Comment by jph
2 years ago
Signal can be better, IMHO, by separating from phone number requirements. In other words, let users have secure random ids, rather than forcing each user to hand over their phone number for phone company verification.
It turns out the budget shows the phone number registration problem: the costs to deal with phone number verification seem to be $6MM, which seems to be 10% of the entire budget.
If Signal staff are reading this, I'd gladly pay $100/year for a phone-free solution for all users.
A bit handwavy, but allowing sign-up without a phone number could massively increase bot/spam traffic and ultimately increase hosting costs for Signal.
The deal could just be: no phone number, but you have to pay $x/year (I guess this doesn't work with 501c3?)
Accepting these payments would not be trivial, and linking them to Signal accounts would create a treasure trove of metadata that neither Signal nor its users would likely be very happy about.
I'd jump on that so fast.
Just charge $10 to create an account without a phone number and accept Bitcoin. Most people can avoid the $10 by providing a phone number, privacy-conscious people only have to pay $10, it generates revenue, and the $10 puts the spammers out of business because they don't pay $10 once, they pay $10 every time they get banned, which happens multiple times a day.
You could even automate the bans by banning anyone who gets blocked by more than two people they sent messages to, which anybody can avoid by not sending messages to people who would block them, and if it happens to someone innocent, it's still only another $10 to reactivate your account.
The phone number requirement is why WhatsApp won the space over in the first place. There were loads of username+password-based services before it, but none reached the market it did. Why? An incredibly wide user funnel, singing up is frictionless.
You might understand that it's a bad idea, but that makes you an outlier.
No, WhatsApp won because it successfully replicated and replaced the SMS experience in the developing world, where the cost of data was dirt cheap in comparison to the cost of a single SMS message.
This is why it still has a stronghold as well…
Experience on WhatsApp, Telegram or any other IM is vastly better than SMS. Unless by SMS you mean iMessage - then it's even simpler - most of the world doesn't use iPhones.
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Mxit existed long before WhatsApp. Possibly a decade. I used it in the developing world and it wasn't anywhere nearly as successful as WhatsApp. For example, nobody in my family used it.
Why not support both?
Let one communicate from a computer (or phone) with a username+password account, with people who use the service with phone number account.
This without the mechanism Whatsapp uses, where you can use it in a web browser, but it's still linked to your phone.
Signal has an app to use it with your computer. It's a one time linkage through a QR code. As long as you connect with the app at least once every 30 days, you never have to worry about it and, unlike WhatsApp, your phone doesn't have to be online for it to work.
I don't really buy this argument. Is signing up with a phone number really that much easier for the average user than using a username/email account? Billions of people seemed to have no problems making a Facebook or Google account.
With WhatsApp, your phone number allowed you to see everyone in your contacts that you could message on there, so you could see everyone straight away. Without that, you'd have to bring your friends along and have them sign up as well, then give you their username so you can connect.
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It’s the building a social network part that’s frictionless not creating user name process that’s frictionless.
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Requiring a phone number also seems like a decent way increase friction for automated account creation - obviously it can be overcome, but it probably reduces automated account creation by a few orders of magnitudes, which I would imagine reduces the amount of botting/phishing/ban evasion, which could all add up to be pretty expensive to an org.
Using phone numbers as identifiers (and by extension users' phone books as a contact discovery mechanism) is probably at least equally significant as a factor for WhatsApp's success.
What did WhatsApp win? I've never used it, so I'm not sure what anyone uses it for.
In South America it's the standard messaging everyone uses, even businesses. No one uses SMS
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You could do both, no?
Focusing on app features is one thing but the bigger picture is that Signal is at risk of not existing without capital… (just donated $20 today and I wish I could buy stickers off of them).
You're in luck: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/9/23953603/signal-username-...
They will still require a phone number, it's just a alias.
I just hope they don’t expose phone numbers if a conversation was started on usernames and one or both parties have phone numbers saved. I hope it is not this bad - something Telegram does.
Also preferably clearing differentiating username and phone number messages.
I don't understand the concern. Signal has never been about anonymity. If you need to be anonymous, use a different tool. I like the fact that a phone number provides an additional verification that the person I am chatting with is who they say they are. As far as risk associated with having your phone number leaked to bad actors, that ship sailed years ago. I guarantee your number has been leaked a thousand other ways starting with by your phone provider.
Phone verification does have value in adopting the network effects of phone numbers and integrity by making it harder to mass create accounts.
It would have very particular ethical trade-offs, but they could just make signing up without a phone number a paid option. That has the advantage of actually turning a cost center into a profit center, at the distinct disadvantage of creating a moral hazard by the exact same virtue.
Right, it's a way to create a cost barrier without anyone giving Signal a credit card directly.
That exists, and is called Threema
How would it be better? Is there anything beyond not having to provide a phone number?
How would it be worse?
Session.app solved this problem well
Typical HN comment saying I will pay $ for xyz feature (which everyone, including the poster, knows to be BS)