I live in the subcontinent and 100% agree with you, I don't know most westerners are able to comprehend how much Whatsapp is tied into our day to day lives. It also plays a huge huge hand in spreading fake news here through message forwards, most politicians here pay off journalists who maintain several large group chats where they spread misinformation (exponentially)
An important thing to ask yourself is "Why are you commenting?" This isn't a dig but a real question. I don't mean to belittle you or the GP. Is it just idle ranting or are you hoping to find a solution?
If the former, my complete sympathies. Carrying around this low-level resentment about an app all while having to use it isn't great.
But if it's the latter, then the solution is obvious. Delete the app and then let the chips fall where they may. I guarantee there is a grumpy 60 year old in your life who just never ditched his Nokia and "it works for him". It's clear that you can't have it both ways.
I make this comment because too often on the internet people will comment on a self-help article, or someone sharing their success story, or a piece of advice with "Yeah, but it doesn't work for me because..."
Well, great? Sorry to hear that? This topic, then, is not for you? Carry on and good luck? It's just too many people expect universal solutions that MUST work EVERYWHERE without exceptions.
Your message seems to boil down to asking people to "get on board or get left behind", and that otherwise they just should delete the app, shut up, and stop complaining.
That may be possible for you, but it isn't for every person, even if they wished it was. "Just don't use it" isn't enough, and I say this as someone who hasn't had Facebook or WhatsApp in over 5 years. That I can go without them is a luxury many don't have.
Lastly, people being outspoken about technology not working for them has led to countless improvements and innovations, often with benefits to the entire population (<curb-cuts-cliche/>). Telling people not to express their criticism and complaints helps nobody.
I thought I was making a wider point about the sort of comment where people dive headfirst into a comment thread with complaints about how the solution doesn't work for them because of XYZ, when the author may never have inteded their solution to be universal in the first place.
I have serious doubts that idle complaining on the internet moves the needle too much. What works instead is voting with feet/dollars. In this instance, it's the mass of people who actually HAVE jumped ship that are causing whatsapp to pause, not the ones saying they can't quit, however justified their reasoning.
So I both agree and disagree. On one hand, yes, one person voting with feet/dollars has a relatively large impact compared to one person raising a complaint. But if we look at the entire ecology of users, the story is different.
Many of the people who end up voting with their feet do so after being exposed to people raising complaints. And on the flip side, people who see their friends voting with their feet may then seek out the explanations and complaints leading to that action.
Just uninstalling an app is very low information density as a signal. It doesn't provide any reason why, it's just a single bit. It's value is more as an action rather than a statement.
I think the ideal is somewhere in between, and we need both concrete action (voting with your feet) as well as public discourse (raising complaints). The former without the latter is inscrutable, the latter without the former is toothless.
It's clear from previous discussions on this topic that a lot of people on HN do genuinely believe that it is possible for anyone to stop using WhatsApp without suffering any social disadvantages whatsoever.
Maybe you are a person that isn't bothered in the slightest when other people have built their opinions based on a faulty understanding of the situation. I wish I was, it must be very peaceful.
Yes, very peaceful. By the same token, it must be deeply burdensome having your own equanimity displaced because "other people have built their opinions based on a faulty understanding of the situation". Quelle horreur!
I used to love Firefox so much before but recently its starting to feel less user friendly than freakin' Chrome the way it shoves changes down my throat. I still cant even stand that huge address bar that goes down to my taskbar, that was one of the major reasons I moved away from firefox just because of how ugly that and the address bar zoom was
I can't remember his name, there was a youtuber named Ali Abdal (I think?) whose videos are focused around productivity and they give me the same feeling that you're talking about in your comment. When you're talking about to 'productively' watch tv shows while try to get some work done in the background thats going a bit too far
Over here in Asia where we live in joint families or our parents/grandparents live in the same house as us for our entire lives this is a non-issue, I always found it weird how people in the west headed out to live independently as soon as they turn 18 or go to college. I knew a guy in Germany who was working a job and said he was peer pressured to leave his parents home because it was seen as something negative, that he was still "freeloading" by the time he was ~24.
It could be argued that the multi-generational home is one of the cultural ingredients for such a bad outbreak in Italy. That is a lot more common in that country than in some other parts of Europe.
It is also somewhat common in immigrant groups in western Europe and the US (though somewhat out of economic necessity rather than cultural norms) and those groups are also the hardest hit in the US (apart for retirement homes).
Causality is hard to prove, but it is something worth looking at.
For me I know about what this data stands for and what it represents, I just don't know what to do _after_ acquiring this sort of data. Any pointers on that? I live in a really poor country where I can't do algotrading anyways but the eventual goal is to venture into that field by moving abroad, any pointers on what I can build right now with free APIs or from data like this?
