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Comment by closewith | Hacker News Reader

Huge amounts of the world de facto run on WhatsApp, including essential services like healthcare, emergency services, finance, etc. WhatsApp going down or shutting down is already an enormous threat.

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That may be true, but from an engineering perspective it's unwise to build a two-story house on a sand foundation just because the rest of the neighborhood has done so.

Sure, but you can say that about most solutions, especially organic bottom-up solutions, like the internet, while neglecting the upsides of it being bottom-up and organic like this system's ability to come up with its own fixes just-in-time instead of waiting for top-down decree.

FWIW, telco companies in Mexico don't charge for WhatsApp data transfer. As for prices, a 30 day Telcel 4.5GB plan is 200 pesos ($10) per month. So long as you don't use up the data doing things outside of WhatsApp, like surfing the web, which will expire the plan, then you get free WhatsApp (and Instagram and most social media) transfer for the month.

So it's not the worst organic solution and it's not even obvious how to centralize a better solution. For example, how many subway drivers are there and how much govt bureaucracy would be needed to do something like give everyone a $10 stipend for WhatsApp? Even giving each driver an extra $10 pesos per month wouldn't change anything.

People will just switch to signal or whatever. It's easily mitigated.

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