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Comment by uoaei | Hacker News Reader

Let's not conflate "normalized" with "standard".

"Standard" implies a lot, and definitely there is nothing about "enabling two-way communication between willing participants" that requires "make available a video on the screens of my contacts in a non-directed way" to be part of the offering.

Signal is not social media. That is not its intention, nor its purpose, nor even its design. It is a messaging service. We already have a discovery feature in Signal: using your contacts, you can see who has Signal installed or not.

This feels like bikeshedding to the max, because it is.

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> Let's not conflate "normalized" with "standard".

Good point - I agree, should have phrased better.

> We already have a discovery feature in Signal

Another point I should have been more clear. I agree that contact discovery is ... well, discovery! I think what I meant is that right now you can only discover folks you already know (i.e.: have the number for) but you don't get recommendations.

So yeah... I'd say that one of the major points distinguishing Signal from a Social Media (at least one of the definitions of) is the lack of recommendations of new people to follow or things to discover. Signal in that sense is a communication platform.

[note I mean Signal the app not the company]

> bikeshedding

You mean if Signal is or isn't a Social media? Or it's run by the feds?

I mean I replied to the above company with a serious comment but I thought the original one was not particularly useful to any discussion around Stories per se.

> Signal is not social media.

I mean, it is now since they just added a stories feature. Sorry that your view of the product doesn't align with Signal's.

You're also using the word bikeshedding in a way unfamiliar to me. I use that word to mean intense debate about inconsequential changes that don't matter, like the right color for a bicycle shed. Which ofc is ludacris because there is no right or wrong color for a bicycle shed. In contrast to that, there are absolutely product decisions about the app that are material to its desired and undesired functionality. If signal decided to change the functionality of their product and stop encrypting texts, would discussion about that be bikeshedding? Why then, is this change in functionality not of similar concern?

The important part of "bikeshedding" is the part about ignoring more important changes by focusing on trivial changes around the edges. If stories are more than trivial, I'd like to know how.

Personally, I think call quality and server reliability with respect to private messages are more important for a service that is explicitly (and, until this change, exclusively) about private messaging, especially considering recent outages.

If Signal changed the encryption protocol to an insecure one, or simply removed it, then they are fundamentally altering the promise of the app vis a vis its core technology, ie, the essence of the provided service. Obviously that is analogous to the foundation of a house, not to the shed in the backyard.

I guess its up to uoaei to define companies instead of themselves. They have a mission statement and othing more and that mission could be achieved as a social media company.

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