It's a little irksome how other commentors are quick to dismiss this very valid point. SMBs in Asia aren't using WhatsApp because they've forced the platform on their consumers; it's their consumers who are using WhatsApp who've forced a choice on the SMBs. WhatsApp has very wide consumer penetration, and its use by businesses is meant as a convenience wrapper for customers.
Now, does switching from WhatsApp to some other not-very-widely-used platform cause customer engagement / retention to drop? I would wager very much so! It's a matter of priorities - people go where there is least friction, and WhatsApp otherwise provides a seamless friction-less experience.
It's very first world centric point of view. I doubt some of these commentator claiming whatsapp being down is good for the society have ever been outside of the first world and have seen how it actually helps people in need.
Do you even know who these business owners are and what kind of life do they live? These are the guys that don't have a solid roof over their head, struggle to meet their daily needs and might have to sleep hungry if their day's sales weren't good. Diversifying is the least of the things they have to worry about. Whatsapp allowed them to reduce friction when it comes to communicating with customers, it helps their sales.
What might be a good thing for society in the first world doesn't mean it's necessarily good thing for society in the third world.
I reject this logic - it's an argument for sustaining the status quo at all costs.
Facebook is the most user-hostile tech megacorp, and they will inevitably harm these businesses you care about. The sooner the bandaid is ripped off the better.
I mean, sure, status quo can / should be changed - but you want to get to a point where a changed status quo is sustainable, and you're not going to get there by simply removing existing options. It doesn't change the incentives people have for preferring to use the platform, namely the pre-existing widespread penetration.
You want to dislodge Facebook, you need to disrupt it / curtail its monopoly.
Have you considered that any change done is going to mean winners and losers.
If Facebook permanently goes down then those businesses would move to a different platform.
Would it suck? Probably. Would the world be a better place without Facebook? A ton of people think so. Me included.
This is the same argument people have used when we talk about health insurance in the US being scammy. If we ever decided to address it it means a good chunk of people lose their jobs but also means that the health of this country goes up. Which one is more important?
But people moving from Facebook to another social media or messaging platform is just changing the company. That new company could do whatever things you don't like that Facebook is doing.
Your example seems to mean that we move to another healthcare system as in method of implementation not just moving from one company to another.
That's a fair point. I'm going to make an assumption here but those systems aren't moderated or controlled centrally? So I see two issues with these if they become popular.
1. This only increases misinformation since there's no censorship at all
2. What prevents people from using the service for illegal purposes (I think this becomes a problem once services become popular)
3. Finally won't it just be banned eventually? If some court in any country issues a ruling to control it and it can't be controlled that will just escalate. Especially if it's something like pedophiles.
I've been doing a pretty good job of moving my client's communications to Signal out here.
I feel bad for everyone who relies on whatsapp bots for making stuff happen, though. These are getting really common out here for a lot of things and it always worries me that it's such a linchpin. They're really handy and save a lot of bullshit phone calls from having to be something people deal with for simple stuff like pharmacy delivery. I can get food from the local place down the street that's only really open for lunch and totally off the map for uber eats, for example... if this persists a few more hours those mom and pop type shops aren't going to have as great a day.
At the start of this year I started working for an employment service company that covers the Indo-Asia-Pacific and South American markets.
I was amazed to discover how pervasive Facebook, Inc. has become in the developing world for conducting business and navigating everyday life.
For a lot of people in developing nations such as the Phillipines and Indonesia, Facebook is synonymous with the internet. This has been buoyed by their push to bundle uncapped/free data for Facebook with mobile plans in markets with high growth of mobile internet access.
It's interesting, because I'm always reading articles about how "Western teens aren't using Facebook any more", which is true, but it's also irrelevant, because they're not really a profitable market, teenagers have short attention spans and no money. Facebook's growth strategy is to become the one stop shop (in lower income nations) for everything you want and need.
In Latin American 3rd world countries, people also conduct business via Instagram.
They create Instagram accounts and post products as posts, with a caption of "DM me for price".
It also turns on every alarm on my mind, when they start calling these "Instagram pages". It blurs the line between a real website and an Instagram account (In Spanish, "website" is "página web" as well).
I've also heard: "My business went to hell because Instagram killed my account" and that's when I reply: "Have you ever thought of owning a real website?"
Maybe an event like this will spur some people into... not doing that? Yes I'm aware of the ubiquitous nature of whatsapp in many developing nations. Have also successfully got a lot of people moved onto using Signal for anything they care about.
Signal has and will go down just like facebook.
Cloudflare/aws having issues affects an insanely high percentage of the internet. People still use them.
Outages rarely cause anything, they happen, people move on.
Email, SMS, good ol' phone calls, Signal, <insert local app/platform here>, your own website, etc, on top of whatever you use right now.
If you're in a country that relies a lot on Facebook or Whatsapp, that's where the main focus will be, but at least try to have alternatives just in case something goes wrong.
So 4/4 of those are platforms controlled by a single company or a few large corporations. This really isn't a win in any meaningful sense.
It should be fine for huge corporations to exist and provide services really efficiently at scale while also being forced to play nice and respond to the will of the people they serve.
If we collectively can't stop Facebook from doing bad thing and being bad stewards to their own platform then you won't be able to stop whatever would replace them either.
It was a mistake to communicate with the users on a platform that they use? Instead of trying to get them on signal, losing 90% of leads in the process and making each of your sales cost x10 much?
You need a contingency plan for when vendors go down even in 3rd world countries. It just so happens a lot of us would not mind this vendor failing entirely. It’s unfortunate that we have so little choice in the matter but ultimately the same advice holds true for all of us smugly throwing insults while keeping our billing in AWS.
He’s a HN 10xer. He doesn’t care about anyone outside his Palo Alto cold-press-Koffee-Klatch, despite what he virtue signals. It’s amusing seeing people here trip over each other to say some variety of “I don’t use Facebook.”
How is that a good comparison? Not everyone uses Facebook out of habit, some businesses need it, and it can be used for good things as well as bad because it's just a medium in which people post content
Yes how that content is presented, ranked, etc is controlled by Facebook but that contribution is less than the content itself.
It would be better to say it's the spoon in which someone could eat a sugary cereal or something healthy.
Are you a Facebook employee? Your justification sounds a lot like the internal propaganda that is being fed to employees. “Facebook is net positive”, “it’s just a tool”, etc
What makes you say that? I think it's a good argument, doesn't mean it's right but it has substance. You also have some quotes that I never said. Nowhere did I imply it's a net positive. It is like a tool however but it has much more input.
The argument was that Facebook is neutral as a platform. Similar to the internet, it serves all kinds of content. Some of the content is good, and some is bad. That doesn't necessarily mean the platform is good or bad.
Having worked in growth before (not at Facebook), I can tell that you vastly underestimate the impact FB teams have on how/when/what/for how long/how many times/etc content is displayed to end users. This is absolutely not a neutral impact.
Here in Europe, WhatsApp actually powers many neighborhood watch groups, and so when it goes down, basically a formal crime reporting system also goes down.
This also means that you can't participate in a neighborhood without agreeing to a legal contract with Facebook to use their services, as well as submitting to ad surveillance and tracking.
I know you think this is some sort of neutral comment about personal choice, but it isn't. Millions of underserved people all over the world live in Food Deserts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert), places with little to no access to affordable nutritious food. Those people wind up consuming a large portion of their calories from high fructose corn syrup, not because they have chosen to do so, but because they have no choice, and that is their only option. Whether you want to accept it or not, your comment is classist and makes HN a more hostile place.
People don’t eat straight corn syrup. The products they do eat that contain it are quite expensive per calorie. I.e. Coke.
The problem is initiative and knowledge. They should walk or ride a couple of miles and buy the biggest bags of rice and beans they can, along with a bottle of multivitamins. And then learn how to cook.
If that’s classist, then the classes are structured by knowledge and choices. Which they may well be.
The entire reason that high fructose corn syrup is so prevalent in low-cost foods is that it's cheaper than sugar, especially in the US because of corn subsidies. Find literally any evidence that HFCS is more expensive per-calorie than sugar and you will come up empty-handed.
> If that’s classist, then the classes are structured by knowledge and choices. Which they may well be.
class by its definition accounts for massive difference in access to resources. If you think access to resources doesn't measurably change the level of knowledge that a population has, that's a declaration that resources do nothing, which would be an odd stance to take on a knowledge-focused community website.
> They should walk or ride a couple of miles and buy the biggest bags of rice and beans they can, along with a bottle of multivitamins.
I just LOVE the subtle food choice of rice and beans here, paired with the recommendation to take multivitamins, a recommendation that is supported by little to no evidence. Your own lack of knowledge on this topic is in full display, as is a clear demonstration of your own biases across multiple dimensions.
Of course HFCS is cheaper than sugar. I'm referring to the products made from it, like Coke. They are a poor way to spend your food dollar.
I agree that class accounts for a massive difference in access to resources. However, in this case, the knowledge is available for free, and in the US the basic foodstuffs are available for far less than what disadvantaged people pay for the typical processed and fast food they live on.
Rice and beans - nothing subtle about it. They are basic foods that provide the necessary carbs, fat, and complete protein. The vitamins are a simple way to prevent scurvy and similar deficiencies, until the choice of food can become more varied.
As a person learns to cook and bake, they can add wheat, peas, and corn (But they need to learn about nixtamalization before they add corn.) None of these foods require refrigeration.
I have in mind the cuisine of Mexico, which is inexpensive and nutritious. Similar cuisines are found in home cooking all over the world, at least where commercially processed food hasn't driven them out.
It is most important to make sure that all school children are taught how to process and cook these basic foods.
If you are knowledgeable in this area, I'd appreciate some specific suggestions.
My mother didn't really have a common means to communicate with her grandchildren in the same way.
Email, phone are just not the same.
There are more channels available now for sure, but none so ubiquitous.
Facetime is not displacing FB for a lot of things, but that's more direct.
'Everyone is on FB' is the reason it still holds in these kinds of uses cases.
None of us case one way or the other about the platform, we'll just use what's convenient, but that is what it is.
This is a very common theme among FB users. FB by the way, is still growing it's userbase, and growing revenues even more so. The themes we see here on HN and even in the news don't represent the views among the population, nor are they necessarily very close to material reality.
There are plenty of ways to communicate with friends and family. If Facebook is down long enough, many people will just move to something else. (And I hope they do)
Sure they do. And it's why Whatsapp needs to be broken off from Facebook, because they blatantly lied about it and only bought it to kill off their competition
Many people don't realize that with the 2020 lockdown and next to zero face to face transactions happening, platforms like FB Marketplace provided an opportunity for many people to set up businesses and generate income. I understand the angst people have with FB, but there's a bigger world out there beyond our keyboards.
for one example of this look at certain ethnic food catering/delivery services that exist in many major cities and operate almost exclusively on facebook.
Convincing somebody who can hardly turn on their computer to get their own domain is just not practical. Even if they can get their own domain they still have to set up DNS. Good luck getting them to set up MX, spf and dkim.
I think things would be better if more people had their own domain. I just don't see any way of making it happen. I can't get my own family to leave gmail even with me handling all the domain stuff for them. Even my technical coworkers who are capable of this don't care.
Yes. In the ideal world messaging would've have followed the same federalized model as email. XMPP offers this, unfortunately few people use it or even are aware of it.
I'm fine with Matrix, but I'm not seeing the people around me moving to it, even with a more friendly solution like Element. It's already hard to make them use Signal just because they want users to remember a pin...
Just because a company has questionable or even straight evil business practices doesn't mean that literally millions of companies/people don't rely on them to do business and communicate.
Well, I know you jest, but a lot of conversations, with many people, over years and years would be lost. It'd be akin to hundreds of email threads with friends being deleted.
On the contrary, it's said far too much. Facebook is extremely valuable for a lot of people. I dislike Facebook as much as most people on here, but saying "it's totally pointless" is silly and it's not surprising that those who say it are ignored by those who use Facebook.
* A friend of mine runs a posh burger van that moves around a lot, and he puts "today's location" on Facebook.
* My wife talks with her family in Brazil through Facebook, sharing photos
* My Church receives a lot of help requests from people in trouble through Facebook
* Some abuse charities talk give support to victims through Facebook
etc
You could argue that it would be nice if there were alternatives, or that these organisations shouldn't be using Facebook at all. Sign me up for your campaign, I agree with you.
But if you say "Facebook has no value" then you will never understand the value proposition you need to offer in order to kill Facebook.
Communication for many out there. Many will be just fine without commenting on cat photos or bragging with their likes or followers. Many will be in trouble if they use WhatsApp/Instagram/Messenger/Marketplace to do business and any important communication.
