WhatsApp is rolling out ads. In an update on Monday, Meta announced that it will now show ads from businesses through its Stories-like status feature.
Meta says it will tailor the ads to your interests by using “limited” information, including your country or city, language, the channels you follow, and how you interact with ads on the platform. You can also change your ad preferences from Meta’s Accounts Center.
This isn’t the only change Meta is making to WhatsApp. The company will also start showing promoted channels when you click on the Explore button to find new ones to follow. It’s also rolling out the ability to subscribe to channels to “receive exclusive updates” as well.
*gasp*
Who could have ever seen this move coming? From Facebook, of all companies!
To be fair, I am shocked… Not to see a Pikachu face in the comments.
Thank you for your assistance.
As somebody that doesn’t use what’s app, I’m shocked it didn’t have ads already.
I see a lot of people saying it’s time to switch to Signal, and I mean I agree in principle, it’s my main messaging app, but I don’t see how it can scale. It runs off of donations and the only reason it’s still functioning is because the users that are there are above averagely passionate about it and willing to donate. If it became the defacto messaging app I fear that there is no way they would be capable of financing that level of traffic.
I’d probably still use it if I had to pay for it
I mean, there are some who will be willing to do that, but the vast majority of average people won’t pay for something if a free version exists (like WhatsApp)
Edit: Ok I just Googled it and apparently their operational costs are less than 1$ per user per year which is far less than I expected. That’s way more sustainable in that case, possibly even through just donations.
Even if they charged 1.99 they’d be making a decent cut for future investment (they are a nonprofit).
GrapheneOS lives on donations too. Its definately possible.
I mean comparing it to GrapheneOS doesn’t make much sense, they don’t have recurring costs.
What, like salaries?
No, they don’t have recurring costs that scale with their size. The whole original point of my argument was that Signal is fine now because its userbase is above averagely passionate about it and willing to donate, but if it were to become mainstream that would mean the percent of its users donating would go down whilst its cost would go up, in other words its costs would outscale its revenue. This doesn’t apply to GaprheneOS as their costs don’t scale with the number of users.
I think you’re missing the point. All I was saying is that both Signal and Graphene are both nonprofits and both seem to be doing okay with their donations business model.
And donations aren’t just a euro here and there from users. Proton is rumoured to be one of Graphene’s supporters.
This is one of the train that impossible for me to get off. It is very ubiquitous in my country to use whatsapp instead of text. I must suck it up I guess. 😅
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The most important people in my life is my family, especially my parents. Teaching them to try new app to chat to me is easy enough but all of their friends and groups are still on whatsapp.
Making them juggle between two apps (separating how they interact to me and totheir friends) is not easy. Justifying it is even harder, they simply don’t care (to understand) the implication.
Rather than make them confused and worried about not being able to contact me, I just have to accept the status quo. It is the conclusion I arrive at.
Must be nice tho to not use any Meta product. :)
It may not fit your exact needs, but my solution to WhatsApp and fb messenger is to bridge them with a beeper account. Of course you lose the calling ability, but if you’re not using it for calls it is a good enough solution. The other caveat (at least with fb messenger) is you still need to check on your actual account if you get any legit messages from someone not on your list.
This might be good middle ground. The last time I tried beeper, the apps is kinda … suck tho. Well, at least it not full of ads!
Does it still require user to install their desktop app first?
Not that I’m aware of, never even knew it was ever a requirement. I’ve only used the android client and the browser client. For whatever reason they don’t really communicate the browser is out there for use. It’s chat.beeper.com for anyone looking.
A fair number of my contacts from countries where this is true also have Signal. If you don’t, I suggest installing it and seeing how many people are there.
If it’s hard to remember who uses what, start conversations from the contacts app instead of one of the messaging apps; in most cases it will tell you.
Already did that months ago when they change the term of services and people are aware of it at the time. Many install Signal, tried them, signal got overloaded, experience degraded, people are back to Whatsapp. Now only dead account are there. Telegram is more popular but that is just jumping from crocodile’s mouth to shark’s.
Government agencies, company customee services all relies on Whatsapp. They have emails but if you want to get response in timely manners, Whatsapp is the way to go (Or twitter, again another bad alternatives).
At least it is still E2E (supposedly), so it is not all bad. Look, I know I sound pessimistic because I am (at least in this specific topic). I hope everyone else can do better than me, cheers!
signal got overloaded, experience degraded
I did not experience this, and I’ve been using Signal daily for years. Prior to 2020 or so, I experienced more unreliability and hesitated to recommend it to the average person.
I’m familiar with the problem though; in most of the EU and probably other places WhatsApp usage is so high that it’s a major inconvenience to avoid it entirely.
Signal has recently been giving me issues like taking forever to send and not properly notifying me about messages.
Android, iOS, or desktop?
I’ve noticed the occasional slow delivery, but I have had reason to believe the recipient has an unstable internet connection when that has happened.
Android and iOS. I’ll have to see if it’s better now though.
Government agencies…relies on Whatsapp
WTF!? What country is that?
I’d hazard a guess that it’s Brazil.
India
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9Ux8DFgMSM
Might give you some ideas on how to do that
Be the change
Good news good Signal.
Only if you donate. Otherwise bad news, Signal.
Have they removed that dogshit crypto they added a few years ago? Haven’t donated since.
Signal was never more than a stepping stone anyway. Centralised privacy services, that can be taken down by any government, are doomed to fail under surveillance capitalfascism.
I recommend https://simplex.chat/
I recommend you have a look at this guy’s Twitter profile and reconsider.
What does this mean? What’s on his twitter profile?
What’s on his twitter profile?
Well for one, he’s still on Twitter, which is run by a Nazi, so…
Bunch of right wing stuff, some anti vax stuff, the usual
I’m surprised. He didn’t come across this way to me on Github, or in group chats and interviews he’s done. I want to say that, as a non-American, maybe he doesn’t know the kind of things Trump has done here, but then it seems like everyone knows what Trump has done here.
This is a bit of an ad hominem. SimpleX is great software, whether the guy’s a Nazi asshole or not. Not a 1:1 substitute for WhatsApp like Signal is though.
It’s still there, buried in the settings. TBF I wouldn’t expect them to remove it, because some people probably do use it.
No idea, all I see as options now for Paypal and credit card.
Uninstalled.
Luckily I/people I interact with never used it much.
the channels you follow
I knew they would use that info for targeted advertising
It’s Facebook 101, let the users themselves tell you what they like
The problem is there are very few alternatives that will work for grandma and her friends, especially open source alternatives. This is why WhatsApp and LINE are stupidly popular.
I had to use LINE for work a few years ago to communicate with the Philippines. Awful app.
Awful depends on your point of view. Is it easy to message and call your friends and make group chats for free? The answer is yes. The fact that the interface sucks and is ad-ridden is irrelevant to older aunties and uncles.
Time to ditch WhatsApp
👆 mark that comment. I’m sure you’ll write that again in a year or so
And the year after that, and the year after that, and the year after that, and
And again in a year or so only a handful of tech nerds with few social connections will actually ditch it.
Slowpoke meme, I chose you… like 10 years ago.
The best time to quit was 10 years ago. The second-best time is now.
No, the second best was 10 years minus 1 day ago
Nothing better than having a private conversation with my friends and having some dude lean in to remind us that Brawndo, the thirst mutilator, has electrolytes.
Hopefully this helps people move off of WhatsApp to Signal or something else.
I just wish SMS would go away.
Why? It works fine and it’s built into the phones. No need to convince family members to install a fuckin’ chat app just to be able to message them.
Because it sucks and it’s tied to a provider and the rest of the world doesn’t even use it.
Yeah like it moved them off of Xitter, Reddit, Facebook and Instagram.
I mean we are here, aren’t we? The majority of people will do nothing of course, but some will make the switch or even just install another app just to give it a try. And soon Whatsapp’s enshittification will continue and some more people will switch and so on.
Hope so… Just a little bit and them another ones when they extent the implementation of IA… And wishing to not be the standard any more
Signal doesnt have ads…
Looks like I need an alternative. An alternative for which there is still no prospect of enshitification. Which services are neither American, Chinese nor Russian? Anything from Europe?
Signal is American but run by a non profit so it can’t be sold and is open source under GPL3 without a CLA from what I can see so it’s unlikely they would ever go closed source.
You may also get invited to a US military intelligence chat too. Bonus!
Will check it out, thank you!
Signal also has been a leader when it comes to encryption and metadata protection. Their cryptographic protocols are public domain and are the gold standard for private messaging from pretty much every perspective other than decentralisation. (it’s still centralised)
Explains why I’ve started seeing ads for WhatsApp, which was really bizarre
Soon: WhatsApp revanced
Ahh meta!!! Sighs.
