This seems to follow a progression
- No ads
- Non-intrusive ads
- Intrusive ads, but you can pay to make them go away
- Intrusive ads, but you can pay to make them less intrusive
- Intrusive ads and you have to pay just to see the content
- Content becomes ads
- Ads pretend to be content (see Dr. Pepper’s “Fansville”)
- Award categories for ads are featured in major award ceremonies
- Award ceremonies just for ads go mainstream
Actually not sure what’s real vs hypothetical at this point.
We’ve been through this before. FFS, the US has a whole event whose entire point for like 99% of the audience is to see which ads will be shown during the half time break. Cable still has 24h advertisement channels.
This is how you end up with that scene in Demolition Man where they’re singing commercials.
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(see Dr. Pepper’s “Fansville”)
Nice try, Dr. Pepper. If that is even your real name!
Oh gosh. Did my critique of ads just become an ad?
I’m gonna be real, I prefer fansville style ads over traditional TV commercials.
Textbook enshittification.
Use Signal instead and donate what you can per month! I’d much rather support them than Meta
There’s one slight issue with Signal and it’s that none of my contacts is using it and I’m not going to be the guy telling them to install it just so that they can talk to me.
In the EU by next year app communication protocols need to be compatible by law, it is mainly said that it would mean that whatsapp could communicate with telegram but I suppose it also should work with signal.
Should work pretty well even, since they use the same encryption protocol.
Won’t happen though. Signal is very much against interoperability, and they’re not big enough to be considered a gatekeeper that will be forced by law.
Fun fact I learned not long ago:
Even iMessage technically wouldn’t count as a gatekeeper, since it is in fact below the usercount threshold the EU defined.Signal is not required to be interoperable and the CEO also stated that they won’t.
That’s… Well, I guess I have zero incentive to try Signal then.
As Signal is open source, I guess someone could just fork it. It’s not like anybody is really using it en masse as it is, and the kind of people who use it at the moment are also exactly the kind of people who would be happy to migrate to another service if they had a reason to.
Literally everyone in the UK uses WhatsApp, including 100% of my own extensive contacts. If I could download an open source rival app and still have full interoperability with WhatsApp users, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I’ve got Signal installed on my phone, but it’s basically pristine and unused due to the lack of people to talk to. What’s another app for the pile?
Not gonna lie I did this with all of my friends and family and most of them switched 🤣 But I completely get not wanting to go there!
You should. If they’ll literally stop talking to you over an app choice how good of friends are they?
Aren’t you doing the same thing to them in this case?
The only thing stopping me would be that literally no one on my contact list wants to do that… including work. I’m sure that’s the same for most people.
Yeah great, then I can talk to literally nobody because I’ve never met a single person in my life who has signal, and now it doesn’t even do texts anymore! Hooray!
SMS was considered a safety issue amd discontinued.
And if nobody in your friends group start talking about, nobody will get to know it.
I know it was, that’s when I stopped using signal. And I’m not going to waste my time trying to convince a bunch of people to sign up for yet another app to chat in, they’re not interested and don’t care because WhatsApp exists.
I was in your place once.
At some point I just decided I couldn’t be bothered with installing junk software that rendered my low spec cellphones unusable in a very short time.
If anyone wanted to reach me they could send me an sms, email me or spend the time to properly call.
Worked like a charm to thin the herd.
I’ll remember that next time I decide I have too many friends. My low spec phone works just fine with one extra app on it.
Just today I found out that usernames are available for public testing.
I’m using it. Thinking of bringing peoples from lemmy to signal.
Signal is this weird middle ground. I would prefer it if the person already has it. But if I am to try convincing someone to at least try another messaging solution, I would rather lead them to XMPP.
Also having to use either signal-cli or Waydroid is VERY annoying, because they arbitrarily decided to screw desktop over.
Legitimate question: would Signal or Matrix be the most desirable place to end up in a hypothetical post-WhatsApp Hegemony world? Or XMPP for that matter?
I’ve honestly never got my head around the difference in terms of the pros and cons of each.
I actually haven’t heard of Matrix, it sounds like your knowledge on this topic surpasses my own!! I’m gonna research the things you mentioned though because I’m interested!
Time to find your matrix homeserver!
I do love the idea of matrix, but it’s definitely not a direct replacement for whatsapp, sadly.
How do you even search for it. What’s it called ? Matrix brings up the film franchise
This is just part of the problem. Matrix is the network, but clients you use are dozens with different names like Element, FluffyChat, Neochat, Fractal, heck even Thunderbird supposedly supports Matrix. And then a huge problem with this is not every client supports every Matrix function. Like end to end encryption? Half of the clients doesn’t even support this main selling point.
Does anyone else get XMPP/jabber vibes from this? Wasn’t this part of why jabber never really got adopted en masse?
So is it user friendly to non devs ? I haven’t been able to find information regarding it.
Any suggestions for using matrix ? Is it useful or nah ?
It’s not hard to use, but it’s not as “idiotproof” like whatsapp or messenger. Once you have it installed and created account somewhere like matrix.org, it’s quite simple.
Main benefit is you’re not feeding advertisment privacy intruding behemots with your data by using matrix.
Ok that’s helpful. Anything you suggest? I pick a client and get my partner to do the same and that’s it ? Then I start to get other people, my family and such to use it as well. Slowly and surely. Like with WhatsApp.
Then do they sell to highest bidder and I start over again or ?
Well, we can only hope that decentralisation is good enough argument for not selling.
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Link gives me error messages
Why not? What is missing?.
It’s more like Slack than Whatsapp IMO. It’s not so streamlined and using it on multiple devices is definitely mainly for tinkers. Or at least it was couple years ago. That cross signing through devices was everything but intuitive.
And THE feature everyone I know misses the most is giphy/tenor support, which is kind of dumb, but also really understandable. This and similar nice to have features are still lacking.
Is Matrix better for the users privacy? Definitely yes! But is it better user experience? Well, kind of almost, but not yet.
Cross signing is easy now, ether scan a QR code, or compare emojis. Multi device on Matrix is even better than WhatsApp, signal etc. because you are not forced having at least one android or iOS phone running the main instance but all instances are the same level, same as in telegram. Having threats is superior to what whatsapp offers (no threats) Well, I’m not a gif sender, so I never recognized that gif is not supported
Good to hear cross signing is now easier. I remember it was real PITA.
Why not? I never tried it so I don’t know the details
Because exactly 2 peopleI know have matrix users.
I still use it, and refuse to use Whatsapp, but it takes some effort to get people over to the beautiful FOSS-side
You can set up some bridges until you have convinced others to use matrix as well (Btw. Matrix is NATO approved 😝)
Yeah, you can do a lot of things with Matrix, unless you want to post a gif, lol. The main problem is it’s still far from being as user friendly as those like Messenger, Whatsapp or Telegram. Typical user doesn’t really care about its privacy upper hand or it being federated, typical user see it’s too complicated and nobody uses it, so he’ll pass on it too. Which is sad.
The app is not less user friendly than whatsapp. It is running the server that is difficult, but average joe can just create an account at matrix.org
Yes, but explain that to average person, especially older one. It’s hard, trust me, I’m dealing with this kind of people every day and unless it’s extremely streamlined (as whatsapp is, cause you don’t even need account name, it’s your number, yay, so easy) “it’s hard and I don’t have time/patience for that”… sad reality unfortunately.
WhatsApp doesn’t have an inbox. What are they talking about!?
It has a feed now full of podcasters and tiktokers, the web version offers me to buy ads for the feed right in the front of the messages, every time I open it, disgusting
I don’t see that. There’s no feed anywhere as far as I can tell. I just see my chats. I didn’t create any communities or join any channels. Is that where you see a feed?
It’s in the second tab, where stories are. Stories used to stay open, so you could easily see the ones you already watched. Now they disappear into a watched drawer that is by default closed. They need the space to show you channels, like the one of the owner Sugar mountain or random tiktokers.
Whatsapp slowly transforms into instagram
Yes, stories are renamed now
Are you sure you’re talking about WhatsApp? I don’t see stories anywhere. Never saw anything like that. Maybe you’re talking about Snapchat or Instagram or something else?
At least for me on android there are 4 Tabs. Community’s, chats,
currentupdates, calls.Edit: I checked the translation.
I have community, chat, updates, calls. None of them have anything related to stories or feeds.
Wrong translation on my side. Check the updates tab. On more recent versions you’ve got the “Status”, those are the stories people are talking about. Below that are the channels of influencers and other people I don’t care about.
Either they haven’t rolled this out in your country yet, or you haven’t updated the app in a while.
The app is up to date. Maybe you’re right and they only deployed this in some countries. How long ago did this show up for you?
I don’t use it myself, I’ve see it on a friends’ phone, so good question. Was a while ago though, a few months, maybe?
I hope that they put ads, lots and lots of ads, so I can finally switch to something else.
Waiting for WhatsApp enshittification do that I can move to more open platform
I hope they do it. And I hope It’s bad enough to push users away.
Then I my exit out of the Meta ecosystem will be complete!
Well, that site complains about adblockers, so it is not much better.
Just don’t use the Channels feature, which is stupid on a messenger app anyway.
In case of anti-adblock: https://1ft.io/proxy?q=http%3A%2F%2Fandroidpolice.com%2Fwhatsapp-ads-meta-messaging-inbox%2F
Does WhatsApp have a premium option like Telegram?
Not actually opposed to paying for my messenger, altho Meta won’t get any $ from me
Don’t worry, they’re still making money off you.
I’m so happy I’m not using WhatsApp. I use Matrix and Telegram and that’s it.
Telegram already has ads in it…
Ow never seem them…? Then again I’m not in very large channels. Or you can also use different clients.
