Behind the Messy, Expensive Split Between Facebook and WhatsApp’s Founders
wsj.com
wsj.com
His speil about how he's "connecting the world" is undermined by his clear attempts to build a monopoly of social+communication, with an inefficient layer of distracting ads. Imagine a future where every time you want to electronically communicate with someone you have to spend mental energy filtering out ads. It's the equivalent of every road having a toll booth, directly paying into a rich person's bank account. This is the "connecting the world" Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to hide from those of us who aren't paying attention.
Nope. Engineers are dedicated there to increasing other things than the utility of the app. Interests aren't aligned with the users.
Same with removing chronological feeds. Turn things more and more into slot machines.
Or it might have been just the doctor until someone complained and from that point on just the fact that Facebook knew about it might make them suddenly and automatically liable for further bad behaviour.
At the same time, that also makes it irrelevant to the point at hand, since it's not Facebook messenger at all, just general health posts and items offered by that medical group.
Any one that does communicate through them with their doctor, most likely doesn't know what HIPAA is or care.
To FB, it is the old "don't ask or tell" scenario.
You also used to be able to reply to the message by replying to the notification email, so you could be a full conversation participant solely through email without ever opening the app.
Social media is best suited to that kind of business model - and most people won’t pay for a subscription.
So social media is broke?
Something that nearly any other company would have been banished to the spambox for.
I have it turned off, and the last 15 notifications are friend activity that has nothing to do with me.
Edit: rephrased one sentence
It was actually really cool, except nobody wanted to “own” the community, and eventually some assholes decided to be assholes and got it shut down.
And the reasoning to use it? "People are familiar with it from home". Well.. how about using something else and spend 30 mins on educating people? Oh, that might mean no new yacht for shareholders this year.
I wonder if you have to pay FB to promote them? /s
This is something people are currently very upset with them for doing.
So they can make things convenient, or keep your data safe, but its hard to do both.
It's an API to publish a notification - a similar API to that used to build the core app. There's no additional sharing of data than what's already happening running the app.
Even if your argument made sense with respect to the thing people are currently very upset about (which I disagree that it does), there is absolutely NO inherent right for FB to exist if they're unable to do both (if it's just "hard", well then get busy).
If I want to keep my data safe, they get to "inconvenience" me? That's ridiculous, if they can't keep my data safe, they don't get shit.
"But it's hard!"
cry me a river
I'll qualify that statement by adding that product management/design team is optimizing for engagement metrics and the engineers are developing from those blueprints. Blame product management for anti-UX decisions. No PO/PM is going to risk their career by spearheading an effort to lower app engagement metrics which results in a loss of advertising revenue.
For example Elon Musk has his "Iron Man" persona that puts himself on a pedestal and projects an ideal that his companies will solve the worlds problems. Once you look behind the curtain you see that he uses this to justify long hours by his workers. The innovation he has is an acceptance of failure for mission critical systems and quality assurance like cars or rockets.
The moral of the story is that while the people at the top might make it seem like they do the right things for the right reasons the reasons that any rational person actually do are the right things for the reasons to expand your new business.
That's definitely not the case unless you're really just out of touch or purposefully trolling here.
He looks and sounds so awkward in interviews that he may have as little charisma as I do… at least, if you can ignore the fact he’s a billionaire, which some people find very charismatic in itself.
I think he is more self aware in general than other execs. He found away to mix self-interest with solving worlds problems. I mean there is still potential for things to go awry.
But at least he is not Facebook. He is not a casino owner or something similar.
With him I don't think you can separate the right reasons and the business reasons
Let's say you have a subscriber model, but than what kind of world will it be where only the wealthy have access to these communication technologies and access to social information.
Or you have a hybrid ad model with the ability to opt out by paying some fee. Than what kind of world will that be when privacy is a luxury item limited to how much you can afford.
The best solution I can think of is keeping the current model, but adding regulation and government oversight to limit some of the most damaging effects i.e. creating platforms that abuse human psychology to keep people clicking and make them addicted to these platforms.
I'm genuinely interested in other models people suggest.
(I've been toying with models like this for awhile, and not to say its an easy or simple solution to implement, especially when considering bad actors, but it seems the best chance at getting something "fair")
Alternatively could steal from games and add "cosmetics". Charge extra for things like themes that personalize but don't necessarily improve the experience. Items with enough value that people will "want" it but not "need" it.
No, there aren’t; this is a political line that doesn’t make any sense at all. This is why “livable wage” is a phrase: just getting above the poverty line does not imply you can live on your income. The poverty line is pegged too low to be meaningful, at least here in US.
I think that reasonably priced subscription model, perhaps taking in account the per capita income of the country, could help preserve privacy while also ensuring mass access to technologies.
This medium reached people rich and poor, all around the world.
The challenge here is greed.
One of the interesting topics in economics is the ability to subvert the supply-demand curve by extracting economic value without the participants awareness. In classical economics the equilibrium point is met when the buyer thinks they are paying too much and the seller thinks they are getting to little for a good or service. In the idealized experiment the buyer doesn't have any other choice, nor does the seller have any other customer to turn to.
But in our internet connected world there is an "invisible" (to the buyer) stream of value which is personal information about the buyer. To date there hasn't been a good way for the buyer to see or negotiate that value. GPDR helps that but it doesn't go far enough in some ways.
What GPDR doesn't supply (yet?) is the practical way of enforcing the theft of personally identifiable information for financial gain. So in your example of a hybrid ad model, if you 'opt out' and now pay a fee, how do you know that they aren't still just selling your data? And if they are selling your data to get extra value out of you being a customer, what recourse do you have when you discover it? What risk are they taking by pursuing that path and maximizing their revenue?
EDIT: From the article -- At the time of the sale, WhatsApp was profitable with fee revenue, although it is unclear by how much. (99 cents per year)
We had multiple independent local phone companies one place I lived. I could call into the next state for free (and by dialing just five numbers), but my friends two miles away in the same state were 35¢ a minute.
In much of the US, in the 70's, 80's, and 90's a telephone had a fixed monthly fee and 'free' calling to any other phone in the local area. Phone penetration was over 90%[1] in 1970 and rose to over 95% by 1980 suggesting that even those at 50% below the poverty line in 1980 (roughly 6% of the US population) had access to a telephone.
So for many living in the US they have probably experienced being able to talk with all of their friends for "free" as long as they want, and if they were old enough arguing with siblings about who got to use the phone longest.
Further, in the "current" epoch, the article suggested that WhatsApp was profitable at 99 cents per year when it was acquired. I would not be surprised if that it is still the case that such a messaging service does not require advertising revenue to be cash flow positive. It just needs enough subscribers.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/189959/housing-units-wit...
I was early 80s, and watched landline and mobile costs fall to negligible levels.
My current girlfriend was born in the late 80s (USA, but world traveler with family work), and I think from the start of highschool onward pretty much always assumed there was an internet connection and too-cheap-to-care calls even before everyone made their own VOIP/video chat messengers.
Something that came with the Internet, and didn't exist for me prior to its existence, was a large body of friends who were not local to me. Today, if I had to go back to metered long distance rather than what we have today it would absolutely be cost prohibitive! And clearly some people move around more than others and for them they might have a lot of friends and family outside of their local calling region back then as well.
The bottom line is that I can see the point you were making but I think we disagree on the magnitude of its impact on the general population that was living with phones at that time.
I left my smartphone and my smartwatch in my smart home when I went to work today (guess I'm not that smart).
I hear through the grapevine that my wife is losing her coolant because she can't text me every ten minutes, or locate me with Find My Friends.
I think I'll stop at a tiki bar on the way home.
Yet, it might be worth contemplating a few details about that. First, it took decades to do so. During almost all of that period, phone use was very expensive for most people, making it something reserved for the rich. It's taken from 1876 to today for almost the entire world to have phone service.
Second, expansion of phone services was often controlled and directed by monopolistic companies. They invariably acted in incredibly greedy ways and had no compunctions about abusing their position(s). Extortionate long distance rates, asserting that only company-owned systems could touch the networks, and more were normal.
I understand why you view phone access as a good model, fundamentally different from an ad-based or subscriber-based model. Yet, it's possible that this approach historically had some rather significant drawbacks that might be worth contemplating.
Those same digital technologies mean a regulated social media monopoly could be much narrower. E.g., we could split Facebook into infra and client apps, or core features versus add-ons. You could make the social graph owned by a non-profit, and regulate it with a board where client app developers are represented. That would provide a much better balance of power than we saw with telcos versus consumers.
So, you're right! Shifts in technology brought prices down to a point where they're affordable to most! That's something enabled by a model that inherently advantages the rich over the poor. But the economic incentives created and encouraged by history and the model are just a detail, not worthy of inspection or being considered part of how we got here.
Right?
As for your proposal, I don't share your optimism for regulated monopolies here. They're a wonderful model for basic needs that everyone shares and that little change will be needed to over time. This describes electricity, water, and in some cases data transport.
It's certainly possible that social media services to date have hit this basic level of common infrastructure. If so, I clearly just don't understand exactly which services that covers or how they're the same level of fundamental as water. Can you help me with this? I need to understand before I can figure out if dismembering Facebook into a publicly owned council-run monopoly is the best way forward.
Especially because this would also probably mean doing something to ensure other, non-council-run social network providers didn't spring up and replace PublicBook.
I honestly don't believe your "help me understand" routine is anything but syrupy and disingenuous, an online rope-a-dope. If you're actually serious, please demonstrate that by providing your own best guess as to a plausible split and your concerns about the model; I'll do my best to help you with that.
I can think of several plausible ways to split up Facebook. The one I can think of that adheres most closely to the basic utility model would be for only the most foundational service to be handled by a regulated monopoly. That, I expect, would be a pseudonymous social graph where people can add and remove connections. Anything on top of that would be handled by third-party providers.
I can imagine other services that some people might consider foundational and thus desire to lump in with the above. Some might consider posts, walls, profiles, and groups part of it. Some might even consider chat part of the foundation.
The "online rope-a-dope" you describe is my attempt to avoid telling people that I am reasonably sure they are being silly. It's always possible that there's genuinely something I don't understand about the positions. It's happened before, it's happening now, and it will continue to happen in the future. It generally doesn't, but telling people I think they are being silly is generally not conducive to productive conversation.
Being over-the-top syrupy nice tends to go over better than pointed criticism, which tends to make people defensive. For example...
Under which set of laws would Facebook be nationalized in your proposal? American? French? English? Turkish? Saudi? What effect would this have on effects to combat fake news and hate speech? Whose definitions of "fake news" and "hate speech"? How are you going to make sure that users don't migrate to a new, better, and non-regulated-monopoly social network the way people migrated to Facebook from MySpace? Are you just going to take over that one too? How do you propose to ensure that client app developers with access to the ruling council don't use their position to push away other client app developers?
These aren't pointlessly detailed questions. They're ones that spring to mind almost immediately, and ones that any serious proposal that merited consideration would need to wrestle with. Some of them are major points of public policy which differ very significantly from polity to polity.
I would like to understand that you've gone through these questions and arrived at good answers. I want that to be true.
You're probably feeling defensive right now. A little attacked. Which is why I couched the whole thing in asking you to help me understand, because a person who feels attacked is not a person who is genuinely listening.
As a point of interest, back when people used dialaround numbers to get lower long distance rates (800-Easy-ITT for ITT, 800-Pin-Drop for SPRINT, 950-4MCI for MCI, or 1010-NJB for New Jersey Bell, etc...) there was at least one service that would make you listen to an ad before connecting the call. In exchange, you got a super-low rate.
I don't know if it failed because of the advertising, or because the line quality was terrible.
note I'm not suggesting we go back to that model. only pointing out we had a non ad based system before
> Let's say you have a subscriber model,
There was a company with a subscriber model. It worked pretty well and we loved it. Facebook bought it and destroyed the very idea behind it.
> but than what kind of world will it be where only the wealthy have access to these communication technologies and access to social information.
The same kind of world were all kinds of tech is expensive at first and then becomes cheaper and cheaper as it approaches and enter mainstream usage?
Nobody would argue today that we should have refused luxury cars to add airbags because "what kind of world would it be where only the rich has access to safer cars".
In the same way we shouldn't argue against people paying for better products.
That said, I think WhatsApp were planning to add other paid options like API access etc before they got eaten by Facebook.
Is it possible that perhaps this has been considered before, and perhaps even implemented?
It's also what email is.
Yet, you're describing email still in essence. A system where people interact very rapidly in a distributed, authority-less magic box based network. Email happens to be chunk-y, though in practice it tends to be nearly as fast as chat.
But I'll humor you. Now you're describing XMPP. Magic sandboxed chat applications, peer-to-peer, NAS storage, authority-free, and monitization-free. Wrap it up in Docker or something, and you have your turnkey magic. Right? Right!
You still have all the problems that come with this. For example, stemming abuse is a major problem with decentralized systems. How do you stop spammers? Appeal to the decentralized community and hope? Peer pressure has never been enough to stop this. Authority and trust problems run rife. Most users are too ignorant and unskilled to look after their systems properly, which is a problem you won't be able to magic away.
I'm trying to be nice here. You're re-inventing email, in a way that does nothing to stem the basic problems of email. You have all the idealism that created email to begin with - lovely, beautiful, admirable idealism! - and little of the pragmatism.
Fundamentally, there have been two kinds of decentralized, authority-less, un-monetized networks: those that are unpopular and those that become popular enough to be subject to a ton of abuse. Abuse that leads to professional service offerings that re-centralize, re-intermediate, and re-monetize the services in order to make them usable to ordinary people again. It's absolutely possible that your idea would be neither of those! It's just that so far I've not been shown anything convincing that this could be the case.
This is a strawman. I give you Usenet and IRC as counter examples.
Roughly $40 billion in revenue, divided by 2 billion users. Only the very poorest wouldn’t be able to afford it.
Facebook can also employ the experience of it's Russian clone vk.com and let users share music (sharing the music that you like and that expresses the mood you'd like to share is a great way to communicate and many people love it!) while requiring those users who'd like to play long playlists in background pay a subscription fee.
A number of other premium features that can add value to a subscription comes on to my mind as well: invisible mode (I'd pay for it immediately - I really hate when others can see if I'm online or if I've read their message, I have been actively hating this for years, this is infuriating yet I don't mind if solving this problem would cost a dollar or two per month), posts promotion, additional typesetting features, profile promotion (top-suggest everybody to add me as a friend), verified status for whoever wants it (not just celebrities), voluntary additional surveillance/curation (for parents willing to protect their underage kids) etc. Introducing a cryptocurrency dedicated to replace old-fashioned likes (e.g. every time somebody likes your post/comment you get a coin) yet traded at a cryptocurrency exchange and accepted as a way of paying for the premium features can be another opportunity. Organic possibilities are limitless.
edit: this is supposed to be a WhatsApp joke.
(Signal is free, though, and Open Source …)
When Whatsapp did charge for iOS users, it was a one time payment as well. So not yearly regardless.
The app wouldn’t have the popularity it does have if it charged everyone $1 a year. That’s significant to some people vs others. Especially when looking at WhatsApp’s global user base.
Whatsapp was operating at a loss during its high growth time period before the Facebook acquisition.
Isn't it like saying "I paid for the car, why do I have to pay for gas"? Somebody has to pay for engineers, infrastructure etc. If not the end users, then the advertisers.
I guess it is the mindset/understanding. The same person who won't pay $1 for email (for example) will pay for Netflix, because somehow in their mind, it takes money to make movies but it doesn't take money to write software or run servers.
I'm talking about distributed services here, 'run your own' as in run an instance for your family and any friends you care to provide those services for. I've been doing this literally for decades, ever since I got a permanent internet connection in the 90's. Others here are doing the same, this is not some outlandish concept.
By paying for internet access you pay to have the ability to send data all over the world. If you then also pay for a device which can provide services with that data using free software, which interacts with other such devices owned and operated by other people who likewise pay for internet access and for those devices and the power to run them (etc) there is no need to pay yet again to use those services.
There is no need to pay engineers to run the services as they're running on your own hardware using free software. You already pay for infrastructure through your internet access payments. You pay for your own infrastructure at home.
Okay, do you also fix your car, make your clothes, fix your plumbing...?
How can we reasonably expect an average person to install, configure, maintain non trivial systems like emails?
We get paid to do things we want to do and are good at, and we pay others for services/goods that we need but aren't capable (or don't have the time or interest) of doing it ourselves. It is unreasonable and impractical to expect everyone to do everything themselves.
Nobody expects the average person to install 'non-trivial systems like emails', just like nobody expects them to configure, build and install Android or iOS on their mobile devices yet still they use those devices without undue problems. They even update the things to new releases, mostly without problems. The reason for that is that someone went to the effort of packing up Android and iOS so that it is possible for just about anyone to install them on their devices.
> We get paid to do things we want to do and are good at, and we pay others for services/goods that we need but aren't capable (or don't have the time or interest) of doing it ourselves. It is unreasonable and impractical to expect everyone to do everything themselves.
This is where free software enters the equation, a few people working on a project like this can make a huge difference. Maybe those people get paid to work on free software, maybe not, this is irrelevant in this context. What is relevant is that digital technology does away with scarcity, the work of a few or one can be made accessible to the world without cost other than that of internet access (for which, as stated, the user already pays).
[1] While I do not have a car myself I do fix my wife's as well as my motorbikes and tractors. I generally do not make my clothes but I do fix them. Yes, I fix my own plumbing, not that strange given that I restored and partly built our house which includes installing said plumbing. I'm currently building roof trusses for yet another build-out. Specialisation is for insects.
There isn’t one. LinkedIn is sort of an exception but it’s not for general use. The market isn’t providing s supply of these products so I don’t see how you can say there’s no demand. New social networks have such high barriers to entry that you can’t just point at some random failed paid one as an example. Loads of free ones fail too.
What would be interesting is if Facebook offered a paid, no data-mining option. But they do t seem interested in innovating.
Certainly generates value for Facebook and retail, though.
There are only a few things you can know about someone clicking 'buy' as the result of an ad:
1. The ad platform booked top-line revenue
2. The seller booked top-line revenue
3. The buyer exchanged money for something they thought was worth it at the time of purchase.
That's it. Even #3 is conjecture, but it's likely enough that I'm willing to run with it for sake of argument.
We do not, and short of asking, can not know if that purchase added value to the buyer's life.
What you're describing for non-mainstream sellers is just gains from internet-scale distribution platforms, whether it's Facebook or Reddit or whatever. It lets the little guy reach lots of people on a much smaller ad budget because of the distribution technology and a platform's ability to grow a large network of users.
Whatever benefit there is might have nothing to do with Facebook (or any specific company) and have nothing to do with tracking users to target ads at them.
It might just be "the internet is a big lever" that lets smaller sellers more easily reach people generally.
That might be argument that ads, in general, can be valuable on Facebook. But it might be the case that the extra effort of personalizing them does not add further value, while it does have downsides with data privacy, tracking, unwanted ads, etc.
This seems like an extraordinary claim that would require extraordinary statistical evidence to believe it. Both evidence to ensure the methodology of comparing whatever Facebook does with blank audience ad serving to whatever is done with lookalike audiences, as well as the "much, much better" part and the "almost everyone" part.
For example, with Google and Facebook controlling so much of all advertising traffic, it could easily be the case that 'blank audience' ad purchasing (which is less in Facebook's interest, since it doesn't help highlight their specialized data products) are directed towards users with less likelihood to engage to begin with, regardless of algorithmic profile or interests.
Do we have any knowledge of the precise differences of the two treatments (blank vs. digital lookalike)? If not, how could we even begin to attribute success seen in the 'lookalike' category to any value-add from Facebook? As opposed to possibly gaming the different user groups to make such an A/B test always tilt in their favor.
This isn't rocket science. I've managed millions of dollars of ad spend across a dozen companies. I know lots of other people who manage ad spend. The only other digital channel that's anywhere near as targeted and scalable as Facebook is Google search, which is why the two combined make up 90% of new online ad spend (according to data).
But that experiment could only possibly tell you if Facebook ads, in general, are more effective than ads on other platforms. And that might be caused by all sorts of confounders, like the relative demographics or usage patterns being different on those other platforms, which have no connection to whether anything that Facebook does contributes to positive ad effect.
In particular, comparing with other ad platforms could not tell you whether Facebook invisible audience ad algorithms are any better or worse than Facebook algorithmically targeted audience ads (especially since you still wouldn’t know if Facebook privileges algorithmic ads in some way just because it’s good for their business if it appears that their specialized product is better than a non-specialized one).
> “This isn't rocket science.”
It’s funny to me that a lot of marketing, product, and A/B testing people express this attitude about understanding what succeeds in marketing & product problems.
When really, those questions require a great degree of statistical rigor that is like rocket science.
It takes a great deal of advanced econometrics theory or formal statistics theory to answer ad spend attribution questions in a way that’s not completely defeated by methodological flaws, poor experimental design, causal indeterminacy, or various statistical fallacies.
Perhaps it’s one reason why the claim that digital ads work is still so hugely debated, with many claiming that quantitatively, digital ads (including Facebook) utterly don’t work.
You posted some way of roughly approximating how much it helps. But looking at metrics like this in isolation is meaningless and there's no useful interpretation except for people (such as in the ad business) whose utility function for this topic only depends on the upside component.
Society at large also depends on downside components, like how much psychological drag the pervasive ads generate, how many people are deceived or manipulated into mis-wanting something purely because of ad repetition, how many times are ML-based personalized ads miscalculated, leaving a consumer to experience inappropriate or irrelevant ads because of algorithm malfunction. How much extra cognitive effort is required to maintain browsing solutions that mitigate tracking. How much of the ad experience facilitates addiction to mobile phones. And so on.
I am not claiming that I have a great way to roughly quantify these, but you could. For example, you could do eye-tracking and phone usage studies and try to roughly compute the amount of extra app time that is attributable to dealing with unwanted ads or app time attributable to ad-linked addictive behavior, and then estimate up what some average case cost of that time would be at a median salary or something, to roughly value that time. Or you could gather statistics on how accurate data-based ad personalization is and how often someone spends time costs processing misclassified ad categories they self-report as not relevant.
I conjecture that the financial cost of that lost time (which is an under-estimate that doesn't factor in other psychological drag or second order effects) would, when aggregated over hundreds of millions or billions of people, add up to waaay more cost that what the offsetting value from effective ads and product discoveries offered, meaning that from a perspective other than the consumer corporations that profit from the transactions, it would look like a giant net loss for society.
There should be a law that says that ads should be clearly identifiable as such. Like: they should be placed in a frame with the word "advertisement" on top of them. (Coincidentally, this would also make it easy for ad-blockers to remove them).
A tollbooth is an access fee, which is the opposite model of ad revenue.
Billboards are illegal in some cities and along some roads in the United States.
Hitler was a great leader too.
The only mass market "free, but pay at some point" model is ads. Nothing else. That is the last 10yrs of Silicon Valley and pretty much every startup today. Cause if you have a great idea and decent execution, FANG companies have so much power to enter the market and crush you, 1st mover advantage is the exception nowadays. Or at least buy you out, github is a perfect example.
I think you're right about Zuckerberg as a young leader. Start making money and you'll start wanting more and more just to see how much you can make.
The only thing really surprising about Facebook is how consistently well they have executed that function, and for how long they have incrementally optimized it. Zuckerberg deserves some blame/credit for that for sure.
For me it’s all about keeping the choice with the user and away from the seller. To my mind, there should be strong evidence that you are really looking for something before sellers are able to interrupt/contact you.
I do agree that it was---in retrospect---unfortunate and optimistic of MZ to promise too much freedom and independence from FB. But it seems FB _did_ give WhatsApp a long runway, it's been 3-4 years since the acquisition. If their ideas don't work (wrt bringing in revenue in line with the acq. price), at some point you have to go back to square one and do the thing that works (also for IG), and do the FB-style ads/monetization.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for the WhatsApp founders. They took the money (they're worth almost $10B now), they did have 3-4 years to find their (and their team's) way within FB. It's cool that they don't like ads and moral standards or whatever, but come on, you have to be more rational when you're playing in the $10B league.
Disclaimer: I worked at FB previously for a short time.
Or, being able to choose between $10B and your values shows your character.
Someone said that the people who love America the most are the immigrants who has to endure the crap back in their home country. I can totally relate to this. I have lived in a country where my privacy and personal judgment didn't mean anything. The government could do whatever with your life, and people can ruin your life and kill your whole family by accusing you of a story they hear from the vines [1, 2]. Maybe [3] - not from the same country, but it is the same story.
I make a point to not have Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp (now) - basically anything that Zuckerberg and co. laid their hands on. I fucking hate the whole idea of any entity blatantly time and again disrespecting my privacy and judgments to advance their agenda and make money. The truth is I really have no control over what it collects from me, what it shows me, what it tells me, what it advertises to me, what it hides from me. I know if I go with it, the decision of foregoing my privacy will go back and bite me when I need it the most. It doesn't matter what they say they stand for; it doesn't matter how many of my peers are using; it doesn't matter what I miss out; it doesn't matter how weird people think I am; it doesn't matter what opportunities I will lose. I have made a decision two years ago to never consider using Facebook, and I will do my damnest to stay away from Facebook and their products and I will try my damnest to convince people to do the same.
That's how much distaste I have for Facebook and their platform as a person who had a taste of injustice. Zuck might be on top of the laws and the world and has a lot of allies, but it's not like I have not seen that and I have to fear that. And that's probably the most beautiful thing about America.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nh%C3%A2n_V%C4%83n%E2%80%93Gia...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform_in_North_Vietnam
I've gotten my wife to quit FB and download her data and request deletion (GDPR), and I've quit a while back and we run facebook blockers. I still don't expect to evade FB's ongoing trawl.
Really feels like it is coming straight from a dystopian future, where the workers are kept happy with little candies, and the promise to work for a better world, while also policing each others to see who got it better next door, while the big bosses are in their towers planning their next move.
If you don't feel like a "sheep" or "token" after realizing that you are fighting over the size of a toilet or a desk, then you are deep deep into it.
Knowing facebook owned it always made me a little nervous, but given that it was end-to-end encrypted, I figured Facebook wasn't getting any more from me then they would from all my facebook-using-friends who would send me SMS's before.
But I'm worried about how long I can continue to use the service moving forward, which is sad as this is my main way to communicate with relatives who live in other countries. And I doubt I can convince an elderly relative to switch to Signal, as we're still working on teaching her how everything in WhatsApp works.
I also recently purchased an Oculus. I like it way more than the current Vive revisions (although I want to have a non-HTC headset and Valve Knuckles as my next VR set), but the fact that it's owned by facebook unsettles me as well.
But overall I would swap back to different apps were WhatsApp to be 'compromised' or misused. Discord text chat for my gaming group, Signal for some tech chats, etc.
Overall it's a shame, since I was very appreciative of the approach the Whats-App founders took. But if we're lucky, WhatsApp will remain mostly the same for a while.
For my 84 year old neighbour, not so. He regularly pops round for help with sharing a picture on WhatsApp.
It's beyond my neighbour's ability to learn how to use WhatsApp correctly. Learning another messaging app for him is not an option.
FB, via the WhatsApp app, have access to your unencrypted messages before the app encrypts them and sends them on. So, there's reason to worry now that FB is in full control. I have no doubt they'll extract data from your conversations and inject targeted ads.
Edit: Am I wrong? Do they not have access to the plain text?
From WhatsApp themselves [0]: "WhatsApp end-to-end encryption ensures only you and the person you're communicating with can read what's sent, and nobody in between, not even WhatsApp. Your messages are secured with locks, and only the recipient and you have the special keys needed to unlock and read your messages."
Similarly it needs decrypted on the other side and displayed to the other user, at which time the app again has accesd to clear text versions.
I don't believe there's any way to encrypt the message before the app sends the message / while it is displaying to the recipient
WhatsApp tells their users and more importantly the US Gov they do not have any access to the message content itself. For this attack surface to be an issue, that would mean WhatsApp is telling a bold faced lie, secretly exfiltrating the plaintext to a 3rd party, and doing so without getting caught by any black-box auditing.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/five-ind...
You say "everyone" is willing to pay that. I'll tell people about an amazing app that solves their problems they are complaining about and they go and see it's a couple dollars (one time purchase) and still complain and usually don't buy it.
There will never be a popular messaging service or social network that relies on subscriptions (maybe subscriptions for additional features though)
The process of putting in your creditcard number, entering your password for google play/paypal/etc is just enough of a barrier to go 'whatever!'.
I think Signal or something of that nature will be the ultimate endgame for communication systems. They're way too easy to make, they're cheap to maintain, and they're hard to monetize without being scummy. This is the perfect formula for a non-profit to step in. I think the WhatsApp founders alone could maintain a worldwide textual communication network for the rest of their lives using a small fraction of their wealth.
I also use Signal ( and about 10 other messaging apps ) and while good, it’s a little rough around the edges and needs improvement.
I also realize other peoples' choice of family/friends make that hard for them. (My FB-addict-mother and I email, and at this point even the passive-aggressive bits about not seeing pictures has stopped.)
But if you can, I can attest that the internet is a much nicer place with a big hole where FB (and similar hostile entities) used to be.
You just can't be the first person to start the conversation
I can't send a message to anyone, without giving it access to everyone. How daft is that.
In the end, you'll have to do some introspection to see if the convenience gained is worth the privacy lost. How essential is it that you communicate in real-time with your relatives? Would your relationship be substantially different if you sent email or wrote letters?
But it's definitely a trade-off, so I at least kind of have a choice.
I wouldn’t recommend Signal to anyone who’s not paranoid about privacy and security. It still needs to improve a lot on UX, reliability and many other fronts.
Facebook only have access to the metadata.
This is not a norm in silicon valley/states?
It's funny how Americans get endlessly bashed for being prudes about the human body, and then somehow on this topic they get bashed for not being big enough prudes about the human body.
Here's why that is: Americans simply get bashed no matter what direction they go on any subject. It's done solely to make the person doing the bashing or mocking feel good.
If the stalls went all the way to the floor, it would be decided by elitist snobs in Europe that that is prudish behavior and ridiculous because there's nothing shameful about going to the bathroom and it's a natural function of the glorious human body. It would go like this: ah those stupid Americans with their fear of the human body, and their overly private bathroom stalls. Dumb Americans are afraid to even know that there's another human in the next stall, even a 12 inch floor gap is too much, because there might be a foot over there somewhere. It's silly how uncomfortable Americans are about normal functions of the human body, they can't even tolerate a small gap in the bottom of the stalls.
It is very weird the first time you see them coming from Europe but it seems to be the norm here
On the other, I really value knowing if someone is in the stall next to me and how many people are in the bathroom. If the stalls extend to the ground how am I supposed to scan for legs? Someone could be hiding in there waiting to frighten me! I cannot use the bathroom until everyone has left it. Just how am I supposed to verify that some quick-footed coworker hasn't made their way in during someone's loud flush?
I cannot stomach this game of chance.
Most places with full-coverage stall doors also have occupancy indicators on the outside - if you go in and lock the door, it changes from green to red.
Shorter walls are cheaper, but it also makes it easier to clean, easier to help someone in case of an emergency, and easier to tell if the stall is occupied.
Someone needs to ask for long doors in order to have them built in the US.
^^ coupled with a photo of outrageously poor open-plan office space.
This is just insane. Like, executives should be ashamed of themselves if they think developing a company culture means micromanagement of desk space and bathroom size.
I have to agree with Joel Spolsky that, when you think of things like this, it makes you start to realize that Facebook has to offer outsized salaries and RSU grants to its employees, because the culture and workspace is so poor and surveillance / micro-management oriented that in order to let yourself be embedded into a hellish workplace like that, you would require greater-than-market salary.
And frankly, the salaries aren't high enough to offset this, compared with other companies that don't turn your work life into a micromanagement panopticon, yet still pay well.
I mean, it seems like indisputable evidence based on the physical structure of the work space. I don't see how there's a way to interpret photographic depictions of the actual Facebook offices in some other way.
It's like saying, "See this picture of a work space that indisputably shows it to be a grotesque panopticon? ... well, trust me, it's not a panopticon."
Is the picture a forgery or something?
Almost prescient is the final line:
When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say "Have you considered the alternative?"
> we wanted to make something that wasn't just another ad clearinghouse
"These days companies know literally everything about you, your friends, your interests, and they use it all to sell ads."
I am not surprised there was a culture clash. I am more surprised that they sold to FB, and that it lasted so long with the difference in vision.
It's the part where What's App doesn't actually make any money and as a standalone business isn't worth a whole lot.
The issue boils down to business model.
It's really easy for WhatsApp founders to take the moral high road when he doesn't have to bother with trying to make a dime.
The WhatsApp founder is in somewhat of a hypocritical position given that his $17 Billion dollars comes from FB practices that he is ostensibly uncomfortable with.
If you've worked in the mobile app business you might get that this could mean almost 0 in revenues.
People. Don't. Pay. For. Stuff.
Moreover, WhatsApp is huge in places like S. America where people don't have credit cards, or for whom $1 is even too much.
"He also turned down hundreds of millions of dollars"
He took $17 Billion and is now publicly complaining that what FB is doing is immoral. He doesn't seem to have a problem taking money from that immoral business model.
It could, but it didn't. It meant revenues in the tens of millions.
I'd take continued success, hundreds of millions of happy users and a good purpose over broadcast.com.
Pretty sure I would, too.
Edit: This was ambiguous. I didn't mean I'd mock WhatsApp. I was agreeing with the orginal post that I'd prefer WhatsApp culture.
I wish I could find out more about WhatsApp's culture in this respect. Something like Valve's new employee handbook[0] or Netflix's culture deck[1]. I can only really find second-hand articles referring to its culture [2]
[0] https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...
[1] https://www.slideshare.net/BarbaraGill3/netflix-culture-deck
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/40459142/whatsapps-cofounder-on-...
I think everyone handled it well. They fought for what they believed in, they lost, and they chose to give up money instead of sticking around and being a pain in the ass. Facebook rightly said "we bought this and control it and here's what we want to do."
Most iOS users get annoyed at the android users when they get green bubbles, instead of getting annoyed at Apple.
As long as that continues to be true, I don't see iMessage ever coming out for Android.
...and all that would fit on something like a Raspberry Pi 3B+ nowadays...
As a user I wish that these apps were widely available because I prefer them to alternatives, but as a shareholder I'm not at all upset by this. At least Apple is charging for these privacy-protecting apps, which is the most important detail about WhatsApp: it was already profitable charging users $1/year before acquisition. If Apple ever does release FaceTime and iMessage for Android I hope they charge subscription fees for both.
...
But Mr. Zuckerberg told stock analysts that he and Mr. Koum agreed that advertising wasn't the right way to make money from messaging apps.
...
Some of the employees were turned off by Facebook's campus, a bustling collection of restaurants, ice cream shops and services built to mirror Disneyland.
...
Mr. Zuckerberg wanted WhatsApp executives to add more "special features" to the app, whereas Messrs. Koum and Acton liked its original simplicity.
...
Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg also wanted Messrs. Koum and Acton to loosen their stance on encryption to allow more "business flexibility," according to one person familiar with the matter."
It sounds like Koum and Acton actually had some principles. Among other things, they wanted to keep the software relatively simple, instead of continuously increasing its complexity by adding "features". The article suggests others saw Acton as a "moral compass". It also suggests David Marcus president of messaging products at Facebook Inc. called his #deleteFacebook remark "low class" behaviour. How to resolve this apparent contrast?
The article suggests Sandberg reacted to the Acton tweet by called Koum instead of calling Acton. It sounds like Facebook's legal department had no leverage (e.g. a non-disparagement clause) over Acton to prevent him from sharing his true thoughts regarding Facebook Inc. He chose his principles, including the freedom to express his opinion of Facebook Inc., over the stock options he forfeited.
If these founders really did have principles, and there are ample indications that they did (not limited only to what this article discusses), then is this not admirable? Their stock, compensation and benefits packages were large enough to make most folks abandon any principles in exchange for a much higher standard of living.
It also sounds like the WhatsApp staff actually like to engage in cerebral work, hence their desire for quiet and their dislike for the "Disneyland" environment at Facebook. Is there an alternative explanation?
Perhaps the lesson here is that "culture clash" may not be so important in these types of acquisitions, where the primary asset is users. These users can be transitioned to whatever the acquiring company desires.
For example, there could be a culture clash between a proprietary software company that acquires a company that offers free source code repository services for free/open source code authors. If the founders acquire significant, life-changing wealth from the transaction and the primary asset being acquired is end users, then any clash of principles or work culture is arguably insignificant.
The analyst quoted in the article calls Koum and Acton "naive" for believing Zuckerberg would not renege on his promise not to use advertising to generate revenue. He offers the ever persuasive cliche that Facebook is "not a charity".
Was WhatsApp a "charity"? It was covering its own expenses and turning a profit at the time of acquisition. It was saving millions of people money on SMS and voice calls. When it sold, it generated a lot of wealth for its investors. Was it not a success. By all accounts it never took money from advertisers.
While Facebook, like a few other oversized ad-financed tech companies, has the purchasing power to acquire any emerging competitor for users' attention, one could argue that WhatsApp had something Facebook does not: principles.
From the article it does not sound like acquring WhatsApp's principles was ever part of the deal.
My next point is a prediction. WhatsApp will remove end to end encryption as the default very soon. With Facebook wanting to grow its revenues and profits (like most other companies), this is too attractive to let it stay as it has been for the last few years. At least some WhatsApp employees seem to have some kind of a moral compass on this topic, and I’d expect several of them to leave when this change is announced later this year or early next year.
4 billion dollars of the 22 billion was cash. The remaining 18 billion was in Facebook stock[1]. Most likely, they still have stock in Facebook.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/032515/whats...
> Messrs. Koum and Acton also negotiated an unusual clause in their contracts that said if Facebook insisted on making any “additional monetization initiatives” such as advertising in the app, it could give the executives “good reason” to leave and cause an acceleration of stock awards that hadn’t vested…
Successful social media platforms launched after Facebook: -
Successful video platforms after YouTube: -
Successful Mobile chat platforms after Whatsapp: - Viber - Line - Wechat - Telegram - Snapchat
It seems that the mirror posted here in the comments is somehow incomplete.
But, of course, if you sell a company for billions of dollars, there is the obvious expectation that within some time frame your company will earn revenue and profit to support that valuation. You can't complain "they're adding ads!" unless you have a credible solution for somehow bringing in billions of dollars otherwise, and the WhatsApp founders didn't.
FTFA Facebook promised not to put ads on WhatsApp.
The terms of the acquisition agreement require accelerated vesting of incentive comp to Koum and Acton if Facebook renege on their promise.
>>>Mr. Acton initiated the clause in his contract allowing for early vesting of his shares. But Facebook’s legal team threatened a fight, so Mr. Acton, already worth more than $3 billion, left it alone, according to people familiar with the matter.
Turns out facebook sucks as a company.
What about business features? Pretty much every business in my country advertises a Whatsapp number, from large companies to mom-and-pops. People contact them over Whatsapp to ask questions, make complaints, order stuff, everything. I can't believe Facebook is unable to monetize that.
It seems to me that Facebook is severely biased towards ads because they already have a platform and it's a market they obviously know well. That doesn't mean ads are the only way to make money.
And apparently that's what they proposed to Sandberg, according to the article, but the financial projections were nowhere near what ads would bring.
I liked the business app especially for shortcuts, auto-replies and other stuffs. But yes, official APIs is deal-breaker.
NOTE: Many applications and websites somehow are already using custom APIs (or something). Ex. Airlines sending booking details as WhatsApp message, flight/bus status and so on.
I work for one of the largest travel groups, I'm actually working on flight notifications, and they don't want to go there - no idea how other airlines or travel groups do it.
> None of the proposals were as lucrative as Facebook’s ad-based model. “Well, that doesn’t scale,” Ms. Sandberg told the WhatsApp executives of their proposals, according to a person familiar with the matter.
I think it's partly a self-selection problem, where the companies which use the service don't have enough revenue to contact their customers through dedicated channels. If you try to monetize this, then most companies just leave because those who could pay already have such channels to customers.
It's the same problem with offering users to pay for an ad and tracking free facebook. Those users who would pay for facebook are exactly the ones you want to show ads to, whereas the others are uninteresting revenue wise either way.
I'm not sure that's true about the companies which use Whatsapp. They are not using Whatsapp because they can't afford anything else. They're using it because the clients use it. In a large part of the world, everyone uses Whatsapp for everything. Companies go out of their way to support clients via Whatsapp - they even pay for shady unofficial APIs implemented by third parties.
A company unable to afford "Whatsapp Business" probably doesn't need it anyway. They can just continue using regular Whatsapp. No need to force them to use the paid version.
Some of the use cases for Whatsapp Business:
- Customer service.
- Product listings.
- Orders and delivery.
- Knowledge base.
- Notifications (flight status, tickets, etc).
- Promotions.
A lot of these would be attractive for large companies.
You see it on the ads side as well, ads to U.S. or European customers can pay 10 times as much as an ad to a Latin American.
It's not implausible to believe that a big tech co would be interested in acquiring a platform defensively and/or for control over the platform ecosystem.
Same goes with google and the subscription I pay for google music.
Best ads on Facebook are brand ads and these work on your subconscious. Unlike Google Search that shows immediate intent, you don’t have an immediate need while browsing FB. Sure there’s the occasional impulse buy for some iPhone case or jewelry you don’t need, but the big companies don’t care for your clicks. E.g. what are the default beverages people buy when organizing an event? Beer and Coke and it’s not a coincidence or because there aren’t better choices.
In other words, as long as you look at ads, your buying choices get influenced by them, so you are generating revenue for pay-per-view ads, even if you never clicked on one.
I don’t mind seeing ads though, as long as they are tasteful. What I mind is the tracking and in that regard Facebook is among the worst.
If you visit a news site and click on an ad that was shown through Facebook's ad network, then they receive money. Importantly, you don't need to use facebook.com that much, only enough for Facebook to start tracking you.
If a Facebook user logs into their account just once, then the Facebook tracking cookie will log their visits to other sites in the ad network, which is the second largest network next to Google's. If they click on an ad, then Facebook receives revenue -- it isn't necessary for the user to be using Facebook in order for Facebook to receive money.
It's a bit stilted as well, which doesn't seem like it would be fixed in editing. I didn't realize WSJ articles were of such low quality. I guess because I have never gotten through the paywall. ;)
I cannot believe this. Seriously, I think this article is bs.
The definition of being rich in my mind is the very concept of being able to walk away from that kind of money for your own sanity.
I don't begrudge him one bit for his decision.
They left and now Facebook is gonna do it anyways and is gonna cost them 400 million less.
When can I cancel?
You may change or cancel your subscription at any time. To change or cancel your subscription, please contact Customer Service at 1-(800)-JOURNAL (568-7625) or 609-514-0870. We do not accept cancellations by mail, email, or by any other means.
With those terms, they can all starve for all I care.
Of course I prefer self-service cancellation to be an option, but if the personal service route is handled well, it’s a small negative in my book, not a dealbreaker.
Besides, subscriptions are only useful if you actually read WSJ regularly. I only click on some, not all, the articles that are linked here on HN. This bit of drama looked interesting, but most of the time I don't even circumvent the paywall, I close the page immediately.
I liked my WSJ subscription and it really helped me at my first job out of college. It was the print subscription and I’d supplement by reading their blogs online.
>They will make a retention offer but will not do things like hang up on you, REQUIRE YOU TO HAVE MOVED OUT OF YOUR AREA
You're stating this like it's a normal requirement for canceling subscriptions. I understand you're praising WSJ for not doing that but...
Do you accept treatment like this in the US? Are press subscriptions a lifetime commitment over there? Do I need to indenture my firstborn to any magazine that I subscribe to as well?
This is common practice outside the US too. Which newspapers have you tried to cancel?
Oddly, I've had better results doing that with DuckDuckGo than Google.