WhatsApp "explores ads in chat app" - Walks like a borg, acts like a borg and Zucks like one too

Perfectly Innocent

Perfectly Innocent

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May 3, 2023
Teams at Meta have been discussing whether to show ads in lists of conversations with contacts on the WhatsApp chat screen, but no final decisions have been made, according to three people familiar with the matter.

This became the dominant instant messaging platform in most of Europe, following the death of Blackberry Messenger because it was promised to forever remain crap-free, and that was before they borrowed Signal's seamless client-side encryption method which got everyone else on board. So, what do we do now farmers? Do we all switch to Signal for the same thing but without ads?

UPDATE: https://www.reuters.com/technology/whatsapp-explores-ads-chat-app-ft-2023-09-15/ (no in-app chat ads, at least for now)
 
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Reactions: There Is Light At The End, HIVidaBoheme, Whoopsie Daisy and 4 others
Ugh. This Facebook POS is the only way my dad likes to talk.
Preseumably because big businesses and even the government like to use it.
Hope I can wean him onto a better platform.
 
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Night-Owl said:
on https://web.whatsapp.com wouldn't the browser adblocker (like uBlock Origin) remove the ads?
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Judging by how they plan to implement it, if the marker of a chat actually being an ad is only indicated in the profile picture, then it would be a problem. With no obvious CSS clues or HTML attributes to go by, filtering out the advertising in that kind of way becomes very difficult. However, if they ended up leaving any way to differentiate ads from non-ads programmatically, then in theory you could install the app and then use the web UI to actually interact with it as a workaround.
 
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When Facebook bought Whatsapp, it had $1 Billion a year in revenue with 50 employees because it had a billion users and cost $0.99 a year. Facebook promptly got rid of the fee, stuck thousands of employees on the app, and it now runs a loss instead of a massive profit.

They could have made billions more by slowly increasing the price in the first world but instead they chose to make nothing.
 
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Reactions: Zero0, Wright, HIVidaBoheme and 3 others
Does this mean it's finally time to get serious about checking out signal, or viber. I would like to keep telegram but for 99% of my normie contacts, even convincing them to move again will be a stretch.
 
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doesn't facebook make a heaping helping of their money from low budget mobile service plans in like south america that only only allow facebook shit? i could be wrong but i feel like somethings connecting...
 
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Reactions: Big up Liquid Richard
Bog-standard Poster said:
Amen to this. Whatsapp is used as a cover for departments who fail at communication and are too incompetent to fix it.
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Every single phone that has whatsapp installed on it also has some sort of email app that can be registered with a work email address. To all the pajeets and douchebags who say "whatsapp is easier" it is brain dead easy to add pictures to an email message. Too fucking lazy to use company email? Fine, I am too fucking lazy to install whatsapp on my phone.
 
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Reactions: Whoopsie Daisy, HIVidaBoheme, Big up Liquid Richard and 1 other person
I mostly use telegram for my personal needs, WhatsApp is for job stuff and relatives that don't like change

If the ads is what makes people change, so be it. YouTube is also getting some hate from relatives for their annoying ads
 
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Unfortunately, the hubris will most likely prevail. Until that thing is riddled with ads like a free mobile game, the userbase won't give a toss.
Frankly what bothers me more is people still trusting their work AND personal correspondence with Facebook. FACEBOOK!
 
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Whatever happened to that facebook twitter competitor?

The one that had 100 million users join every day, or so every media site in the world kept telling us.
 
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Lone Wandering Courier said:
I honestly forgot "Threads" even existed.
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Threads!!! That's the one. Remember when it took over twitter? No? Me either.

Just two more weeks to shill the fuck out of threads before it becomes nu-twitter.

Is this why we may start seeing ads in Whatsapp? Because of the fucking failure that threads was?
 
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