Meta has close to 4 billion people worldwide using one or more of their products. Their brand problem doesn't extend much further than the HN comment section.
> Meta has close to 4 billion people worldwide using one or more of their products.
If you ask any of those 4 billion people if they know WhatsApp is related in anyway to Meta, your answers will be split between "no" and "what's a Meta?"
People in HN treat non tech people as illiterate. Everyone knows what meta and facebook is and who owns whatsapp. At least if you remove the >50 years old folks.
Most non tech folks believes that Meta listens to their conversation for ads in Instagram, but that's a different issue, and even with that belief they are fine with that. I have seen this discussion so many times with so many different groups.
I think 99% of WhatsApp users would gladly stop using WhatsApp and switch to something like Signal, if they had verbal agreements of "everyone else" that they would also switch.
Everyone is only on WhatsApp because everyone is on WhatsApp. That is why they tolerate the Meta ickiness of it.
I bet more than 1% of Whatsapp users make use of their web interface and/or live location. Signal doesn't have either of these. Yes, you can install a Signal app on your computer, but not everyone wants to do this.
Also, that "everyone else" would have to include all business accounts, which I think would require Signal to build out an API
This sounds like a product idea to me. Make a website that shows the status of your friends that are willing to switch to signal. You send an invite to all your friends first so the list keeps up to date as soon as one of your friend made a decision. If everybody agreed you can switch as a whole. Even better if signal would implement it themself!
As far as I can tell, Signal automatically tells me which of my contacts are already on the app. If someone is willing to switch, the obvious thing to do is install it.
> I think 99% of WhatsApp users would gladly stop using WhatsApp and switch to something like Signal, if they had verbal agreements of "everyone else" that they would also switch.
Most users do not care. If you told them other users agreed to switch platforms, they’d be annoyed about having to learn a new app when they already had one that was set up and they knew how to use.
HN is part of a small bubble that doesn’t understand product management for common people. Average users do not care. They just want a product that works.
I was able to avoid WhatsApp until we started our current multi-year sailboat cruise. All the local cruiser communities are on WhatsApp. So when we got to the Canaries, I created an account.
But I'm making sure WhatsApp will not be used for anything outside this context. That way I can nuke it when we're back home.
WhatsApp. Instagram not really. WhatsApp has unfortunately become "official" (not in a figure of speech) mode of communication in certain countries, one of which has more than a billion people in it.
Instagram as well absolutely. There's all sorts of "small business owners" whose entire existence is conducted via an Instagram account and DMs, the same way there were entire businesses that operated via Facebook pages in the past.
It’s interesting to see how out of the loop many HN commenters are on social media. Any teenager or even occasional social media using adult could confirm that Instagram is a hotbed for business operations and marketing for many business. I barely use it myself but this is plainly obvious.
The number of overly confident yet entirely incorrect comments about how other people use WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook from people who obviously aren’t familiar with this platforms is interesting.
Depends on who you are. Quite a lot of careers require you to market yourself on social media now. You can hate Meta with a passion but acknowledge that you still have to reach customers who are on Instagram.
WhatsApp I can buy due to the communication factor, but Instagram you're really going to have to sell me on fitting into the category of 'critical for daily functioning'.
Actually Facebook and WhatsApp are the only products I know of where even completely non-tech people like my mom or the other parents at my soccer game have ever mentioned something along the lines of "yeah I did X on Facebook so now whatshisname Zekkerburg knows about it too..."
These people probably have zero awareness about cookies, tracking, online disinformation campaigns and online security in general...yet the one "tech" thing they know is that Facebook spies on you.
Everyone is aware of how Meta kills privacy in their products. The products are still useful, especially at price point "free". And they are still riding on an installed base and network effect from a time before we cared that much about the privacy infringement.
But, actually paying for the privilege of being the product...that seems like an extremely hard sell from Facebook for me.
In my (totally limited) experience, most non-tech people don’t even know what Meta is. WhatsApp is almost the only messaging platform used where I live (and pretty much everywhere outside the US).
I remember doing Bug Bounty for Meta a while ago and telling some friends and family about it, and I had to repeatedly explain they _are_ Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram and many other things because they would look at me like I was talking about aliens.
Those 4 billion people are using a free product with strong network effects. That has basically zero bearing on who's going to buy useless spyware glasses.
