Hacker News Reader

Comment by pearjuice | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one upset with this? I don't use Facebook - haven't and never will - because I hate how I and all my data will become their product on registration. Sure, Whatsapp has its quirks being proprietary and all, but now, I am basically doomed. Whatsapp says they will stick to their core and stay independent, but I have 16 billion reasons to believe otherwise. The sad part is that due to Whatsapp, I can't escape my doom because EVERYONE I contact daily uses Whatsapp. I would basically kill myself socially if I were to delete Whatsapp. I really, really hope Whatsapp stays Whatsapp but knowing Facebook we are fked either way.

View on HN

  The sad part is that due to Whatsapp, I can't escape my
  doom because EVERYONE I contact daily uses Whatsapp. I
  would basically kill myself socially if I were to delete
  Whatsapp.

I have been playing around with deleting my whatsapp account (for different reasons) in the last couple of months, but haven't because of everybody uses whatsapp. But I don't share your sentiment. I just used this acquisition as a trigger to actually delete my whatsapp account. And I don't think I'll miss anything really significant (the SNR went done quite a lot lately anyway): I'm still as reachable as I've been before.

Maybe I can manage to bring more of my social contacts to actually use an open XMPP client anyway ...

I'm exactly in the same boat as you and this really stresses me out. With WhatsApp I finally felt like I could stay in touch with people easily and "casually" without being on Facebook, it has became a big part of my daily routines.

Just curious. Why couldn't you use text messages to contact the same people?

In my case, for example, most of my friends are not born americans but rather people that lived in south america that moved to the US or still live in south america. In Colombia/Vzla EVERYONE uses whatsapp. At first it was because SMS has charges per text sent so a free, better way to communicate (whatsapp) quickly became the norm. Network effects pushed through boundaries and now I use it more than anything else to communicate with friends and family. I have groups with my immediate family and with friends across borders. Mind you, I've lived in the US most of my life so I use iMessage with all americans and whatsapp with the rest.

I think it comes as a surprise to most people in the USA because here we never had to deal with SMS charges (plans were for the most part unlimited). In other parts of the world, the opposite is true, which is where whatsapp gained it foundation. Add to that cross platform, free, awesome ux, network effects and the fact that IT WORKS PERFECTLY and boom, 19B. Cheers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com