I keep seeing things like this ... smart-minded, tech-savvy people trying to find ways to claw back some scrap of privacy in this modern dystopian hellhole we call the Internet ... people who are...
I keep seeing things like this ... smart-minded, tech-savvy people trying to find ways to claw back some scrap of privacy in this modern dystopian hellhole we call the Internet ... people who are probably too young to remember a world w/o it. And I want to offer advice, or encouragement, or something.
But in my mind, I keep unwinding it, back and back and back, to root causes ... the whole "chopping at the branches is useless; you gotta find the root" philosophy.
And by my way of seeing it ... this ... all of this { gestures vaguely at All Things Tech } ... is a problem of our own making. Us the users of tech. In a kind of giant, decades-long, frog-in-hot-water, just-one-more-thing, corporate-scope-creep-gone-wild ambivalence that dates all the way back to the Eternal September.
I "woke up" in the early '00s; I never joined FB, I started using FF exclusively back when it was still called Phoenix, and I started to actively disconnect myself from all things Google after they sold out to China, and I've been loudly and annoyingly ranting at anyone who'll listen/read, ever since.
But I think I was already too late to the party, even 20 years ago.
And now, hmmm, I don't really even know where I'm going with this post.
I guess I'm saying that, yeah Meta sucks, Google sucks, WhatsApp sucks ... but these are all just symptoms. People are chopping at the branches, missing the roots.
I think the root issue was always targeted advertising. I may be wrong, maybe it was all advertising on the 'Net. Maybe it's all Capitalism. Maybe it was US wealth disparity, corporate protectionism ... IDK exactly which one is the "right" answer. Quite likely, there's plenty of blame to go around for all of them.
But I do know that, if this thing is still salvageable -- frankly, I do not believe it is any more -- but if it is, we're not going to solve it by "not letting WhatsApp see our contact list".
I am 100% with you, the whole journey, but a couple years later. Removed Facebook from my phone in 2015ish, never used Instagram or Whatsapp or any of the others. Always kept Siri turned off on my...
I am 100% with you, the whole journey, but a couple years later. Removed Facebook from my phone in 2015ish, never used Instagram or Whatsapp or any of the others. Always kept Siri turned off on my Apple phone, and haven't found any evidence that they're using my collected data against me, not that there's much on my phone, all of my banking/shopping/life is mostly on my linux desktop.
I think the nature of how we organize our society is a little flawed. We solve things like agriculture expecting to free people up to pursue 'creative work' to advance society, but we don't want to provide them the resources to keep themselves alive in exchange for that work. The only thing that brings in money is selling a physical product, and it takes increasingly toxic advertising to make that happen.
We don't want to pay anyone for any act of service, preparing food, caring for others, educating others, none of it, we just refuse to pay anyone for anything that doesn't directly result in a physical product being produced or money being directly increased by what they're doing. Any job that benefits society in some non-tangible, hard to monetize way, is basically not paid for, we expect all of that to happen for free.
The only solution is to pay for social media apps, pay for internet browsers, pay for open source software, etc. We cannot sustain ourselves providing things for free when food still costs money. Either make food, housing, medical care, education not cost any money, or make everyone pay for these services.
You cannot makeother people to look differently on such things. I mean you can, but they have to want it themselves. I use Element (Matrix.org client) as my way of communication in this age and I...
Exemplary
You cannot makeother people to look differently on such things. I mean you can, but they have to want it themselves.
I use Element (Matrix.org client) as my way of communication in this age and I keep crashing into people who always say "Why don't you use WhatsApp?" or "Why doesn't your daughter use WhatsApp?" (when I humbly ask them if their kid can use Element).
Some are willing to accept that I want to.protect my (and my daughter's) privacy and have her use secure apps that are not in full control of big corporations, others can't seem to comprehend. They don't realize what they give up and when I tell them, they don't care. I always tell them it's like they gave (for example) Meta key to their house and everytime they wanted to go inside, Meta would jump in andopen the door. It may still be their house, but they can't access it if Meta doesn't feel.like that.
Even people that are close to me don't want to understand. I stopped explaining.
I have Facebook account, I need it for work. It is in my real name and everything I havr put in is the name, phone number and e-mail. And guess what - Facebook keeps showing me peple to add as friends that I know personally. I didn't add even my school (I selected some totally random one) and it still has me figured, literally without any inout from me. I guess that know which people I have in my contact list or in whose contact list I am. Disclaimer: I never logged in to Facebook on my phone nor I have ever used their app, just on work laptop through browser. Hell, I don't even have any contacts for those people on my laptop.
This helped open eyes to some of people around me. Yet they do exactly nothing.
As Louis Rossmann keeps saying: "You will own nothing and be happy about it." He is right, we are already at that state. Maybe not completely in materialistic things, but at our privacy we are already there.
How to get out? Absolutely top thing is that one must want to. If you don't want, you are not getting out. Everything alse comes after that.
I really think that if you missed the Friendster - Myspace - Facebook transition, social media just seems like a permanent thing that can never go away. I went through that one, and I lived...
I really think that if you missed the Friendster - Myspace - Facebook transition, social media just seems like a permanent thing that can never go away.
I went through that one, and I lived through that era where there were a crap ton of illegal "Spotify" websites before anyone worked out a legal way for that to exist and those sites got taken down so often that after the first three I started just downloading music directly to my hard drive and keeping it there, so that I'd never lose it. People who didn't go through that just cannot comprehend that the service they use may not be there forever, and everything they think they'll always have access to on that service is really not in their control at all.
To clarify, I don't have any problem at all with paying for a service. Spotify was great, before they started cutting corners by producing AI music instead of paying artists for their creative work. Netflix was great before it started cutting corners by producing its own content instead of paying for existing content produced by other people. It's not the service I'm attacking, its the way that they conduct business by extracting absolutely every single cent out of you while providing less and less in return that I have an issue with.
I lived through Napster, Kazaa, torrent and other such things. That means I had to download everything and keep it. And it is how I do it nowadays - but legally. I buy CDs, DVDs and Blu rays and...
I lived through Napster, Kazaa, torrent and other such things. That means I had to download everything and keep it. And it is how I do it nowadays - but legally. I buy CDs, DVDs and Blu rays and rip them to my home server. My streaming service is actually my own, the access to it is in my hands only.
I also don't have problem with paying for services - my library on Steam has over 400 games (probably less than 10 of those were "bought" for full price, others are either bundles for a few bucks or from heavy sale). That's a lot of games I don't really own, isn't it? Yet I believe in Valve, they are doing best from all of such providers (in my eyes). The same goes for my Nebula subscription - my money goes to creators (and to running the servers), not big corporations that already have a lot of money and doesn't need me (I'm talking to YOU, TUBE! Youtube drove me out with their "free" model that is paid by my time so heavily nowadays, that I stopped visiting the site, I use Grayjay instead...).
You are right about Spotify and Netflix. I didn't even install any of them and never used them and never will, but I know from others what Netflix used to be and where it went. And of course others want their own share and the place got fragmented (again) - and not for the good of consumers, quite the contrary.
Well, as was already said - if one doesn't want this to change, the change will never come to them. I don't want to live/use services like that, hence why I'm picking the harder path full of (sometimes artificial) obstacles. Yet it is the path I want to be on. I want to be my own master (if it makes sense).
Pawn shops have proven amazing for getting dirt cheap physical copies. They are all still out there, and collections eventually get dumped because the collector moves on to other things or dies...
I buy CDs, DVDs and Blu rays and rip them to my home server.
Pawn shops have proven amazing for getting dirt cheap physical copies. They are all still out there, and collections eventually get dumped because the collector moves on to other things or dies and nobody wants the collection. Even libraries are liquidating their print archives as they go more digital. It all washes up at pawn shops, goodwill, salvation army, and other thrift stores. You can walk out of those places with fifty discs, books, and console games for fifty dollars, even less in some cases. Sure, it's not 'modern' media, but that's just a plus to me since most of the new stuff is just lesser copies of better older originals anyway.
Copyright holders can't censor or alter original physical copies. They can't prevent them from changing hands legally either. Once you've got the physical media you can legally make a digital backup for yourself, legally stream it to your phone from your home media server, legally use the ROM in an emulator, etc. Physical media is still king. The vinyl revival is a trend that I think will spread beyond the music industry. Music's just ahead of the curve a bit, which makes some sense as they were the first industry to be taken down by internet piracy and digital services. They've had longer to stew on the problem. ;)
Recently I bought 3 used DVD (movies) for 0.6€. Sometimes I go at length to get something - I paid 20€ to get Lilo & Stitch 1&2, which are DVD from more tha 20 years ago. Even worse - I have to...
Recently I bought 3 used DVD (movies) for 0.6€. Sometimes I go at length to get something - I paid 20€ to get Lilo & Stitch 1&2, which are DVD from more tha 20 years ago. Even worse - I have to find Czech dubbed copy.
Physical media is till king for me. It is something they can't take away from me. It costs me more, that's for sure - you have to get discs, buy HDDs to store it all and I even bought licence for MakeMKV as it is the thing that ripped everything for me and I felt like givingmoney for licence is good thing to do - but once again, it is mine to actually own, not just lease.
Good point about Steam, they remain pretty great. I like their business model of basically getting people to buy games they’ll never play, cause thats on us hahahaha I only go on Youtube to watch...
Good point about Steam, they remain pretty great. I like their business model of basically getting people to buy games they’ll never play, cause thats on us hahahaha
I only go on Youtube to watch specific content creators. I’ll watch one 20ish minute video while I do my daily cardio and thats really the only time I watch streamed content. Everything else is torrented same as Ive been doing since I was a teenager.
To be fair there, it's more like existing content took their ball and went home. They had to make new content to compete. But yes, they then proceeded to cut quality programs and instead approach...
Netflix was great before it started cutting corners by producing its own content instead of paying for existing content produced by other people.
To be fair there, it's more like existing content took their ball and went home. They had to make new content to compete.
But yes, they then proceeded to cut quality programs and instead approach content like they were Tiktok: cheap, highly engaging, minimally creative. That's a shame. Ideally, the invisible hand works here, but somehow these last 1-2 decades have had more people embrace slop. Even paid slop. It's understandable when people don't respect their time and get free time wasters, but it's a bit baffling for supposedly "premium" services that you pay $10-25/month for each.
Right, theres quite a few streaming services with just documentaries that are doing pretty well, Netflix really has no excuse. I’m also not convinced that it was one sided, I think Netflix had...
Right, theres quite a few streaming services with just documentaries that are doing pretty well, Netflix really has no excuse.
I’m also not convinced that it was one sided, I think Netflix had been getting that content for basically nothing and they “packed up” probably because Netflix didn’t want to pay any more than basically nothing for it.
Just to show how much communication habits differ, I've only connected to one person on WhatsApp for a specific purpose, and I could probably uninstall it since we have little reason to chat now....
Just to show how much communication habits differ, I've only connected to one person on WhatsApp for a specific purpose, and I could probably uninstall it since we have little reason to chat now. On the other hand, I use Google Chat every day with family.
There are probably others who almost exclusively use Facebook Messenger or iMessage.
The EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) has pushed WhatsApp to open up interoperability with other clients, although I’m not fully up to date on the progress there. I read some preliminary API docs a few...
The EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) has pushed WhatsApp to open up interoperability with other clients, although I’m not fully up to date on the progress there. I read some preliminary API docs a few months back (maybe last year?) but I haven’t seen actual user facing evidence of this yet.
There’s also an ongoing antitrust case over Meta’s ownership of WhatsApp and Instagram alongside Facebook, because of the overall control of the communication landscape that gives them, but honestly I think per-service interoperability is far more important than who owns which services in the current environment. Walled gardens of hundreds of millions of users are a bad thing, even if each company is limited to owning only one walled garden and you’re technically free to select a competing one instead, which would render monopoly regulations moot. Mandating against the walls themselves seems necessary in a way that pre-internet legislation didn’t need to account for.
Also worth noting that it’s essentially mandatory, i.e. everyone uses it and good luck convincing all but your most tech-focused friends and family to switch, but nobody’s actually forcing you to use it. It’s a lot less clear cut in law than it would be if a company were actually requiring you to sign up for bundled service or anything like that; the modern tech giants seem to have learned from Microsoft’s losses all those years ago, and they’re a lot better at plausible deniability.
Afaik Meta was trying for a while to comply without complying and repeatedly being told to actually comply. But, last I heard they announced that interconnectivity will be possible somewhere in 2027.
I read some preliminary API docs a few months back (maybe last year?) but I haven’t seen actual user facing evidence of this yet.
Afaik Meta was trying for a while to comply without complying and repeatedly being told to actually comply. But, last I heard they announced that interconnectivity will be possible somewhere in 2027.
Yeah, classic knuckle dragging among tech companies when the EU actually tries to reign them in. Apple has been doing the same. Really wish they stopped playing softball and threw the book at...
Yeah, classic knuckle dragging among tech companies when the EU actually tries to reign them in. Apple has been doing the same.
Really wish they stopped playing softball and threw the book at them. From what I've read, the EU doesn't (or isn't supposed to) play around with this kind of malicious compliance.
It's not really mandated by governments, but instead it's just what the vast majority of people use. Not using it can severely hamper your ability to communicate with others since many people...
So basically your options are to use it, or just... Lose your ability to smoothly interact with the vast majority of society. It managed to become "mandatory" without government action.
In Brazil, many government services also use WhatsApp to some extent. I'm sure you can do everything without it, but that is one additional factor to make WhatsApp feel official and mandatory.
In Brazil, many government services also use WhatsApp to some extent. I'm sure you can do everything without it, but that is one additional factor to make WhatsApp feel official and mandatory.
This is not the case for Europe. I live in the Netherlands and never installed WhatsApp. This has caused me exactly zero problems because there is always SMS, and that is very cheap over here.
It's not really mandated by governments, but instead it's just what the vast majority of people use. Not using it can severely hamper your ability to communicate with others since many people won't have an alternative means of communication
This is not the case for Europe. I live in the Netherlands and never installed WhatsApp. This has caused me exactly zero problems because there is always SMS, and that is very cheap over here.
Yeah, same here as someone in the US. I use SMS to talk to every except the Chinese side of my family (well, the ones still in China), that's all WeChat. The closest thing to big tech social media...
Yeah, same here as someone in the US. I use SMS to talk to every except the Chinese side of my family (well, the ones still in China), that's all WeChat. The closest thing to big tech social media I use is LinkedIn, and even that I use so rarely and will absolutely not install the app.
I have two friends who only communicate via Messenger. If not for them, I would uninstall messenger and only use iMessage/SMS. Neither of them are iPhone users, and I suspect that's why, since...
I have two friends who only communicate via Messenger. If not for them, I would uninstall messenger and only use iMessage/SMS. Neither of them are iPhone users, and I suspect that's why, since many of our friends are iPhone-ers.
It would be amazing to have one fewer app on my phone, especially one owned by Facebook, since I have to have insta on my phone for my art account.
I moved my family group chat to Signal, because the SMS wasn't an option due to pictures not sending right between the iPhone and Android users. But before that we were on messenger for the same...
I moved my family group chat to Signal, because the SMS wasn't an option due to pictures not sending right between the iPhone and Android users. But before that we were on messenger for the same reason. I still have it for a few friends, and because my small town has 3 Facebook groups and messaging that way seems to be their preference still.
It would be nice if I could move everyone to Signal, but so far, only my discord server has picked it up for chatting. I'm also using it less and less since I only have 2 people who are on there...
It would be nice if I could move everyone to Signal, but so far, only my discord server has picked it up for chatting.
I'm also using it less and less since I only have 2 people who are on there that refuse to use anything else.
With the newest update to iPhones thanks to them losing lawsuits, the issue with photos seems to be resolved, at least for me. As long as everyone I'm talking to has the most recent OS (android and iOS), pictures and videos send fine, but I'm also on the newest iPhone, so that may be why.
Yeah I had thought it should have been fixed previously but it wasn't and now I'm not gonna move the fam back. Oddly the communities are most of the reason I stay on Facebook at all
Yeah I had thought it should have been fixed previously but it wasn't and now I'm not gonna move the fam back.
Oddly the communities are most of the reason I stay on Facebook at all
Why don’t you just use insta through the browser? That’s what my SO does on her phone. I thought everyone would have uninstalled meta apps after the most recent fiasko.
Why don’t you just use insta through the browser? That’s what my SO does on her phone. I thought everyone would have uninstalled meta apps after the most recent fiasko.
Insta doesn't show me notifications when I use it through the browser and I exclusively use it on my phone. I'm not sure why it does that, but I've been trying to troublehsoot for a while now...
Insta doesn't show me notifications when I use it through the browser and I exclusively use it on my phone. I'm not sure why it does that, but I've been trying to troublehsoot for a while now about it. I would love to uninstall all the apps.
I keep seeing things like this ... smart-minded, tech-savvy people trying to find ways to claw back some scrap of privacy in this modern dystopian hellhole we call the Internet ... people who are probably too young to remember a world w/o it. And I want to offer advice, or encouragement, or something.
But in my mind, I keep unwinding it, back and back and back, to root causes ... the whole "chopping at the branches is useless; you gotta find the root" philosophy.
And by my way of seeing it ... this ... all of this { gestures vaguely at All Things Tech } ... is a problem of our own making. Us the users of tech. In a kind of giant, decades-long, frog-in-hot-water, just-one-more-thing, corporate-scope-creep-gone-wild ambivalence that dates all the way back to the Eternal September.
I "woke up" in the early '00s; I never joined FB, I started using FF exclusively back when it was still called Phoenix, and I started to actively disconnect myself from all things Google after they sold out to China, and I've been loudly and annoyingly ranting at anyone who'll listen/read, ever since.
But I think I was already too late to the party, even 20 years ago.
And now, hmmm, I don't really even know where I'm going with this post.
I guess I'm saying that, yeah Meta sucks, Google sucks, WhatsApp sucks ... but these are all just symptoms. People are chopping at the branches, missing the roots.
I think the root issue was always targeted advertising. I may be wrong, maybe it was all advertising on the 'Net. Maybe it's all Capitalism. Maybe it was US wealth disparity, corporate protectionism ... IDK exactly which one is the "right" answer. Quite likely, there's plenty of blame to go around for all of them.
But I do know that, if this thing is still salvageable -- frankly, I do not believe it is any more -- but if it is, we're not going to solve it by "not letting WhatsApp see our contact list".
I am 100% with you, the whole journey, but a couple years later. Removed Facebook from my phone in 2015ish, never used Instagram or Whatsapp or any of the others. Always kept Siri turned off on my Apple phone, and haven't found any evidence that they're using my collected data against me, not that there's much on my phone, all of my banking/shopping/life is mostly on my linux desktop.
I think the nature of how we organize our society is a little flawed. We solve things like agriculture expecting to free people up to pursue 'creative work' to advance society, but we don't want to provide them the resources to keep themselves alive in exchange for that work. The only thing that brings in money is selling a physical product, and it takes increasingly toxic advertising to make that happen.
We don't want to pay anyone for any act of service, preparing food, caring for others, educating others, none of it, we just refuse to pay anyone for anything that doesn't directly result in a physical product being produced or money being directly increased by what they're doing. Any job that benefits society in some non-tangible, hard to monetize way, is basically not paid for, we expect all of that to happen for free.
The only solution is to pay for social media apps, pay for internet browsers, pay for open source software, etc. We cannot sustain ourselves providing things for free when food still costs money. Either make food, housing, medical care, education not cost any money, or make everyone pay for these services.
You cannot makeother people to look differently on such things. I mean you can, but they have to want it themselves.
I use Element (Matrix.org client) as my way of communication in this age and I keep crashing into people who always say "Why don't you use WhatsApp?" or "Why doesn't your daughter use WhatsApp?" (when I humbly ask them if their kid can use Element).
Some are willing to accept that I want to.protect my (and my daughter's) privacy and have her use secure apps that are not in full control of big corporations, others can't seem to comprehend. They don't realize what they give up and when I tell them, they don't care. I always tell them it's like they gave (for example) Meta key to their house and everytime they wanted to go inside, Meta would jump in andopen the door. It may still be their house, but they can't access it if Meta doesn't feel.like that.
Even people that are close to me don't want to understand. I stopped explaining.
I have Facebook account, I need it for work. It is in my real name and everything I havr put in is the name, phone number and e-mail. And guess what - Facebook keeps showing me peple to add as friends that I know personally. I didn't add even my school (I selected some totally random one) and it still has me figured, literally without any inout from me. I guess that know which people I have in my contact list or in whose contact list I am. Disclaimer: I never logged in to Facebook on my phone nor I have ever used their app, just on work laptop through browser. Hell, I don't even have any contacts for those people on my laptop.
This helped open eyes to some of people around me. Yet they do exactly nothing.
As Louis Rossmann keeps saying: "You will own nothing and be happy about it." He is right, we are already at that state. Maybe not completely in materialistic things, but at our privacy we are already there.
How to get out? Absolutely top thing is that one must want to. If you don't want, you are not getting out. Everything alse comes after that.
I really think that if you missed the Friendster - Myspace - Facebook transition, social media just seems like a permanent thing that can never go away.
I went through that one, and I lived through that era where there were a crap ton of illegal "Spotify" websites before anyone worked out a legal way for that to exist and those sites got taken down so often that after the first three I started just downloading music directly to my hard drive and keeping it there, so that I'd never lose it. People who didn't go through that just cannot comprehend that the service they use may not be there forever, and everything they think they'll always have access to on that service is really not in their control at all.
To clarify, I don't have any problem at all with paying for a service. Spotify was great, before they started cutting corners by producing AI music instead of paying artists for their creative work. Netflix was great before it started cutting corners by producing its own content instead of paying for existing content produced by other people. It's not the service I'm attacking, its the way that they conduct business by extracting absolutely every single cent out of you while providing less and less in return that I have an issue with.
I lived through Napster, Kazaa, torrent and other such things. That means I had to download everything and keep it. And it is how I do it nowadays - but legally. I buy CDs, DVDs and Blu rays and rip them to my home server. My streaming service is actually my own, the access to it is in my hands only.
I also don't have problem with paying for services - my library on Steam has over 400 games (probably less than 10 of those were "bought" for full price, others are either bundles for a few bucks or from heavy sale). That's a lot of games I don't really own, isn't it? Yet I believe in Valve, they are doing best from all of such providers (in my eyes). The same goes for my Nebula subscription - my money goes to creators (and to running the servers), not big corporations that already have a lot of money and doesn't need me (I'm talking to YOU, TUBE! Youtube drove me out with their "free" model that is paid by my time so heavily nowadays, that I stopped visiting the site, I use Grayjay instead...).
You are right about Spotify and Netflix. I didn't even install any of them and never used them and never will, but I know from others what Netflix used to be and where it went. And of course others want their own share and the place got fragmented (again) - and not for the good of consumers, quite the contrary.
Well, as was already said - if one doesn't want this to change, the change will never come to them. I don't want to live/use services like that, hence why I'm picking the harder path full of (sometimes artificial) obstacles. Yet it is the path I want to be on. I want to be my own master (if it makes sense).
Pawn shops have proven amazing for getting dirt cheap physical copies. They are all still out there, and collections eventually get dumped because the collector moves on to other things or dies and nobody wants the collection. Even libraries are liquidating their print archives as they go more digital. It all washes up at pawn shops, goodwill, salvation army, and other thrift stores. You can walk out of those places with fifty discs, books, and console games for fifty dollars, even less in some cases. Sure, it's not 'modern' media, but that's just a plus to me since most of the new stuff is just lesser copies of better older originals anyway.
Copyright holders can't censor or alter original physical copies. They can't prevent them from changing hands legally either. Once you've got the physical media you can legally make a digital backup for yourself, legally stream it to your phone from your home media server, legally use the ROM in an emulator, etc. Physical media is still king. The vinyl revival is a trend that I think will spread beyond the music industry. Music's just ahead of the curve a bit, which makes some sense as they were the first industry to be taken down by internet piracy and digital services. They've had longer to stew on the problem. ;)
Recently I bought 3 used DVD (movies) for 0.6€. Sometimes I go at length to get something - I paid 20€ to get Lilo & Stitch 1&2, which are DVD from more tha 20 years ago. Even worse - I have to find Czech dubbed copy.
Physical media is till king for me. It is something they can't take away from me. It costs me more, that's for sure - you have to get discs, buy HDDs to store it all and I even bought licence for MakeMKV as it is the thing that ripped everything for me and I felt like givingmoney for licence is good thing to do - but once again, it is mine to actually own, not just lease.
Good point about Steam, they remain pretty great. I like their business model of basically getting people to buy games they’ll never play, cause thats on us hahahaha
I only go on Youtube to watch specific content creators. I’ll watch one 20ish minute video while I do my daily cardio and thats really the only time I watch streamed content. Everything else is torrented same as Ive been doing since I was a teenager.
To be fair there, it's more like existing content took their ball and went home. They had to make new content to compete.
But yes, they then proceeded to cut quality programs and instead approach content like they were Tiktok: cheap, highly engaging, minimally creative. That's a shame. Ideally, the invisible hand works here, but somehow these last 1-2 decades have had more people embrace slop. Even paid slop. It's understandable when people don't respect their time and get free time wasters, but it's a bit baffling for supposedly "premium" services that you pay $10-25/month for each.
Right, theres quite a few streaming services with just documentaries that are doing pretty well, Netflix really has no excuse.
I’m also not convinced that it was one sided, I think Netflix had been getting that content for basically nothing and they “packed up” probably because Netflix didn’t want to pay any more than basically nothing for it.
Just to show how much communication habits differ, I've only connected to one person on WhatsApp for a specific purpose, and I could probably uninstall it since we have little reason to chat now. On the other hand, I use Google Chat every day with family.
There are probably others who almost exclusively use Facebook Messenger or iMessage.
OP is Brazilian. WhatsApp is essentially mandatory here.
Ditto the UK, and much of Europe.
Where is antitrust law in this? "One mandatory private company" isn't a situation that a functioning government allows to stand.
The EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) has pushed WhatsApp to open up interoperability with other clients, although I’m not fully up to date on the progress there. I read some preliminary API docs a few months back (maybe last year?) but I haven’t seen actual user facing evidence of this yet.
There’s also an ongoing antitrust case over Meta’s ownership of WhatsApp and Instagram alongside Facebook, because of the overall control of the communication landscape that gives them, but honestly I think per-service interoperability is far more important than who owns which services in the current environment. Walled gardens of hundreds of millions of users are a bad thing, even if each company is limited to owning only one walled garden and you’re technically free to select a competing one instead, which would render monopoly regulations moot. Mandating against the walls themselves seems necessary in a way that pre-internet legislation didn’t need to account for.
Also worth noting that it’s essentially mandatory, i.e. everyone uses it and good luck convincing all but your most tech-focused friends and family to switch, but nobody’s actually forcing you to use it. It’s a lot less clear cut in law than it would be if a company were actually requiring you to sign up for bundled service or anything like that; the modern tech giants seem to have learned from Microsoft’s losses all those years ago, and they’re a lot better at plausible deniability.
Afaik Meta was trying for a while to comply without complying and repeatedly being told to actually comply. But, last I heard they announced that interconnectivity will be possible somewhere in 2027.
Yeah, classic knuckle dragging among tech companies when the EU actually tries to reign them in. Apple has been doing the same.
Really wish they stopped playing softball and threw the book at them. From what I've read, the EU doesn't (or isn't supposed to) play around with this kind of malicious compliance.
It's not really mandated by governments, but instead it's just what the vast majority of people use. Not using it can severely hamper your ability to communicate with others since many people won't have an alternative means of communication. In Brazil's case, WhatsApp started getting broadly used because of high fees for phone lines and SMS. After that, it's apparently become a major part of the Brazilian economy since most businesses now primarily operate through it rather than having a website or app. Even banking is commonly done on it. Which... Wow. That level of power is actually pretty scary to me given it's, as you said, a private company.
So basically your options are to use it, or just... Lose your ability to smoothly interact with the vast majority of society. It managed to become "mandatory" without government action.
In Brazil, many government services also use WhatsApp to some extent. I'm sure you can do everything without it, but that is one additional factor to make WhatsApp feel official and mandatory.
This is not the case for Europe. I live in the Netherlands and never installed WhatsApp. This has caused me exactly zero problems because there is always SMS, and that is very cheap over here.
Yeah, same here as someone in the US. I use SMS to talk to every except the Chinese side of my family (well, the ones still in China), that's all WeChat. The closest thing to big tech social media I use is LinkedIn, and even that I use so rarely and will absolutely not install the app.
I have two friends who only communicate via Messenger. If not for them, I would uninstall messenger and only use iMessage/SMS. Neither of them are iPhone users, and I suspect that's why, since many of our friends are iPhone-ers.
It would be amazing to have one fewer app on my phone, especially one owned by Facebook, since I have to have insta on my phone for my art account.
I moved my family group chat to Signal, because the SMS wasn't an option due to pictures not sending right between the iPhone and Android users. But before that we were on messenger for the same reason. I still have it for a few friends, and because my small town has 3 Facebook groups and messaging that way seems to be their preference still.
But I use it less and less thankfully.
It would be nice if I could move everyone to Signal, but so far, only my discord server has picked it up for chatting.
I'm also using it less and less since I only have 2 people who are on there that refuse to use anything else.
With the newest update to iPhones thanks to them losing lawsuits, the issue with photos seems to be resolved, at least for me. As long as everyone I'm talking to has the most recent OS (android and iOS), pictures and videos send fine, but I'm also on the newest iPhone, so that may be why.
Yeah I had thought it should have been fixed previously but it wasn't and now I'm not gonna move the fam back.
Oddly the communities are most of the reason I stay on Facebook at all
Why don’t you just use insta through the browser? That’s what my SO does on her phone. I thought everyone would have uninstalled meta apps after the most recent fiasko.
Insta doesn't show me notifications when I use it through the browser and I exclusively use it on my phone. I'm not sure why it does that, but I've been trying to troublehsoot for a while now about it. I would love to uninstall all the apps.