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.
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*gasp*
Who could have ever seen this move coming? From Facebook, of all companies!
To be fair, I am shocked… Not to see a Pikachu face in the comments.
Thank you for your assistance.
As somebody that doesn’t use what’s app, I’m shocked it didn’t have ads already.
Good news good Signal.
Only if you donate. Otherwise bad news, Signal.
Have they removed that dogshit crypto they added a few years ago? Haven’t donated since.
Signal was never more than a stepping stone anyway. Centralised privacy services, that can be taken down by any government, are doomed to fail under surveillance capitalfascism.
It’s still there, buried in the settings. TBF I wouldn’t expect them to remove it, because some people probably do use it.
No idea, all I see as options now for Paypal and credit card.
I recommend https://simplex.chat/
I recommend you have a look at this guy’s Twitter profile and reconsider.
What does this mean? What’s on his twitter profile?
Bunch of right wing stuff, some anti vax stuff, the usual
“We will never show you ads in WhatsApp. We promise”. --Facebook when they bought WhatsApp and promised the previous owner not to force ads in the app…
I wonder if anyone believed them at the time
If they did not, they at least ignored that instinct and kept using WhatsApp…
How do we get people to stop ignoring their better instincts in things like this?
If thats not a reason to switch to Signal what is.
But people just suck it up anyway, they did when reddit gone to shit, they did when Amazon startes showing ads even tho when you were paying, they did when Netflix disallowed sharing and you had to pay extra.
People just suck up whatever is thrown at them and are fucking stupid.
We cant have nice things, because companies will greed and if users dont react and cancel the shit out of them they and others will continue to press more moneyjuice out of people.
Sheep don’t know they are being slaughtered. We’re the digital 1% and we can’t make the sheep wake up.
I don’t use either but my issue with Signal is none of my friends want another application to install and they are happy with WhatApp.
Conversely, I’m happy not having a group chat app and will either text you or iMessage you. Don’t you dare ring me as I ain’t answering.
I just deleted WhatsApp one day and made the switch. Messaged all important contacts, that I will be available via Signal. Most of the few I care about went ahead and installed Signal. One is still dragging their feet and we communicate via SMS now xD
I only use WhatsApp for work and none of my coworkers are switching off it. They have too much invested in it. Family specifically.
I had a similar situation at my previous two jobs, but I just told people I wasn’t installing WhatsApp, if they asked, and nothing ever came of it. If it’s that important, they could text me or use my work email.
Hopefully this helps people move off of WhatsApp to Signal or something else.
Yeah like it moved them off of Xitter, Reddit, Facebook and Instagram.
I mean we are here, aren’t we? The majority of people will do nothing of course, but some will make the switch or even just install another app just to give it a try. And soon Whatsapp’s enshittification will continue and some more people will switch and so on.
Hope so… Just a little bit and them another ones when they extent the implementation of IA… And wishing to not be the standard any more
I just wish SMS would go away.
Why? It works fine and it’s built into the phones. No need to convince family members to install a fuckin’ chat app just to be able to message them.
I’m forced to use WhatsApp chat so I keep it installed begrudgingly. But who the fuck is using WhatsApp stories?
I use Beeper which shows me a unified view of whatsapp and Signal and others. whatsapp itself has zero permissions on my phone. I hate that I need to have it at all but Europe is deep into that. Sigh.
There was a big uproar amongst normies when the WhatsApp TOS changed…but people forget quickly and prefer convenience. That was our one chance to convert everyone over.
I stopped using it for 3 years, then I had to interact with a surgeon through it and reconnected with a fee people who still use it. I fucking hate using it
At least normal European people are locked into a platform that doesn’t care what device you’re using, unlike iMessage - so it’s not all bad
I’m an iPhone user and I’ve never met anyone that gave a shit about iMessage. In the past ten years.
I’m an android user and I semi-frequently meet iPhone users who show anything between surprise and downright disdain towards me because I don’t have the right color of bubble.
It’s never the other way around.
Where do you find these peeps?
Sewer oulets, I’m guessing.
Work, school (not anymore, but while I was in school), local events where I meet people, friends, etc.
The only iPhone users I ever met who cared were back when texting cost a lot, unless you had a special plan (there was one that made it free if the person you texted had the same plan). Then smart phones came and we all switched to Kik, then WhatsApp, then Messenger (some got both or an alternative). And now we have got free texting and calling across the whole EU, yet none of my friends uses it haha
Isn’t Beeper another security risk? They also store your data on their cloud, and it’s not encrypted during the bridge process.
Whatsapp is popular a lot in many parts of the world. In India, WhatsApp is almost the defacto standard messaging app with Telegram probably flying in a far second. I doubt I know anyone who even uses stuff like Signal or Threema or any of the alternatives.
Doesn’t help that Telegram media downloads are throttled by some Indian ISPs (looking at you, Jio)
But then aren’t you trusting your credentials to yet another application? That seems like a bad idea…
Fair point. The simplest answer is thrt any other business cannot possibly be as evil as meta, so even worst case is a net win.
I wished Whatsapp wasn’t a thing so much. There are so many so much better apps. Signal is so much better and it would work fine for the vast majority of people.
Unfortunately “better” varies from person to person. Signal is behind on features, e.g. WhatsApp has integration for businesses (customer support).
I hope my monthly donation will help but we must realize for some some features are important, I guess that for most it’s how many ppl they know is there/unwilling to lead a migration
Nobody in their right mind wants to use Whatsapp for getting support. That is insane. I want to message people and do group chats. That is it. Anything else is bloat.
Lots of people in Brazil and many Spanish a speaking companies would disagree with you unfortunately. It’s incredibly embedded in those countries, to the point where WhatsApp will often be the primary, and sometimes only, point of contact for a business. At least it’s not that bad here.
Facebook shit gonna do facebook shit
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provide free app at a loss
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grow massive user base and market share
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squeeze your userbase for every cent they’re worth
Every single time. We got to solve the funding issue some how, I dont want to live in a future run by ads.
WhatsApp was not free and already had a massive user base before Facebook bought it.
Hope this will turn people to alternatives.
Wasn’t it like a quid to sign up?
The enshittification process in a nutshell.
It’s not very easy to solve the issue of infinite growth in a world with finite resources. The fundamental issue is that it’s just not physically possible, but they keep trying. Either we continue this cycle and eventually destroy the planet irreversibly, or we acknowledge that maybe money isn’t everything, and that maybe [the vast majority of] people aren’t inherently egoitistical monsters, and we move on to different systems.
Eastern Europe loves the app Viber that Rakuten bought, which has had ads for years.
People LOVE a walled garden of their friends are there, too.
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I’m more surprised it took them this long. Thankfully there are already many decent alternative messaging apps.
but still nobody is going to switch. whenever i try to convince people to switch, they just defend whatsapp and I’m a whiner
Or they do switch but for like 1 day and then go back to messaging you on WhatsApp. I tried switching to signal at least a couple times, even convinced a couple groups to move, but not a single chat lasted more than a couple weeks. Eventually they all went back to WhatsApp. Every single one. It’s extremely difficult to get people to care.
Keep answering on Signal.
got my mom and sister to switch our group chat to element, but after a month they decided it sucks and now they love whatsapp more than ever…
Meta has been running ads claiming no one can read your WhatsApp messages, including them. For some reason, I’m not 100% sure about this. It’s hard to imagine they can resist grabbing all that data for their AI somehow.
Of course they fucking grab it. They have 45 backdoors with golden handles otherwise they’re show the fucking source
This is one of the train that impossible for me to get off. It is very ubiquitous in my country to use whatsapp instead of text. I must suck it up I guess. 😅
A fair number of my contacts from countries where this is true also have Signal. If you don’t, I suggest installing it and seeing how many people are there.
If it’s hard to remember who uses what, start conversations from the contacts app instead of one of the messaging apps; in most cases it will tell you.
Already did that months ago when they change the term of services and people are aware of it at the time. Many install Signal, tried them, signal got overloaded, experience degraded, people are back to Whatsapp. Now only dead account are there. Telegram is more popular but that is just jumping from crocodile’s mouth to shark’s.
Government agencies, company customee services all relies on Whatsapp. They have emails but if you want to get response in timely manners, Whatsapp is the way to go (Or twitter, again another bad alternatives).
At least it is still E2E (supposedly), so it is not all bad. Look, I know I sound pessimistic because I am (at least in this specific topic). I hope everyone else can do better than me, cheers!
Government agencies…relies on Whatsapp
WTF!? What country is that?
I’d hazard a guess that it’s Brazil.
India
signal got overloaded, experience degraded
I did not experience this, and I’ve been using Signal daily for years. Prior to 2020 or so, I experienced more unreliability and hesitated to recommend it to the average person.
I’m familiar with the problem though; in most of the EU and probably other places WhatsApp usage is so high that it’s a major inconvenience to avoid it entirely.
Be the change
It may not fit your exact needs, but my solution to WhatsApp and fb messenger is to bridge them with a beeper account. Of course you lose the calling ability, but if you’re not using it for calls it is a good enough solution. The other caveat (at least with fb messenger) is you still need to check on your actual account if you get any legit messages from someone not on your list.
This might be good middle ground. The last time I tried beeper, the apps is kinda … suck tho. Well, at least it not full of ads!
Does it still require user to install their desktop app first?
Not that I’m aware of, never even knew it was ever a requirement. I’ve only used the android client and the browser client. For whatever reason they don’t really communicate the browser is out there for use. It’s chat.beeper.com for anyone looking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9Ux8DFgMSM
Might give you some ideas on how to do that
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The most important people in my life is my family, especially my parents. Teaching them to try new app to chat to me is easy enough but all of their friends and groups are still on whatsapp.
Making them juggle between two apps (separating how they interact to me and totheir friends) is not easy. Justifying it is even harder, they simply don’t care (to understand) the implication.
Rather than make them confused and worried about not being able to contact me, I just have to accept the status quo. It is the conclusion I arrive at.
Must be nice tho to not use any Meta product. :)
I literally just got my senior citizen dad off Skype and over to WhatsApp like 2 years ago… Ain’t no way I can get him over to signal
Only shocking part of this is that it took them this long.
Yeah, it was never not going to happen. Shareholders demand unending year-on-year growth at all costs, forever, until everything is shit.
Time to ditch WhatsApp
👆 mark that comment. I’m sure you’ll write that again in a year or so
And the year after that, and the year after that, and the year after that, and
And again in a year or so only a handful of tech nerds with few social connections will actually ditch it.
The best time to quit was 10 years ago. The second-best time is now.
No, the second best was 10 years minus 1 day ago
Slowpoke meme, I chose you… like 10 years ago.
