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WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

(www.nytimes.com)
713 points greenburger | 2 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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klabb3 ◴[17 Jun 25 13:09 UTC] No.44298747[source]▶
Yup. Non-traveling US Americans mostly won’t understand how critical WhatsApp is in many parts of the world, for more than a decade. It’s much much stronger than the iMessage norm in the US.

Businesses put WhatsApp numbers on their stores, and it’s often the only way to get a hold of a person. I would bet it’s more used than email, especially for young people. If WhatsApp went down for a week, it would seriously impede normal societal functions. It’s pretty much de-facto standard and arguably critical infrastructure.

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recursive ◴[17 Jun 25 16:32 UTC] No.44300986[source]▶
> It’s much much stronger than the iMessage norm in the US.

I've lived in the US all my life, and I didn't even know there was a norm at all, so that's not much of a threshold.

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bigyabai ◴[18 Jun 25 00:17 UTC] No.44305413[source]▶
It's less prominent if you were already 20-30 when the first iPhone came out. In slightly-affluent primary schools, owning an iPhone was your inroad to a cult of iMessage games and insular group chats. If you didn't beg mommy and daddy to fork over $600 and tax to Verizon then you didn't join the cool group chats.

It sounds petty, but not very abnormal for growing up in America.

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throwaway314155 ◴[19 Jun 25 04:05 UTC] No.44315331[source]▶
Respectfully, you can't extrapolate a single experience to _every_ "slightly-affluent primary school". Even the most miniscule of cultural differences can and will lead to different outcomes such as "did you just judge me for a green bubble? what sort of asshole thinks that's worth judging someone over?" (group proceeds to make fun of the iPhone user)
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1. bigyabai ◴[19 Jun 25 15:54 UTC] No.44319834[source]▶
> Even the most miniscule of cultural differences can and will lead to different outcomes

I certainly didn't say it was the only outcome. I switched schools three times in my youth, and each place I went had different kids but the same materialist obsessions. Some people did mock the Apple users, for what little it did to get them into the iMessage chats. Every school I went to had an 'iPhone in group' though, and if you didn't have the right phone you didn't get to chat, period.

My larger point, which you really don't need to extrapolate for, is that Apple knew they were making a FOMO-based service that would predate on kids and adults with maligned priorities. They understood the social clusterfuck that they engineered, and marketed the hell out of it; because it worked, bragging about iMessage does sell iPhones.

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2. throwaway314155 ◴[19 Jun 25 21:51 UTC] No.44322845[source]▶
Fair enough. I went to public school and (I believe) more people do in general. In my particular public school it was frowned upon to brag about your privilege as many had less fortunate upbringings. Mind you, this was still in a (relatively) affluent area - so general amenities were okay but many people still didn't come from extravagant or even mild wealth.

Excessive privilege really fucks with people's worldview.