I hate to be that guy but there are ton of reasons this is doomed from the start.
First, getting people to pay any money is such a massive barrier to entry that it limits your audience by orders of magnitude. WhatsApp (pre-FB) is a rare outlier. Likely the only reason this worked is there simply weren't any other messaging apps for many of their platforms at the time and SMS prices were still outrageously high. none of that is true anymore.
Second, just the name ("HalloApp"). I mean the fact that it's "Hallo" not "Hello" tells you a lot. This is developed on a budget. It's also too close to "WhatsApp" so (combined with the subscription) it just smacks of former WA engineers trying to create WA 2.0. 2.0s almost never succeed (MariaDB being a rare exception).
Third, it's not really clear to me what the messaging model here is from just reading this. How is this going to be different from the user's perspective compared to WA, Messenger or whatever?
Fourth, any new platform that is similar to another is simply going to be a haven for those that are banned on the original platform or who otherwise feel they proselytize whatever whacko positions they hold. This is not the basis for a healthy platform.
Lastly, people. The dirty secret of social media is that the core problem is people. On anonymous online spaces people are hateful and vindictive. They believe crazy shit and want everyone to know about it.
> Lastly, people. The dirty secret of social media is that the core problem is people. On anonymous online spaces people are hateful and vindictive. They believe crazy shit and want everyone to know about it.
This is simply not true.
"According to the researchers, results from a major social media platform over a period of three years “show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals."
All you have to do is look at twitter. The toxicity of blue-check mark people and the hideous cancel culture and attacks by non-anonymous individuals against non-anonymous individuals. When your identity is open to everyone, you have more stake in an argument/belief/cause/etc and it incentivizes you to be more extreme and toxic because your identity/social standing/group/etc is at stake.
>Fourth, any new platform that is similar to another is simply going to be a haven for those that are banned on the original platform or who otherwise feel they proselytize whatever whacko positions they hold. This is not the basis for a healthy platform.
wait, you think people get banned for wrongthink on whatsapp? lmao
Often you'll have a relatively niche game like PUBG that validates a concept (battle royales) which is then done in a more polished way by a second-mover (Fortnite, WOW, TF2, CSGO, StarCraft 1, Unreal Tournament, etc) with commensurately greater success.
> Users who violate the rules must talk to a “conflict coordinator” and read documents about why their behavior was problematic before they can post again. These moves are intended to “lay a foundation for users and set a different expectation” for how users should behave online, Ms. Austin said.
There are lots of great ideas about how to tame problematic online behaviour.
But in the end I've only see one working well and at scale - here at HN, @dang's courteous yet determined interventions. As luck would have it, I noticed a new one this morning, classic dang:
IMO The current moderation model centres around moderating the things people communicate so as not to offend others. And results in attempts at keeping all communications in the sphere ‘pure’.
Social media however has grown far beyond what I think the original inventors intended at the time of creation. couple that with a multitude of legal jurisdictions and levels of sensitivity I fee we can no longer keep the environment clean to so many different standards and must instead switch to a model which is more akin to defaulting to being exposed to nothing and choosing over time to be exposed to some categories of potentially offensive things.
I did have a stab at this and fee it needs refining for sure. Wether this is a valid attempt or not, I think the worry that the current moderation model isn’t adequate is grounded in reality.
And all silcon valley wants to do away with this type of work in the name of HumanOps. Highly educated professionals as typically hired by tech do not want to moderate for money and so they and their employers use machine learning for such "drudge work". Moderation is triggering and traumatic and abuse reports can cause psychological harm to the worker dealing with it. This is literally what all of silicon valley believes. In real life, therapists have to go to their own therapists regularly so there is some precedent!
That they don't see the army of Reddit moderators as an indicator that things can scale is a sign.
I suspect it's about an under valued skill in people.
Personally I'm in favour of the semi-anonymous freenode channel ops who are encouraged to be hidden at least until required and image board "janitors". Basically moderators shouldn't be idolized or be given unique powers or made to stand out as a special power user but it should be seen as a kind of service. Humble moderation.
Dang is great most of the time but effectively ends up pushing a "centrist" semi liberal view point.
I do not envy what dang does. It's a hard job. But at the end of the day these positions end up effectively enforcing the middle ground logical fallacy.
The middle ground "fallacy" as used by most people in reference to social media moderation is usually a strawman. Often pushed by the exact types of people responsible for social media being the divisive cesspool that it is.
dang's job sucks, but him pushing for moderation (as in moderate behavior regardless of opinion being expressed) is exactly what makes HN enjoyable even in threads where I don't necessarily agree with the consensus.
> I do not envy what dang does. It's a hard job. But at the end of the day these positions end up effectively enforcing the middle ground logical fallacy.
Dang has personally dinged me a few times -- maybe I'd disagree with a few, but the guy seems alright. Sometimes I troll and don't get caught, sometimes I'm being honest but dang dings me.
I dunno', but this is by far the best forum on the modern web. Of all fallacies, the "middle ground fallacy" seems to me to be the best.
From what I've seen and noticed myself, exposure and engaging with different arguments in good faith (e.g. able to switch sides and argue for the other side in as convincing a way, as one might do in a debate club) tends to either move people towards the center or makes them agnostic to any solution. At least in political questions, or questions of "ought" as opposed to "is".
I agree with you. In the interest of cohesion and to avoid conflict, every new user who posts their point of view and isn't a centrist-leaning-to-the-left progressive ends up banned in the end. Even if the new user is polite and well-meaning, after so many years the community is completely full of centrist progressives and every post that goes against that is a trigger for a flame war - in the interest of avoiding conflict it's easier to ban the new guy than it is to warn everybody involved.
Absolutely correct. Their moderation idea quoted here sounds horrible, as in 'we'll take you to room 101 for re-education' horrible. You just point users to the moderation/conduct guidelines and ban them if they continue to offend.
Human moderation against clearly set community expectations for behaviour is the only effective way. And if things are going to get too spicy, do the same as always and ban religious/political discussion altogether.
The reason we have such massive issues with Twitter/FB/etc is becuase they essentially said they were gigantic open public spaces with no moderation guidelines at all, then started enforcing arbitrary 'moderation' based on political or cultural biases, including banning content instead of bad behaviour (which it seems a lot of people out there - including the WSJ staffer writing the article - have a really hard time understanding the difference between).
HalloApp will avoid the problem by having the 50 user group limit, but how long until they get the 'feature request' to allow bigger and bigger groups? It also sounds almost exactly like Facebook groups, so what's new there aside paying for it?
I would be cautious with this platform being created from ex-Twitter employees, they will continue to implement 'misinformation' policies that police content rather than behaviour, but time will tell.
It's interesting to see it all come round again to basically the forums of old: Specific interest groups, smaller scale, moderation to suit. Who knew that worked...
> There are lots of great ideas about how to tame problematic online behaviour.
Isn't that what all the censoring europeans, chinese, russians, saudis, israelis, etc all say? All censors are trying to target "problematic" behavior.
Your comment is no different than what every tyrannical or oppressive regime espouses. The biggest problem with social media and internet is that it is transnational. Countries and people that value censorship really shouldn't have a say in american social media. I believe they should develop their own social media.
I no longer ascribe to the idea that everyone should have free speech. I believe we should have free speech in america and you should have whatever you want in your own country and own social media. The problem with american social media is that it is trying to appease everyone and as a result, it becomes a race to the lowest common denominator.
> Countries and people that value censorship really shouldn't have a say in american social media. I believe they should develop their own social media.
If American social media chooses to be global (it does!), then putting up with the rules of the countries it chooses to operate in is part of the game.
It reads as very self-serving for these folks to create a business model that is clearly economically unsustainable and fueled only by venture capital, then sell their company to Facebook for billions of dollars -- and then to pretend like they're shocked that Facebook wants to make their money back.
Of course they do. You knew that. We all knew that. And you still sold your business anyway. That's fine -- good job -- we're happy for you -- but don't act holier-than-though now that you're rich and bored. And don't start a new company backed by venture pretending you're not hoping to do it all over again.
Their take, that WhatsApp has been ruined, is weird to me as a regular user of WhatsApp who has been using it for what must be a decade at this point. I don’t have a single complaint about it, and I’ve never heard a complaint about it outside of anti-Facebook sentiment in tech circles, and while we can certainly begrudge Facebook’s behaviour in a lot of ways, it seems absurd to suggest that Facebook have somehow ruined the user experience of WhatsApp — it’s one of the most consistent apps I’ve ever used, and continued growth surely demonstrates that.
Internationally, whatsapp has been a big (or bigger) source of bullying, mobs, and disinformation in group chats - with even less visibility or moderation capacity/capabilities.
> shocked that Facebook wants to make their money back.
Haha. So true. As if all these people in the heart of the money spinning and raking machine that is SV were so naive and cheery eyed, that they just didn't see what all the "deals" were.
They didn't know that FB has a fiduciary duty to explain its spending? They didn't know that Zuck wants to increase the share price and market cap of FB?
Did they really think that paying 1$ for downloading WA was a good enough revenue stream?
Did they really think that Zuck was such a fool to actually allow that "No Ads..." bullshit paper really run?
He waited for a couple of years, mining user data, then when people mostly forgot about it, went in for the kill.
The thread is a yawn. I can feel no moral force, no genuine passion from it. Even if you ignore how he cashed out and suspend disbelief for the sake of a good rant, it's still boring.
I'd say go wipe your tears with a wad of Benjamins, but I'm not convinced there are any tears being shed to begin with.
WhatsApp was making decent money and not burning VC money at all when we sold to FB. this was in 2014. There is no such thing as clearly economically unsustainable. It is just harder.
Not sure why you would be dishonest about this when it's easily verifiable to be false[1]. Even ignoring the meager revenues with 600M(!) users, WhatsApp had no way to realistically meet their equity obligations without a fat exit. And then, FB wanted to make their money back (duh).
I’m not sure how this meme got started. I think it was something like WhatsApp may have been profitable in its first year when it was barely started but that doesn’t appear to be true either. Whatsapp was always a money pit, even if that meant losing 7 or 8 figures a year vs some startups burning 9 figures a year (there would have been less of this 8 years ago too, before the tech stock explosion).
The problem really starts when you take in venture capital, not when a possible exit is on the table.
Whatsapp was making money, but was that enough for the VCs? Even if it was not burning currently, it might have burned it in the past, so if the VCs trigger the clauses to ask their money back, you might not be able to give the money to them, ending up bankrupt. Plus, VCs might have a majority on the board. They see nothing but money, so they will push for the option that results in the highest payout for them, even if it is immoral, and even if that means using their powers to kick out the founders.
VCs look for businesses that 10x their investment in a very short time frame, and use that money to finance their many more failed ones. What might be a solid business in the wild is something they cull.
The way WhatsApp used to make money was through a subscription model. It cost $1 to download and then $1 a year going forward. Facebook eventually removed the $1 fee and made WhatsApp a free service,
I paid that Dollar!
They make it sounds so magnanimous that they are using a different tactic to exploit users for profit. If the motive is profit, the motive is not healthy conversations. It may end up being less bad than Facebook by coincidence but it's not an exercise in civil discourse.
This is as pretentious as saying you need poison to counteract poison. The fix for social media is NOT another app- you need to realise if that has any ROI for your social interaction. Most users doom-scroll or track/stalk others and "pseudo-react" as just extensions of lab-rat experiments for minor dopamine hits and hooked to digital drugs.
Atropine is the standard antidote to several nerve gases and pesticides. It is itself quite toxic, as are the standard antidotes to atropine overdose.
Analogies often fall apart when examined literally, but I do think there's a role for software to play in mitigating the harms of social media. This is almost certainly not that software, but I like online one-to-many and many-to-many communication with people I actually know, and miss what Facebook provided when most of what it showed me was original content from my friends and family.
True. A whole generation of users has been accustomed to finding their folk on social media.
Whatever SM comes about, they are going to do the same.
Also, the one and only business model, of any SM, is keeping people on the app, and you don't do that by providing counter points / arguments against their world view. You do that by matching them with people who think like them.
Any social media will devolve into cesspools of group think that often ends up being bad for society.
Just look at Whatsapp. It has no ads feed, no subscription fees and yet, it has innumerable groups that do spreading of all sorts of conspiracy rumor mongering.
WA is not even getting like minded people together. They are doing it themselves.
The next wave of SM will be similar. But, even more crass and materialistic. It will not bring people together. It will bring groups together that will fight ever more aggressively with other groups, drawing strength from numbers.
And human nature, with its fickle tendencies, will enable the dumbest and gullible to form the largest groups.
Ah no. Those 100 posts you see on your feed are not random. For your statement to be true, it would assume that social networks do not use algorithms to pick what you see.
The unfortunate truth is that fights creates audience engagement which drives up user retention and thus stock prices. Financial analyst look at how much time a user spents on each platform to issue a price forecast.
How does any of this apply to WhatsApp? It isn't social media, it is a messaging app. And as far as anyone who actually uses it is concerned, it works just as well now as it did before the acquisition. If not better, given it finally has a migration story between devices, no matter how imperfect it is.
I literally cannot think of a single thing, when it comes to WhatsApp specifically, that got worse.
I believe that it not only increases engagement, but also increases likelihood to click ads and buy things. People seem to like to shop as a distraction / coping mechanism.
I have no evidence of this but I have thought quite a bit about why social networks angering push content the way they do.
There’s a popular narrative that social media companies use algorithms that intentionally favor divisive content. WhatsApp is a useful illustration of how that narrative might be wrong.
The WhatsApp algorithm can be described as: “show the chat with the most recent reply at the top, then show the most recent reply at the bottom if the user clicks on that chat”.
Suppose the Twitter algorithm was: “show the tweet with the highest count recent replies at the top of the feed, then show the most recent reply at the bottom if the user clicks on that tweet”
That is a pretty natural way to design a social media service that wants to host the global discourse. And that algorithm would inherently promote tweets that provoke a lot of responses. It would take a strong thumb on the scale to make it not be full of divisive content (the major social media companies publicly claim to be attempting this).
WhatsApp is a useful datapoint here because we know the feed is chronological, yet there are a ton of news stories about how the app is rife with divisive content and misinformation, just like Twitter and Facebook.
I personally preferred the tweet because I can’t read the article. Also, the tweets are personal statements (which seemed relevant to me), not just a link to the article (only mentioned in the last tweet of the thread).
On the one hand, I think the things they are changing sound like things that should be changed: limited group sizes rather than a public broadcast, and subscription-based rather than ad-based. Guarantee data confidentiality and you've got a neat platform I still wouldn't use.
On the other hand, we know how this story goes: they either fail outright, or they succeed and scale up, slowly adding more and more features people request in order to create more growth, until eventually they look like the platforms they started as a reaction against.
Because Facebook, et al. didn't randomly arrive at the combination of qualities that makes them destructive, they got there by giving people what they asked for. Until you change what people ask for, you're either going to keep creating Facebooks, or get driven out of business by Facebook. Replace Facebook with the social media platform of your choice.
Readit News
First, getting people to pay any money is such a massive barrier to entry that it limits your audience by orders of magnitude. WhatsApp (pre-FB) is a rare outlier. Likely the only reason this worked is there simply weren't any other messaging apps for many of their platforms at the time and SMS prices were still outrageously high. none of that is true anymore.
Second, just the name ("HalloApp"). I mean the fact that it's "Hallo" not "Hello" tells you a lot. This is developed on a budget. It's also too close to "WhatsApp" so (combined with the subscription) it just smacks of former WA engineers trying to create WA 2.0. 2.0s almost never succeed (MariaDB being a rare exception).
Third, it's not really clear to me what the messaging model here is from just reading this. How is this going to be different from the user's perspective compared to WA, Messenger or whatever?
Fourth, any new platform that is similar to another is simply going to be a haven for those that are banned on the original platform or who otherwise feel they proselytize whatever whacko positions they hold. This is not the basis for a healthy platform.
Lastly, people. The dirty secret of social media is that the core problem is people. On anonymous online spaces people are hateful and vindictive. They believe crazy shit and want everyone to know about it.
This is simply not true.
"According to the researchers, results from a major social media platform over a period of three years “show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals."
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/why-ending-anonymity-wou...
All you have to do is look at twitter. The toxicity of blue-check mark people and the hideous cancel culture and attacks by non-anonymous individuals against non-anonymous individuals. When your identity is open to everyone, you have more stake in an argument/belief/cause/etc and it incentivizes you to be more extreme and toxic because your identity/social standing/group/etc is at stake.
Wait, what? Could you elaborate? How do you go from "Hallo" to low budget?
wait, you think people get banned for wrongthink on whatsapp? lmao
Video games? DotA?
Often you'll have a relatively niche game like PUBG that validates a concept (battle royales) which is then done in a more polished way by a second-mover (Fortnite, WOW, TF2, CSGO, StarCraft 1, Unreal Tournament, etc) with commensurately greater success.
There are lots of great ideas about how to tame problematic online behaviour.
But in the end I've only see one working well and at scale - here at HN, @dang's courteous yet determined interventions. As luck would have it, I noticed a new one this morning, classic dang:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31265977
Perhaps there is literally no tech. that can do as good a job as a motivated savvy human.
Social media however has grown far beyond what I think the original inventors intended at the time of creation. couple that with a multitude of legal jurisdictions and levels of sensitivity I fee we can no longer keep the environment clean to so many different standards and must instead switch to a model which is more akin to defaulting to being exposed to nothing and choosing over time to be exposed to some categories of potentially offensive things.
I did have a stab at this and fee it needs refining for sure. Wether this is a valid attempt or not, I think the worry that the current moderation model isn’t adequate is grounded in reality.
https://gist.github.com/TheMightyLlama/bb77a05d3dde4da251142...
Typing from phone. Sorry.
That they don't see the army of Reddit moderators as an indicator that things can scale is a sign.
I suspect it's about an under valued skill in people.
Personally I'm in favour of the semi-anonymous freenode channel ops who are encouraged to be hidden at least until required and image board "janitors". Basically moderators shouldn't be idolized or be given unique powers or made to stand out as a special power user but it should be seen as a kind of service. Humble moderation.
I do not envy what dang does. It's a hard job. But at the end of the day these positions end up effectively enforcing the middle ground logical fallacy.
dang's job sucks, but him pushing for moderation (as in moderate behavior regardless of opinion being expressed) is exactly what makes HN enjoyable even in threads where I don't necessarily agree with the consensus.
Dang has personally dinged me a few times -- maybe I'd disagree with a few, but the guy seems alright. Sometimes I troll and don't get caught, sometimes I'm being honest but dang dings me.
I dunno', but this is by far the best forum on the modern web. Of all fallacies, the "middle ground fallacy" seems to me to be the best.
Human moderation against clearly set community expectations for behaviour is the only effective way. And if things are going to get too spicy, do the same as always and ban religious/political discussion altogether.
The reason we have such massive issues with Twitter/FB/etc is becuase they essentially said they were gigantic open public spaces with no moderation guidelines at all, then started enforcing arbitrary 'moderation' based on political or cultural biases, including banning content instead of bad behaviour (which it seems a lot of people out there - including the WSJ staffer writing the article - have a really hard time understanding the difference between).
HalloApp will avoid the problem by having the 50 user group limit, but how long until they get the 'feature request' to allow bigger and bigger groups? It also sounds almost exactly like Facebook groups, so what's new there aside paying for it?
I would be cautious with this platform being created from ex-Twitter employees, they will continue to implement 'misinformation' policies that police content rather than behaviour, but time will tell.
It's interesting to see it all come round again to basically the forums of old: Specific interest groups, smaller scale, moderation to suit. Who knew that worked...
Isn't that what all the censoring europeans, chinese, russians, saudis, israelis, etc all say? All censors are trying to target "problematic" behavior.
Your comment is no different than what every tyrannical or oppressive regime espouses. The biggest problem with social media and internet is that it is transnational. Countries and people that value censorship really shouldn't have a say in american social media. I believe they should develop their own social media.
I no longer ascribe to the idea that everyone should have free speech. I believe we should have free speech in america and you should have whatever you want in your own country and own social media. The problem with american social media is that it is trying to appease everyone and as a result, it becomes a race to the lowest common denominator.
If American social media chooses to be global (it does!), then putting up with the rules of the countries it chooses to operate in is part of the game.
Fool me once...
It reads as very self-serving for these folks to create a business model that is clearly economically unsustainable and fueled only by venture capital, then sell their company to Facebook for billions of dollars -- and then to pretend like they're shocked that Facebook wants to make their money back.
Of course they do. You knew that. We all knew that. And you still sold your business anyway. That's fine -- good job -- we're happy for you -- but don't act holier-than-though now that you're rich and bored. And don't start a new company backed by venture pretending you're not hoping to do it all over again.
Also nice that they are building out product catalogs. In the developing world sometimes it is difficult to get a list of products with prices.
https://blog.whatsapp.com/introducing-catalogs-for-small-bus...
Haha. So true. As if all these people in the heart of the money spinning and raking machine that is SV were so naive and cheery eyed, that they just didn't see what all the "deals" were.
They didn't know that FB has a fiduciary duty to explain its spending? They didn't know that Zuck wants to increase the share price and market cap of FB?
Did they really think that paying 1$ for downloading WA was a good enough revenue stream?
Did they really think that Zuck was such a fool to actually allow that "No Ads..." bullshit paper really run?
He waited for a couple of years, mining user data, then when people mostly forgot about it, went in for the kill.
I'd say go wipe your tears with a wad of Benjamins, but I'm not convinced there are any tears being shed to begin with.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/28/whatsapp-revenue/
Whatsapp was making money, but was that enough for the VCs? Even if it was not burning currently, it might have burned it in the past, so if the VCs trigger the clauses to ask their money back, you might not be able to give the money to them, ending up bankrupt. Plus, VCs might have a majority on the board. They see nothing but money, so they will push for the option that results in the highest payout for them, even if it is immoral, and even if that means using their powers to kick out the founders.
VCs look for businesses that 10x their investment in a very short time frame, and use that money to finance their many more failed ones. What might be a solid business in the wild is something they cull.
Deleted Comment
Atropine is the standard antidote to several nerve gases and pesticides. It is itself quite toxic, as are the standard antidotes to atropine overdose.
Analogies often fall apart when examined literally, but I do think there's a role for software to play in mitigating the harms of social media. This is almost certainly not that software, but I like online one-to-many and many-to-many communication with people I actually know, and miss what Facebook provided when most of what it showed me was original content from my friends and family.
Whatever SM comes about, they are going to do the same.
Also, the one and only business model, of any SM, is keeping people on the app, and you don't do that by providing counter points / arguments against their world view. You do that by matching them with people who think like them.
Any social media will devolve into cesspools of group think that often ends up being bad for society.
Just look at Whatsapp. It has no ads feed, no subscription fees and yet, it has innumerable groups that do spreading of all sorts of conspiracy rumor mongering. WA is not even getting like minded people together. They are doing it themselves.
The next wave of SM will be similar. But, even more crass and materialistic. It will not bring people together. It will bring groups together that will fight ever more aggressively with other groups, drawing strength from numbers.
And human nature, with its fickle tendencies, will enable the dumbest and gullible to form the largest groups.
The unfortunate truth is that fights creates audience engagement which drives up user retention and thus stock prices. Financial analyst look at how much time a user spents on each platform to issue a price forecast.
I literally cannot think of a single thing, when it comes to WhatsApp specifically, that got worse.
I have no evidence of this but I have thought quite a bit about why social networks angering push content the way they do.
The WhatsApp algorithm can be described as: “show the chat with the most recent reply at the top, then show the most recent reply at the bottom if the user clicks on that chat”.
Suppose the Twitter algorithm was: “show the tweet with the highest count recent replies at the top of the feed, then show the most recent reply at the bottom if the user clicks on that tweet”
That is a pretty natural way to design a social media service that wants to host the global discourse. And that algorithm would inherently promote tweets that provoke a lot of responses. It would take a strong thumb on the scale to make it not be full of divisive content (the major social media companies publicly claim to be attempting this).
WhatsApp is a useful datapoint here because we know the feed is chronological, yet there are a ton of news stories about how the app is rife with divisive content and misinformation, just like Twitter and Facebook.
On the other hand, we know how this story goes: they either fail outright, or they succeed and scale up, slowly adding more and more features people request in order to create more growth, until eventually they look like the platforms they started as a reaction against.
Because Facebook, et al. didn't randomly arrive at the combination of qualities that makes them destructive, they got there by giving people what they asked for. Until you change what people ask for, you're either going to keep creating Facebooks, or get driven out of business by Facebook. Replace Facebook with the social media platform of your choice.