WhatsApp is rolling out ads. In an update on Monday, Meta announced that it will now show ads from businesses through its Stories-like status feature.
Meta says it will tailor the ads to your interests by using “limited” information, including your country or city, language, the channels you follow, and how you interact with ads on the platform. You can also change your ad preferences from Meta’s Accounts Center.
This isn’t the only change Meta is making to WhatsApp. The company will also start showing promoted channels when you click on the Explore button to find new ones to follow. It’s also rolling out the ability to subscribe to channels to “receive exclusive updates” as well.
The problem is there are very few alternatives that will work for grandma and her friends, especially open source alternatives. This is why WhatsApp and LINE are stupidly popular.
I had to use LINE for work a few years ago to communicate with the Philippines. Awful app.
Awful depends on your point of view. Is it easy to message and call your friends and make group chats for free? The answer is yes. The fact that the interface sucks and is ad-ridden is irrelevant to older aunties and uncles.
Nothing better than having a private conversation with my friends and having some dude lean in to remind us that Brawndo, the thirst mutilator, has electrolytes.
Doctorow is always right.
I hate how my country (Brazil) depends so much on Whatsapp. If I could, I would uninstall that app immediately.
Same in Germany.
I do believe it’s better than using iMessage for example but it’s undoubtedly rubbish.
Same here in UK. So many people think of it like email. A universal communication system. They can’t see the problem with it being a single, closed, for profit, provider. Now Meta feels people are locked in, they will be finding out. But they still won’t see the problem until it ratcheted to really bad. Like frogs in boiling water.
Same thing here in Italy
Explains why I’ve started seeing ads for WhatsApp, which was really bizarre
@MazonnaCara89 The country I live in (Brazil) overly uses and depends on WhatsApp. From government departments to businesses and transactional relations, all the way to social and family affairs, people is addicted to it, forcing other people (e.g. me) to either have a WhatsApp account or ending up far beyond mere social ostracism (beyond mere loneliness): effectively, the inability to buy, sell, rent or even resolve citizen matters with certain government/state departments (such as receiving medical appointment schedules from Brazilian’s public health system (Sistema Unico de Saude/SUS (Unified Health System) via their “postinhos”/“Unidades Basicas de Saude” (neighborhood public health centers)). They don’t even use the grand old phone calling and SMS anymore: even “calls”, when performed, are made by people/departments/businesses via Whatsapp VoIP functionality.
That said, it’s worth mentioning that WhatsApp has been running ads for a long time: the “Channels” section lists seemingly random “channels”, many of which are businesses with “verified” “blue badges”. So it’s effectively advertisement disguised as veiled “recommendations” from Meta. It seems like it’ll just become worse (to the surprise of no one who understands what Meta is).
I really want to leave WhatsApp, but I’m socially compelled to stay (it’s the only mainstream platform where I still have an account, against my will)… the raw, grotesque distillation from social compliance, worse than depicted in Derren Brown’s documentaries…
Facebook has had a strategy for a long time of monopolising the internet of countries that previously had very little internet. They essentially subsidise internet infrastructure and make that subsidy dependent on facebook being a central part of the network.
So I’m not surprised to hear this. They obviously have found ways to inveigle themselves into key infrastructure in lots of places, even if they couldn’t build it in from the ground up.
jesus that some dystopian shit
i use none of these features.
i’m glad they are not as invasive as i tought, but they will definetly be making them worse over time.
You mean WhatsCrap?
OH whatsSNAP
Never used it for personal ends. But I’m curious to see if all the companies using as a work tool will divert from it.
Signal.
And IF I learn how to run Jammi, it will be my default communication application.
I think you mean Jami (single m).
It’s a nice concept but I’ll try to get my xmmp server nice and secured.
LET THE ENSHITTIFICATION BEGIN!
Begin? 🤔🤔🤔
What year is this?
2025!
the channels you follow
I knew they would use that info for targeted advertising
It’s Facebook 101, let the users themselves tell you what they like
Repeat after me… “Enshitification”!
Is it really enshitification if it was shit to begin with?
Years ago before Meta bought it, it was good. So I think it kind of counts.
People are going to use whatever the majority use.
I need to ude WhatsApp when i travel to countries egere it’s widely adopted. Just like I need tocuse Facebook if I want to partake in group chats with friends.
They’re just too big. How is anything else supposed to take off? Just gradually maybe.
So maybe Signal will get there in a few years? What’s itd adoption rate since it was created?
It’s a slow grind for adoption. I’ve had Signal installed on my phone since like 2016. Went from one person I knew to now about ~30. It’s mostly people from work at tech companies but progressively I’ve noticed other industries employees adopting it for unofficial chat that my contacts list has been growing over the years. Probably won’t take off in a few years. Maybe another decade
Family chatgroup, signal Work chatgroup, signal Half of my friends, signal
Won’t be very long until I remove whatsapp from my phone. That one friend that doesn’t want to switch, call me I guess…
Gradually is the answer. You can dual use both Signal and Whatsapp. Same how you can use Lemmy and Facebook and are not limited to one sociale media app.
I see a lot of people saying it’s time to switch to Signal, and I mean I agree in principle, it’s my main messaging app, but I don’t see how it can scale. It runs off of donations and the only reason it’s still functioning is because the users that are there are above averagely passionate about it and willing to donate. If it became the defacto messaging app I fear that there is no way they would be capable of financing that level of traffic.
I’d probably still use it if I had to pay for it
I mean, there are some who will be willing to do that, but the vast majority of average people won’t pay for something if a free version exists (like WhatsApp)
Edit: Ok I just Googled it and apparently their operational costs are less than 1$ per user per year which is far less than I expected. That’s way more sustainable in that case, possibly even through just donations.
Even if they charged 1.99 they’d be making a decent cut for future investment (they are a nonprofit).
GrapheneOS lives on donations too. Its definately possible.
I mean comparing it to GrapheneOS doesn’t make much sense, they don’t have recurring costs.
What, like salaries?
No, they don’t have recurring costs that scale with their size. The whole original point of my argument was that Signal is fine now because its userbase is above averagely passionate about it and willing to donate, but if it were to become mainstream that would mean the percent of its users donating would go down whilst its cost would go up, in other words its costs would outscale its revenue. This doesn’t apply to GaprheneOS as their costs don’t scale with the number of users.
I think you’re missing the point. All I was saying is that both Signal and Graphene are both nonprofits and both seem to be doing okay with their donations business model.
And donations aren’t just a euro here and there from users. Proton is rumoured to be one of Graphene’s supporters.
WhatsApp getting ads is great news! WhatsApp, and any other meta/facebook/for-profit-social-network will never be a good product. Therefore, the second best alternative is for it to be as bad as possible, so people finally change to worthy alternatives.
What is the alternative here? Don’t know, perhaps Signal, though the devs are not welcoming at all. The UI is absolute shit. Looks like UI for old people, huge margins and empty space. My screen fits like 3 chats. A compact theme would take a few hours to create and vastly improve the product, but ya…
I know right? Why would I use signal? There’s not even any games!
/s
My Signal screen fits 8 chats, and looks simliar to any other messenger I’ve used. It’s a messenger app and the UI shows messages. I wouldn’t want it to show anything else.
It seems to be device specific. On my device, WhatsApp fits 2 more chats. I hate meta/insta/fb/etc, but WhatsApp just looks considerably better than Signal. Signal, as I said earlier, just has huge margins and padding. It looks ugly.
Like you, I also want my messenger app to show conversations. Sadly, Signal shows more empty space than conversations. It really needs a compact UI. I invited several friends to Signal and they all left because it looks bad. I know it sounds like nitpicking, but UI/UX IS extremely important. Making the claim “meh, it looks fine” and ignoring people’s perspective is not the way to run an app that is dependent on the number of users, like signal is. If I don’t have anyone with whom to chat, the app is useless. It needs userbase.
Signal? Dude, I don’t want nonstop getting updates about the war plans of the Trump administration ;-)
