5 ms·
It is becoming painfully apparent that the cycle of enshittification is truly inevitable, right up there next to the second law of thermodynamics.
by 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 agoWhatsApp used to be a paid app, and I paid for it back in the day, as did lots of my friends.
- avhception 1y agoAnd I'd gladly pay again if they would only let me!
- bapak 1y agoYou 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 ago1 day salary for chat app? Are you nuts?
- triceratops 1y agoPhones were more expensive back then. Someone earning $1/day mostly didn't use WhatsApp.
- owebmaster 1y agoPeople pay months of salary for a phone, what's one dollar for the most used app?
- high_na_euv 1y agoOne day salary for app is a lot. Only web browser justifies that
- owebmaster 1y agoI 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> Only web browser justifies that There's a surprisingly number of people whose usage of the Internet is exclusively through WhatsApp, and may not even know what a "browser" is or how to use it to get in touch with their contacts.
- overfeed 1y agoDid you know people below the poverty line would by $20 S40 feature phones just to be able to run WhatsApp? The other 2G phones cost less than half that amount, but you had to pay $0.1-$0.2 per SMS sent, in that light, spending $1 per year for WhatsApp's unlimited messages on a PAYG data package was a steal. So no, I am not nuts, you just didn't think through the value proposition.
- homebrewer 1y agoNonsense, it was very popular in my low-income country even back then. They charged something like half a day of income of a manual laborer per year, and everybody was happy to pay since it made your life so much easier. Of course, there's no going back now that everybody is accustomed to using it "for free".
- bapak 1y agoIf you read other top-level comments, you'll find that many people are simply allergic to paying for software. A lot of people don't have cards or even bank accounts so it's just not possible.
- bonoboTP 1y agoIt replaced SMS, which was costly, so the deal was pretty clear. Back in those days people were quite aware of SMS prices and 1 EUR/year to replace SMS was a no brainer. It was very popular despite the price. For many people, it was the only app they actually bought.
- bonoboTP 1y agoIn most of the world SMS ("texting") was (or still is) a paid service per message (~5/10/20 cents per message or so, I can't remember exactly and would have to factor in inflation). But it was costly enough that people flocked to WhatsApp to avoid texting costs. Paying 1 USD or 1 EUR per year was a great deal to send unlimited texts.
- b0a04gl 1y ago[dead]
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 1y agoWasn’t it like a dollar a year or something way way back in the day?
- chgs 1y agoSure. 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 agoSeem 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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agoMaybe 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 agoDidn't help them [avoid this fate] is how I read it; that doing quite fine was tragically insufficient to escape the maw.
- HappMacDonald 1y agoNot well enough to resist being acquired...
- EbNar 1y agoI 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 agoUnless it's an open, federated system.
- upcoming-sesame 1y agoRight. 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 agoNo 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.
- assbuttbuttass 1y agoOnly if you think Capitalism is also inevitable