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WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

(www.nytimes.com)
713 points greenburger | 3 comments | 16 Jun 25 13:38 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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yakkomajuri ◴[17 Jun 25 12:56 UTC] No.44298568[source]▶
I guess this was expected, but it makes me feel really powerless in the sense that I can't really move away from WhatsApp.

I have a couple of friends that I message via Signal and even convinced my dad to use it a while back, but here in Brazil WhatsApp is _everything_, and I doubt most people care about this at all. In my case, I'd love to just go over to Signal fully but then I couldn't talk to family, friends, and probably couldn't even book a haircut or pay my taxes (my accountant messages me on WhatsApp).

It's one of those where unless just about everyone were to go over to Signal, most people won't, because keeping track of messages in two apps is quite hard.

That leaves me stuck in this ecosystem, which is quite sad.

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mvieira38 ◴[17 Jun 25 13:30 UTC] No.44298977[source]▶
Last night I just removed myself from every friend groupchat and blocked everyone there, while leaving a status message about how they can reach me on Signal or call me. If they are actually your friends they'll come around, and families survived before Whatsapp existed. I'm also brazilian, I just won't stand with people dismissing what matters to me as if I'm a nutjob for not using their fascist app
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1. sebastiennight ◴[17 Jun 25 16:24 UTC] No.44300881[source]▶
Why would you block people instead of just messaging them about how you're moving to Signal, and then uninstalling WhatsApp?

This approach seems unnecessarily confrontational and might end up being quite counterproductive.

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2. mvieira38 ◴[17 Jun 25 16:30 UTC] No.44300955[source]▶
Because then they have the option of readding you to group chats and sending you messages

ETA: there is no way to really uninstall Whatsapp around here because so much of society runs on it, the most I can do is move all of my private existence elsewhere and hope that decreased traffic will do something

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3. sebastiennight ◴[17 Jun 25 17:07 UTC] No.44301328[source]▶
I appreciate your point of view.

Please allow me to be devil's advocate here (and FYI, this comes from someone living in a country where government officials use [official state institution]@gmail.com to ask you to send passports and other info, and tell you they'll whatsapp you your papers when they're ready).

I have not yet been in a situation where you CANNOT skip WhatsApp - since having someone be your one-time intermediary is almost always possible. Can it be an incovenience ? Yes.

How much would this inconvenience compare to what my grandfather's grandfather would consider an inconvenience? Probably not much. (You mean, I had to twiddle my thumbs for twice as many minutes!? How difficult)

So in the end, you're asking people to experience what they consider to be a major hassle (having 2 apps) just for you, when you're not willing to go through the pain of having just one app. It feels unbalanced.

So please consider that people might be complaining that you're being too much of a Don Quixote, but actually, the reason it's not working is because you're not playing the Don Quixote card hard enough