WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

At least in The Netherlands, WhatsApp could show a 60 second unskippable modal ad video on every launch, and still get away with it due to network effects.

If you’re not on WhatsApp, no updates or news from your kids school, your sports team, your family, your car dealership etc. for you.

Signal seems to be booming right now in the Netherlands. I've been using it for years and never managed to grow my contact list beyond single digits, being a few friends in tech and a few who were very privacy conscious. All of those people were also available on WhatsApp and we'd often forget and message one another there.

But since January the trust in Meta has not only plummeted but it's become a mainstream enough talking point that I now receive invites to join Signal groups from--for want of a better term--normal people. Two of the local parenting groups I'm on are on Signal and no one ever mentions it or questions it, it's just "here's the group link" and the expectation that everyone has it installed.

In the Netherlands, was trying to promote Signal.

I switched phones and lost all my history. Now I’m fairly careful with these things, and make backups, but even I wasn’t able to get it back. Couldn’t recommend it to anyone since.

There’s a line between being secure and being useful, and they’re slightly unbalanced in Signal.

You should've made sure of how Signal works with regards to chat history before you removed the app from the old phone.

It’s similar in India. Even many businesses only use WhatsApp for orders and communications with customers. Heck, even the police use it to communicate between their people and with complainants/victims. Politicians use it between their party people and to send messages to the public. The average person on the street no longer knows what an SMS is or how to use it.

But I manage without WhatsApp (it’s also a privileged position to do so). Not having WhatsApp also helps avoid seeing all the junk and misinformation that people forward on it without any thought. There’s actually a name for this in India: “WhatsApp University”, which is a derogatory term for how people believe anything they read on WhatsApp and share it around without any analysis or thought or skepticism whatsoever.

Something seems to have happened in NL in March that generated some demand for it, but it seems to have vanished now:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=NL&q=%2Fm%2F012...

Your link shows a peak at the time you mention but the interest in subsequent months has been around 4 times higher than it was prior to the inauguration, so it seems inaccurate or even misleading to say that demand has "vanished."

"the iphone 4's antenna isn't a bad design, you're just holding it wrong" - steve jobs

It’s not like there’s no alternatives.

But tbh if they keep the ads out of messages I don’t see it an affecting people much.

To be fair Whatsapp works the same, if you are not careful when changing phone you will lose your history. That's because they don't actually store your messages on their servers, they are just synchronized between devices.

I have Signal on my phone and laptop. For some reason my laptop desynced from the phone, so my chat history now has a missing block of message history (that exists on the phone). I did nothing obvious to cause that desync. My guess is that my phone updated the Signal app, and I didn't update it on the laptop in lockstep. That's not a great UX, especially since there is no notification that this might happen.

That "something" is just people searching for this news story, rather than interest in signal for the sake of using it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_group...

NL clearly has some background interest in signal however, unlike the UK, which spikes on this story alone:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=GB&q=%2Fm%2F012...

Been tempting to spin up a competitor but the business/compliance side seems nightmarish whilst the actual tech aspects are trivial on modern hardware.

How does it handle phone theft?

Desync happens simply after a month of not using the PC client. Yes, it's that short.

Had the same happen with WhatsApp. Turns out you get one chance to get the local file backup right or you're screwed.

Message history still can’t be backed up on iOS, and also can’t be moved between Android and iOS in either direction AFAIK. There are far more gaps here than just imperfect users, which is often a UX problem as others have noted.

Oh wow. Good to know! Thanks for the heads up.

It's the same in many countries, especially the developing ones. In Kenya for example, you can run out of data but Whatsapp will still work. It's that crucial to daily life, it's get an exception by telecom companies.

Here’s an advertising model I’ve thought about but never seen:

The app itself is 100% ad free and runs on credits. You get credits through se other portal by logging in to watch ads whenever it’s convenient for you.

Good app experience for the user, and potentially better experiences for the advertisers because they get the target audience when they are most open to ads (and not annoyed by them).

WhatsApp has been selling your metadata to facebook for quite a while now. Their marketing gimmick of "end-to-end encryption" makes everyone think it's safe and private but here's the thing, your messages don't matter to them. It's the metadata they use to profile you. Remember the quote from Michael Hayden: "We kill people based on metadata."

> If you’re not on WhatsApp, no updates or news from your kids school, your sports team, your family, your car dealership etc. for you.

Maybe, but not being in WhatsApp is also a signal.

> It's that crucial to daily life, it's get an exception by telecom companies.

Isn't this because Facebook is paying telcos to keep its services free? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org

I mean, I'm in Switzerland and I recently deleted my Whatsapp after reading Careless People. Too few people in our modern world have the courage to let the leaves fall where they may.

They could publicly execute cute puppies, live stream this and force the users to watch it. They still won't lose significant user base.

I've given up on trying to get my non-tech network to use some other messenger, it's just too exhausting and wasted time.

Just out of interest, why are you keeping your chat history? What for? All my chats are set to burn after 6 months as standard but most are shorter than this.

Pretty sure this has been done before but it didn't take off. Personally the hassle of doing this would lead to me just not using the app.

Apps are popular until they aren’t. Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger and Skype were all popular once.

Ads are one thing, but now WhatsApp is letting businesses message you in Europe, only with opt out. This is pretty frustrating. I suspect some users will seek alternatives.

There's no guarantee that the user is "open to ads" in your model. I'd say it's even more likely someone would "watch" the ads while doing something else (AKA not actually watch the ads).

And if you want add something that makes sure the user is paying attention, then you have seen this advertising mode: it's basically the second ever Black Mirror episode.

Yep, this is why Signal hasn’t gained great traction I think. It’s just not intuitive (and I don’t understand why it’s necessary). You could always have this level of security as an option for journalists etc without ruining the UX of all users.

>. Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger and Skype were all popular once.

Credit where credit is due, Microsoft needed more than a decade to kill skype. It was so resilient and entrenched.

That's just a paid app with extra steps.

If you, after 20 years, can process all your chat history with a (locally run!) AI, you may find a lot of interesting things about yourself and your friends.

just curious.. why you are deleting your chats? what if you want to search them for something from a while ago?

Yeah. It’s a paid app, but it gives people the option of explicitly selling their time/attention via ads if they don’t want to use money.

Most users would probably pay, but some people really don’t want to/can’t and this gives them an option.

That's not the case though, at least for me? I had set Whatsapp to backup to Google Drive, and when I switched to an iPhone it did some automagix and all my stuff was there (and then backed up to iCloud!).

In India a palm will pop out of the phone screen every few hours and deliver a tight slap and people might still use it.

Even banks et cetera are making it the first class communication medium especially for OTP (which technically is safer than SMS but a glaring lock into a desk-less foreign company and at the same time the “OTP” can literally be the single point to take over someone’s almost entire life - including almost every single paisa). Every other day I am shown a sneaky lightning popup or two asking me to consent to send everything or something on WhatsApp. Sometimes the popup is about something entirely else but there’s an already checked checkbox with WhatsApp consent. Calling it bizarre will be an understatement.

"{straw man}" - most HN users.

It is much more likely that someone else will process all my chat history at a border checkpoint or somewhere similar and find out a lot of interesting things about me and my friends.

Don't keep it all on your phone and unencrypted.

I can't think of anything beyond a month is need to search for. And I'm definitely not interested in having it just in case. If it's important I'll write it down.

I'm also not a social media user.

How many people have been caught out over shit they've said decades ago that is now not fashionable to say?

What parts of your old chat histories can get you in trouble if the police got hold of your phone?

But why? Genuine question, What's the point? It's not going to improve anything.

I mean... none of mine, that's for sure, nor am I expecting to get in trouble for anything I've said in the past. I don't customarily do things I wouldn't be okay with somebody finding out about, and if did find something out and decided to become angry at me, that's on them for being a shitty person and doesn't really bother me. Nor am I expecting anyone to be looking at my history other than me anyway; that's why my phone has a passcode.

Why are you so sure it's not? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself

> Don't keep it all on your phone and unencrypted.

I've had a 90-day message retention policy set in WhatsApp ever since the feature became available. Not because I doubt my ability to manage secure backups, but because I don't expect my contacts to act equally careful.

I wish Signal supported a 90-day retention period. Four weeks (Signal max) is often too short for my contacts, which leads people to disable it altogether.

I also find it frustrating that Signal only applies your message retention policy to the conversation when you initiate the conversation, not when others do. As a result, more of my conversations end up being ephemeral on WhatsApp than on Signal, which feels a bit ironic.

So might anyone else, which is very worrying with the new rise of facism.

If you really care about it, you should probably pursue anonymity on the Internet, too. The worldwide data collection from websites is far more concerning and harder to deal with. I use Qubes-Whonix for that.

I personally keep it all (on iMessage) as a bit of personal history. Trying to see conversations I had with friends and family around fun/important events, searching to see if I ever went on a similar tirade about a product I’m about to send a friend…