This should be the first and most important question anyone asks when trying a new product/service. If I don't understant the business model and how much I could be locked-in, I don't even bother wasting 1 minute on the product (I might tray that to get inspiration, but I probably wouldn't use that for anything serious).
> If I don't understant the business model and how much I could be locked-in, I don't even bother wasting 1 minute on the product
Personally I do it the other way around, first I try it out and see if it's useful, then I'd figure out if I'm willing to accept the tradeoffs of pricing/lock-in.
If you do it the way you suggest, wouldn't that mean you can't actually understand if the business model is fine because of the benefits you get? Seems backwards to me.
100% agree. Why even question the business model if that's not a product that I would use. First should be "Can I use it?"(meaning does it run on my devices etc.), then "Do I find it useful?" before anything else.
If I know the price is something I'd be willing to pay for a thing that is useful, I evaluate as such. If I know that it's a price I'd never pay, I still want to see what it is and try it because I'm curious. Don't hide information from me.
Example: enterprise licenses that are meant for a huge org rather than an individual let me know that I shouldn't get excited about a tool because it's not for me. Happens a lot because I'm very into networking and automation.
I believe that we will soon live in a future where the content will be fake by default and we will validate the authenticity by looking at the reputation of the source. Each time we will read, listen, or see a new content we will think "is this coming from a trustworthy source? otherwise I will not believe any single word of this".
In this context, the more fake news/content we see, the better it is, because it will only make the process of getting there fast.
Once AI gets good enough, we will be able to tailor it. It (our agent that we personally use) will tell us what is AI and what is not ai generated, if we wish it. But until then, it’s a disaster zone. A holocaust for integrity lol.
If you think this is naive and optimistic, ask yourself, what more valuable technology would there be than an AI agent thats legitimately accurate? It will replace search, it will replace gui. Just tell it what to do.
I agree. As an Italian (where you read exactly what you say and you say exactly what you read) it was straightforward to read. I have always wondered why English has so many weird pronunciation exceptions.
The standard joke is that English isn't actually a language: it's three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat, which go around beating up other languages and rifling through their pockets for loose vocabulary and spare grammar. This is funny because it's true.
Modern Italian, on the other hand, makes a modicum of sense because it was explicitly constructed during the 19th-century unification of Italy, when somebody had the bright idea that if you wanted to have a nation called "Italy", you should also have a language called "Italian" and it should make a modicum of sense. This is a memo which English has somehow never gotten.
The monkey's paw curls a finger: "Today Donald Trump announced a new initiative to teach all children a new AI-normalized language known as Americish. All English signage will be replaced with Americish."
The sibling comments are good answers. Another factor is the fact that written English goes back a long time. In some cases, pronunciation has drifted over time, but the spelling didn't change. The silent k's in words like knight and knife were not always silent, for example, but you have to go back to old English for them to be pronounced.
> where you read exactly what you say and you say exactly what you read
surely there are regional accents of Standard Italian where different people say the same word different ways though, right? Does everyone speak it the same way and save variation for their local dialect?
There are dialects, but they are more similar to different languages rather than different pronunciations. For instance dialect of Piedmont, my region, are somehow similar to French, because of geography and history.
It's common for people of one area to not understand dialects from a very different area, but the language is one, and you pronounce all the letters (almost, there are some exceptions, but they follow a rule), and if you were to write the dialect you'd write anything you say.
There are many variations on the cadence and on how some words are used, but generally speaking the language is the same everywhere. But then, of course, Italy is a small Country and only a few millions people speak Italian.
I wasn't hinting that one language is better than others, just that it comes very natural to us to read that alphabet. Once you map in your head some signs to some sounds it's almost all there (provided that you know enough English to infer which words are written for enough time to learn the missing signs).
Another factor is, sometimes different forms of words have different pronunciations (because of the phonology of English), but often the same spelling: compare "electric" where the final "c" has a hard K sound, and "electricity", where he same "c" has an S sound. The pronunciation change is predictable, but the spelling retains continuity between the two pronunciations. It breaks the idea of 1-to-1 relationships between sounds and spellings, but in these kinds of situations, I think it's a good thing.
Because we nicked so many words from so many different other languages, and kept (to some extent) their so many different spellings and pronunciations.
I use both kagi and Orion, both on mobile and Mac, and I have to say that there a few bugs. On the other hand, paying for a software and a service feels good.
My only real complain with Orion is that it's not open source. I get the rationale behind, but still I don't like it.
- on one side there is the increasing number of features in WhatsApp that nobody asked for and that make the experience worse and worse, I agree. Yet, on the other side of the world a 1B people in China use WeChat for so many things beside communicating, so I understand Meta's appetite to become the West WeChat. Still I hate it.
- on the other side there is the business model of WhatsApp. Or the complete lack of it. It's 100% unrealistic that a global, always on, high availability, high security service is free. These things are expensive and they need to be monetized.
It's either ads, either fees on extra services they are providing through the app, either a monthly subscription. Now, I think nobody would pay for WhatsApp and they would lose their market immediately if they went that route (for many good reasons). They tried hard to position WhatsApp as WeChat, failing at that (for many good reasons). Ads is the only thing that is left IMO.
True, but they are a much smaller service. I remember that WhatsApp was designed to be lean and very efficient so that it would run on a small number of servers.
But this it different from a highly profitable service. Let's keep in mind that Meta payed 19B for WhatsApp in 2014. They need a juicy ROI.
I wonder how it scales. It is an order of magnitude smaller but it's not exactly "small": I read it had 70M users in 2024. If you can relay messages between 70M messages without storing metadata, it feels like it shouldn't be too hard to scale, right?
Not sure if they get enough donations, but assuming they do: with 10x the number of users, if they get 10x the donations, it feels like it may work.
> Meta payed 19B for WhatsApp in 2014. They need a juicy ROI.
I think they paid for the metadata (I know that back then it wasn't E2EE but they moved to the Signal protocol in 2016), and now they are just enshittifying.
I have seen criticisms of Signal's crypto stuff (which I just disabled) and trademark, but I don't get it. It's okay to not use the crypto stuff (I personally don't like it) as long as it doesn't clutter the UI. Sponsored content says "for those who like this feature, they will now see ads". It's pretty different from saying "if you don't like the feature, don't use it", IMHO.
>so I understand Meta's appetite to become the West WeChat
Revolut will probably get there first
>It's 100% unrealistic that a global, always on, high availability, high security service is free. These things are expensive and they need to be monetized.
Do you have any information how much whatsapp costs per user per month? Threema seems to be doing fine with just one 5$ forever.
I have no numbers. I remember that it was designed to be very efficient and easy to maintain, but this was before Meta bought it. Things probably changed, and keep in mind that they need to return of the 19B investment in 2014, so they are probably aiming at much more than just covering the costs.
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