Can you please stop editorializing titles?
You heard a cool new word and used it where it doesn’t work, this feature isn’t bad at all. If Signal didn’t alienate a large number of users by removing SMS maybe switching would be more viable.
If Signal didn’t alienate a large number of users by removing SMS maybe switching would be more viable.
This. I hate Whatsapp, but I have to use it because that’s what everybody else (where I live) uses, so either I cave, or be Incommunicable by everyone and get used to explaining why while sounding like a dork.
I used Signal because, although a very small set of friends used it, I had an excuse to keep it because it handled SMS, and so I could keep it in the hopes that eventually WA would shoot itself in the foot and people would finally migrate, but since they removed SMS, why the hell would I hold on to it if I’d have no reason to other that I like it?
In my experience, people might raise an eyebrow when you say you don’t have WhatsApp, but I never had to explain myself. Even then, saying “I don’t trust Facebook” will make most people understand.
I don’t know the technical issues, buy couldn’t a fork of Signal revive SMS support? I would switch to such a fork and help everyone I know also do so.
alienate a large number of users by removing SMS
Would you mind elaborating on this?
SMS in Signal was never secure (it’s SMS), and so it was removed. Now I have private messaging in Signal, and if some one sends me an SMS, it shows up in my stock texting app. No false sense of security and it’s very easy to use 2 apps.
Yes I dropped signal when it stopped supporting sms. That was a really dumb choice and I honestly don’t know why they did it
I’m curious, why that feature was so important for you?
Because 90%+ of my contacts use sms (USA) and keeping touch across multiple apps is a huge pain. Like remembering which contact uses which service is stupid.
Turning a messaging app for myself and friends into a data farming social media app full of paid promotions is absolutely the definition of enshittification.
The enshittification actually began several years ago, back when FB bought WhatsApp. That was the moment you gave up on privacy, the moment that was a clear sign that it was all going to go downhill from there. If y’all didn’t quit WhatsApp at that time, then you bought it upon yourselves. The truth is, you’ve been using a shitty service for a long time and whoring your data to Meta and making Zuckerberg richer, so this latest feature bloat or w/e isn’t the least bit interesting.
Unofficially, yes probably. But officially Facebook only upped the ante on user data connection from WhatsApp more recently according to their privacy policy. Sorry, “Meta”
Idk why you’re being downvoted, you are 100% correct!
Unless I’ve missed something I don’t see how this makes WhatsApp worse…? Just don’t sign up to the people’s channels if you don’t want to 🤷🏻♂️
This is the beginning of monetizing the app after they started collecting user data a few months back. The more aggressively they decide to monetize, the more aggressive they’ll be about pushing promoted content. Remember when Instagram had no ads?
That’s how this works. And they’re certainly not going to choose to make less money off of their app over time with the market dominance that they have. Why would they when users will continue to use it?
How is this turning it into a data farm? It did that when it plundered your address book, and kept track of who you messaged when.
Sure, they will probably stay monetizing it a few years from now, but right now they aren’t. Enshittification is a term with a very specific meaning, and it does not mean “features I don’t like”.
Is it? How do you define enshittification?
Because adding paid promotions to something that never had them is always the beginning “making things worse” -ificaton.
The rest of this story is very predictable following Meta’s track record with social media. Everything will go to shit from a UX perspective now that they’ve decided to put ads in the app. That is how this works.
How do you define enshittification?
I don’t. I use Doctorows definition.
If anything, if you prefer signal to WhatsApp (I do), you should be happy with its enshittification - because that means it’s killing itself. But it’s not, and it’s already shit, and its users are okay with that.
adding paid promotions to something that never had them is always the beginning
- They’re not paid
- They’re not promotions
- It’s opt-in
It’s basically a way to keep up with events you’re already interested in (your favourite band, local soccer club, etc). You’re complaining about an optional feature you don’t want to use, that doesn’t even exist yet, and misrepresent it as ads.
Yeah, no, I’m right. This is always how it starts, and these new Channels “partners” will definitely be a revenue stream in the future if they aren’t already. Your view is naive.
I don’t get why everyone isn’t on signal. Its kind of a no brainier.
Signal doesn’t have a marketing department worth billions or synergy with any popular platforms
I only text people I know IRL and none of them are tech literate enough to use something other than the default messenger app, let alone hack anything to obtain sensitive info. And if a 3rd party wants to hack my messages, they’re gonna see a LOTTA penis and not anything important, so fuck it.
So, they also don’t use WhatsApp, Instagram and so on, because they would need to install an app? Oo
Why even bother with a smart phone? WAP and MMS should suffice…Around here even the most tech illiterate use Whatsapp for messaging. No one™ with a smartphone uses the default messenger app. So I’d say it is more an issue of expectation and motivation, rather than actual ability.
I still get the occasional message that takes hours to deliver. I don’t trust it to always be reliable.
What’s enshitty about this?
Nothing, OP just wanted an excuse to use the buzzword of current year
No, this is absolutely how it begins
Have sex
Monetizing the app
I’m not seeing anything about monetization in this article, could you be more specific?
If you log into the app, you’ll see promoted content from celebrities and organizations. What do you think drives those promotions?
It’s either direct paid promotion, user data being sold to ad firms, or a combination.
Did you not read the article you posted yourself? You have to opt in to those channels.
You mean they’re adding ads but it’s cool because we don’t have to click on them? You’re right, this will never be made more intrusive, and it’s definitely not an anti-feature.
You mean
No. As I explained elsewhere, that’s not what I mean at all. Nice try.
I don’t use WhatsApp, I only have this article to go off of. You need to include more context with editorialized titles like this.
Pretty sure WA started out pure shit and only got worse when Meta bought it.
I will never switch to something that only treats phones as “primary device” and adds extra hassle to support PC as a “secondary device”. I also find very concerning the lack of understanding of the value of anonimity even when communications are private, they even mock people that want privacy and anonimity.
another non-deal breaking but still telling issue is the lack of a clear roadmap for signal.
I also find it crazy that people don’t understand the value of privacy. Telling people that Nissan wants to sell information about your sexual activity seemed to wake some of my social circle up. But only in the context of Nissan, which almost certainly doesn’t have that data. Meta almost certainly does.
What sort of roadmap are you looking for in Signal? It does everything I need it to do, personally.
I am not looking for anything specific since i am not planning to use it, the issues I pointed are deal breakers as I said.
Regarding the roadmap,I only expect them to share it. They have talked about their vision and desire to be self sustainable. It would show they have a clear plan even if it involves testing features.
Signal the anonymous messenger asking for your phone # to register… I didn’t check if they changed that but it was such a good joke
Who ever said signal is anonymous? Secure, private, encrypted - yes. But definitely not anonymous.
Making an anonymous messenger is surely borderline impossible, somewhere along the chain someone will know who you are.
TOR
On TOR the NSA who control the endpoints know who you are
Okay, but NSA (or any state actor) aren’t going to blow their load (tip their hand) by busting anything less than a massive terrorist cell.
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And while it will always be controversial, I’ll say it over and over again: you MUST support some kind of adversarial interoperability for a messaging client, at least if you want me on your service. In the US, that means having some degree of SMS support since that’s what most people can use by default. In many parts of the world (at least pending the new EU directive), you don’t even have that since the primary means of messaging most people is proprietary services.
Signal walked back from even bare-bones SMS support in their app. If they had supported it, including forwarding messages to desktop/tablet clients , I am sure it could’ve given them a high degree of user retention. Maybe even some opportunities to conversion, e.g., a user getting a prompt when starting a new SMS that the sender is on Signal. They instead focused on maintaining the walled garden and that creates an INTENSELY high up-front cost. For someone like me, who puts a high priority on juggling as few of these apps as possible to communicate with people, it’s an unreasonably high one. I have no more desire to try and fight to convert all my parents to Signal as getting them onto a Discord server or any other random, narrow-field service that they will not be able to ding strangers on.
It’s absolutely unintelligible to me that no competitor has seen plainly what makes iMessage so strong: that it works by default with pretty much everyone with nearly zero friction to the user by supporting a nearly universal fallback.
It also is why it makes so much damn sense to me that the EU passed the adversarial interoperability rule. Because the had very close to nothing for a universal fallback.
Signal’s SMS support was basically just a novelty in most of the world. Where there really isn’t much chance of Signal taking over any time soon.
There is virtually no benefit for the average user to use Signal over Whatsapp, unlike the possible benefits of Signal over SMS/iMessage. Telegram on the other hand is very attractive to them because of all the bells and whistles it has. The only difference Signal has from Whatsapp is that there’s next to no one using it, and given how a lot of the world runs on low end phones, having an app on your phone to chat only with like 1 person at best is a waste of space.
Signal axing SMS support got it into an awkward spot where it doesn’t have “anything” going for it in neither its home country or everywhere else.
I fully support the push for open protocols. It’s insane to me that most walled garden messaging apps are largely a wrapper for XMPP.
Signal supporting SMS would be nice, but I certainly prefer web based protocols over MMS for sending media. The less compression there is on the photos and videos I share the better.
Other than being forced to use WharsApp due to their market dominance, I have no desire to use anything proprietary or closed source.
Signal is my top choice open source option, because it’s easy for my family and friends to just use, and it’s one of a very small pool of messaging apps that is verifiably private and secure.
Signal is great!
I remember when it was trash in like 2013, but it’s been something I recommend to family and friends since at least 2020. UI is clean, modern, and uncluttered IMO.
Not sure I’ve ever seen Signal push anything crypto related.
Telegram is “pinky promise” secure with a closed source encryption mechanism. I love that it was created by the guy who created VK and fled Russia when the oligarchy wanted control, but that was years ago. Signal is fully open source, including its encryption.
They store no information on users, not even metadata like phone numbers, and this is documented in the blog posts they make when governments get mad about it after their requests for user data can’t be filled.
The fact that you need a phone number to sign up bothered me early on, but over time I’ve realized how helpful it is from a UX perspective. Friends and family want to be able to connect to their contacts directly – not ask for a username.
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Ew. Thanks for pointing me to that. TIL.
I have a lot of gripes with it, but since I only use it with a few people (if I try to switch someone to an unfamiliar platform anyway, I’d rather go with XMPP), my biggest one is not allowing desktop registration officially. I had to use signal-cli to register, and then it kept giving errors for trying to bind the official client. Maybe it’s for the best since the client is Electron… But still, very disrespectful to people who refuse to use smartphones. Such an arbitrary requirement, they have phone numbers already…
image quality has 2 options. if you choose high quality, there’s no “extreme quality loss”
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2,5 mb is just the exif data 😋
that’s a considerable quality loss, like you wrote. Maybe they think that there’s email for sending large files and that a messenger is more about conversation 🤷
I’d love to switch to Signal and I do have 1 contact there. Everyone else uses FB or whatsapp and just doesn’t care. What am I supposed to do?
What am I supposed to do?
Decide if your privacy is more important than their convenience and your feelings of FOMO.
Right, but if I need to contact a friend or family. How am I supposed to do it without affecting privacy? If the other person doesn’t use Signal or else.
Honestly, go back to sms. It is the least worst option compared to FB.
Exactly. When FB announced their metadata harvesting plans for WhatsApp, I decided I didn’t want to be part of the problem and deleted my account. You can’t make people quit a platform by whining about it. I’m on signal, telegram and good ol’ SMS if they want to reach me or vice versa.
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I expected more people in EU use Signal after even the EU deciding to use it over any other one. Seems like people don’t care.
I feel like this thread has been bombarded by the Zuckerberg defense brigade.
“All I did was misrepresent something harmless, done by a company that’s doing so much more horrible things that I shouldn’t be using their product in the first place, and now people are calling me out on it. Clearly, they are wrong.”
What you posted isn’t enshittification.
So, what the harm is Whatsapp channel ?
