Like the government saying: "Sorry Fox, you cannot have this one, this one is too good for your dinosaur management."

Since that's a very dangerous government hand meddling, I guess the correct move is to let it happen (to our liking or not).

But as written to the letter of the law, no, as this would not create a monopoly. More consolidation yes, but a monopoly technically not.

Statuses cannot be disabled, so the little notification dot is always there (I solved that by archiving everyone's statuses) and the phone call feature cannot start a recording when you get called. If you need to record a call you need to do so separately.

If for some reason you want to stop using WhatsApp, you just cannot. You socially exclude yourself.

Most people you know are there so you cannot just leave it. Some companies run their business there. Some government services and banks have a WhatsApp chat bot, and don't accept email or phone calls anymore.

I wish I could fully leave WhatsApp, but I can't without paying a social price. The network effects are a straitjacket.

Anything not from their vanilla app, the littlest dot on their charts will trigger severe alarms and actions.

Big correlation systems. The safest path used to be to automate the app itself, through mobile automation, but they even got too sensitive to that.

I don't doubt the whole app has a behavioural analysis component, full screen size, much like a big "I am not a robot" checkbox.

Also, it's very likely their private APIs are CSRF-protected or similar.

I realized months ago that social networks are distribution systems. Want acceleration? Pay.

There is little incentive to make anything viral/organically boosted.

I thought he was some mad Karpathy-tier ML scientist or something.

If you don't have that, now that writing code is basically zero-cost now (in terms of time), you'll still be slow.

Might be my IRC mind talking, but a proprietary service like Discord, or Slack, or even Telegram at times, is just not suitable for the target community, as there's often a data privacy concern.

I never had a Discord account, and I'm hoping I can keep that streak.

Too much dependency in Google[0].

--

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48396596

Yeah, now that's flagged.

You can be absolutely destroyed if your hosting provider later hits you as a Website Owner with an excess traffic bill.

We don't need to feed more the Google monster machine more than it needs to.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47488928

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

I had to look thrice to find it.