Comment by Retric

4 years ago

It matters because the segment of population in your country that doesn’t care about WhatsApp is a nucleus of adoption for both the next messaging app and a phone without WhatsApp. Facebook is already hedging it’s bets by owning and promoting the next most popular messaging app.

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Retric

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matheusmoreira  4 years ago

> the segment of population in your country that doesn’t care about WhatsApp

No such thing exists. At best you have people such as myself who care about alternatives. Those too have WhatsApp installed.

  • Retric  4 years ago

    WhatsApp isn’t installed on 100% of phones in any country, try to look at actual statistics before making such bold claims.

    • matheusmoreira  4 years ago

      So what? Those people are essentially ostracized. They don't matter, they never mattered. Also, I guarantee you they still care about WhatsApp, even if the only thing they do is seethe about how dominant it is. I hate Facebook and its data collection yet look at me talking about WhatsApp. I'm actually happy that the people of my country are using something so secure. At least it has end-to-end encryption just like Signal.

      Try living in a country where nobody asks girls for their phone number anymore. They ask them for their WhatsApp. Phone numbers are just an old idiotic thing you need to put into your contacts database to get the person to show up in WhatsApp. The WhatsApp word itself has become part of the language as a synonym for message, just like the Google verb has become a synonym for search in the anglosphere. People even compressed it into "zap" to make it easier to say. "I gotta go but I'll send you a zap later." Want to order some food? You want the restaurant's WhatsApp. Those that don't have a WhatsApp contact are losing so much money it's not even funny because it's better than every single food app out there. First day in college? The very first thing you want to do is join your class's WhatsApp group, or make one if it doesn't exist. Actually, you'll want to make two: one with your professors and another without. If you don't do this, you'll be so hopelessly out of the loop you might as well quit. I had classmates who barely had money to buy a cheap phone being forced to do so because they couldn't keep up with classes otherwise. Their phones had literally a single app and that app was WhatsApp.

      WhatsApp once refused to comply with a court order to decrypt user messages during a child abuse investigation. It was impossible to comply because they didn't have the end-to-end encryption keys to begin with. The judge got mad and blocked WhatsApp nation-wide at the ISP level as punishment. You would not believe the disruption and outrage this caused. I remember teaching at least 10 friends how to bypass the block with VPNs. Not only was it an ineffective and unpopular measure, it lasted only a couple days before a higher authority undid the judge's decision. In my country, judges are perceived as gods who can do literally anything they want, but WhatsApp is so important it put some much needed humility into them. The judge wasn't punishing WhatsApp, she was punishing every citizen of my country by denying them access to such a vital tool. WhatsApp is so important they replied to the fucking judge in english instead of portuguese. I still remember the judge's pissed off face when she talked about that during a media interview. The nerve, right?

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