this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Over-reliance on proprietary, closed-source products and services from megacorporations.
For instance, it's really absurd that people in many parts of the world cannot function without WhatsApp, they can't even imagine a life without it. It seems absurd that Meta literally has them by the balls, and these people can't do anything about it.
Also the people who base their entire careers on say Adobe or Microsoft products, they're literally having their lives dictated by one giant corporation, which is very depressing and dystopian.
Itβs worse in China. WeChat is EVERYTHING.
Talk to some older folks about what it was like when there was only one phone company and the alternative was snail mail.
I was there. It was fine. You didn't need phones to be able to function in a society. Phones were something like an optional convenience that you had only at fixed places, like your home or office. If you were out and about, you typically didn't have access to a phone, unless you were in the vicinity of a payphone, so you weren't expected to be available on phone. Whereas in the countries where Meta has monopoly over, everyone expects you to be on WhatsApp, and you don't really get a choice in the matter.
Whatsapp is just a text service that gained popularity because it bypassed expensive text messaging rates, and it's superior to SMS in most ways anyways. If meta starts charging people will go somewhere else. It's odd to hear this take that people are somehow dependant on it. It's more replaceable than a pair of shoes.
That may be the case where you and I live perhaps, but these countries that I speak of, have an entire ecosystem built around WhatsApp. Many companies there no longer provide a customer support number that you can call for instance, they expect you to interact with a bot run on WhatsApp, which can further lead to chatting with an actual agent speaking to them, but that's all done via WhatsApp. Also many teachers in schools and universities share lecture notes and study material via WhatsApp groups. Doctors and medical labs may share electronic copies of your reports via it. Some restaurants accept reservation requests solely via WhatsApp. It can even handle payments now, and besides using it as a means to send money to someone, some companies have even built entire e-commerce platforms around it, using interactive bots and the payment features. So for you and I, WhatsApp may be just another messaging service, but in these countries WhatsApp is quickly turning into an "everything" platform, and it's not trivial for someone to just replace it, unless they want to go live in a cave and cut themselves off from modern society.
Wow, that's news to me. I didn't realize it had gone so far in some places.
There are plenty of free and open source messaging alternatives, they just don't have the branding money to make sure a user base appears. To some degree the people using the apps are choosing the proprietary option.
We collectively need to be doing more to support and promote free open source software to avoid this issue. Secure peer to peer communication protocols should be more more ubiquitous than even http.
I can happily live with any IM software, just happens that WA got on the market earlier and everyone else uses it. Me taking a stand by only using telegram does no good if I have no one to talk to.