhatsApp.
        owebmaster 1y ago
        People pay months of salary for a phone, what's one dollar for the most used app?
        high_na_euv 1y ago
        One day salary for app is a lot. Only web browser justifies that
        owebmaster 1y ago
        I use whatsapp for more than 10 years, it would be quite cheap if it cost only 1 day of work and nothing more. That is not possible, tho.
        overfeed 1y ago
- b0a04gl 1y ago
  [dead]
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 1y ago
  Wasn’t it like a dollar a year or something way way back in the day?
  - chgs 1y ago
    Sure. Which would easilly pay the actual operating costs of a messaging platform However that’s in a world where you don’t pay people tens of billions of dollars for building a relatively simple messaging platform who manage to get the network lock-in.
- rhubarbtree 1y ago
  Seem to remember paying for WhatsApp when I first downloaded it. I’d be happy to keep paying. Just not the amount that they can make from advertising. Solution maybe to ban intrusive advertising so they can’t make a lot of money from it that way?
  - upcoming-sesame 1y ago
    I would be happy to pay few bucks a month for an instant messaging service to make sure it's independent. I consider it basic necessity like internet on my phone. The problem is the fragmentation. We need federation first across all providers and then everyone could choose whatever provider they want to pay for
- piva00 1y ago
  I paid for WhatsApp, USD 1 for year for a few years. They dropped the fee back in 2016. If WhatsApp wasn't part of Meta they would have found a way, even more it was a very small team before the acquisition already supporting hundreds of MAU, promises were made there wouldn't ever be ads but of course that corporate-consolidation doesn't care about any of that.
- xorcist 1y ago
  Maybe not the best example. Whatsapp started out as a paid service (even if it was comparably cheap, somewhere around a dollar per year comes to mind), but that didn't help them. They have followed the same trajectory as everyone else. No one exists in isolation, if the market values your user base at ten billion then that is what it is. That also indirectly means someone with deep pockets could spend that order of magnitude of resources to compete with you. No one really wants to know how customer acquisition or sausages are made. The best counter example is perhaps wikipedia. But they exist in a very special niche. Lots of people have tried foundations in other places only to be outspent by a loss leader.
  - lou1306 1y ago
    > but that didn't help them What do you mean that didn't help them? They were doing quite fine up to the acquisition, no?
    - aendruk 1y ago
      Didn't help them [avoid this fate] is how I read it; that doing quite fine was tragically insufficient to escape the maw.
    - HappMacDonald 1y ago
      Not well enough to resist being acquired...
- EbNar 1y ago
  I did. It was something on the like of 1 €/year. I'm usually cheap as fuck, but I'd gladly pay for something useful not to enshittify.
fsflover 1y ago
Unless it's an open, federated system.
- upcoming-sesame 1y ago
  Right. Instant messaging should be considered basic / core utility like ISPs. I can pay a cheap or even a free one and they'll probably sell my data or I can pay more for an ISP that preserve my privacy
  - account42 1y ago
    > or I can pay more for an ISP that preserve my privacy In what alternate universe?
- klabb3 1y ago
  No system can credibly claim to sustain massive consumer scale until proven in real life. Even if your technical architecture supports scale and federation, these are just some threats off the top of my head: - spam, fraud and Sybil attacks, deteriorating the experience for everyone - infighting, forking among maintainers of core libs and protocols - maintainers get poached by mega corps - hostile takeovers of foundations, trademarks and auxiliary institutions - a single entity within federation gets too large and imposes their own changes that can’t be rejected without losing majority of users or forking (see infighting) - VC/deep-pocket subsidized competition offering free service (say eg video calls) and unlimited marketing, OEM pre-installs etc, to poach critical mass of users I love the idea of federated systems. But I think some of us nerds think too much about tech and too little about the social and economic dynamics of the real world.
  - EuAndreh 1y ago
    Despite its flaws and issues, email is federated and has been working at scale for decades.
    - klabb3 1y ago
assbuttbuttass 1y ago
Only if you think Capitalism is also inevitable

TheAceOfHearts 1y ago

The next one to enshittify will be Threads. Right now it's in the honeymoon stage where there aren't any ads so people are encouraged to use it and help grow the platform.

h1fra 1y ago
This one I don't mind, there is like 1% of actual posters, everyone else are bots or tweet copy pasters
anshumankmr 1y ago
I used Threads for the first day. And seeing occasionally promo pics that James Gunn posts of Superman. But from my ancedotal experience, Threads is already full of bots, escort services, and random tweeters who I have no interesting in following. I feel Threads might be shut down eventually or integrated into Instagram perhaps.
sebastiennight 1y ago
Ha! You jinxed it! Introducing ads in Threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44297875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44297875 Just got an email about it today from Meta, inviting us to bid on the new platform.

iLoveOncall 1y ago

> most people won't switch because of network effects, so meta can keep tightening the screws. I don't have high hopes either but people did stop using Messenger in favor of WhatsApp, so they can absolutely stop using WhatsApp too. The "mistake" (if you're evil) those apps make is that they use your phone number as unique identifier, not a login. So if you switch app, you still have the phone number of all your friends.

SunlitCat 1y ago
Although those apps are still out there, i really miss those days were all you needed was some kind of unique identifier like a nickname, username or something like that an email address and some fancy password (and you weren't even pestered about to provide a phone number anywhere!). Those were simpler times. :')

bootsmann 1y ago

> most people won't switch because of network effects, so meta can keep tightening the screws Network effects are much much smaller for messaging apps vis-a-vis social networks because there is no problem in incrementally moving your DMs from one place to another.

whiplash451 1y ago
There is a massive barrier to switching. In order to switch, you also need to convince your acquaintances to switch. Good luck with that.
- bootsmann 1y ago
  There is no switching involved, you can have two apps installed at the same time. It's not a social network where posting to one means the people posting on the other won't see your stuff.
  - amelius 1y ago
    You are ignoring chat groups here.
  - swarnie 1y ago
    You're always going to send the message on the app with 100% coverage. I'm not switching apps to send the same message to 50% of people and then again to 100% resulting in some switchers getting it twice. And lets be honest, people dont walk around recommending chat apps to each other. It hasn't been 2010 for at least five years.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > In order to switch, you also need to convince your acquaintances to switch. Rather: you have to to convince yourself to be willing to make it a little bit harder, if necessary, for these acquaintances to contact you. :-)
- upcoming-sesame 1y ago

phyrex 1y ago

It's been 11 years. If they hadn't been bought they'd have found a different monetization model long ago

owebmaster 1y ago
WhatsApp make billions of dollars but Meta wants it to make hundreds of billions. There's no way to appease the dragon.
- xeromal 1y ago
  Curious how whatsapp makes any money besides the handful of companies that use it as a customer support portal
  - owebmaster 1y ago
    WhatsApp integrates into the rest of Meta ads machine so it distribute leads from facebook and instagram directly to whatsapp. It also makes money with spam.
    - phyrex 1y ago
      WhatsApp makes absolutely no money with spam. There isn't a per-message cost or however you think that would work
      - hermanzegerman 1y ago
        There absolutely is a per-conversation cost for marketing messages. https://business.whatsapp.com/products/platform-pricing?country=Germany&currency=Euro%20(EUR)&category=Marketing https://business.whatsapp.com/products/platform-pricing?coun... See also here >With marketing messages, you pay for each message that is delivered to a receiver you chose within five days of being sent. https://faq.whatsapp.com/178447635241069?cms_id=178447635241069&draft=false https://faq.whatsapp.com/178447635241069?cms_id=178447635241...
      - 1y ago