Yeah, I don’t know where you’re from, but over here if you don’t have a Whatsapp account in working order you can’t… do things.
I hired a company to wire my house and they won’t communicate over anything else. I am in maybe five friends and family groups where every social event in my life is put together. I recently noticed a family member and I didn’t have each other’s numbers anymore, since we only ever communicate over Whatsapp. At work events people will show you a QR code for Facebook or Whatsapp and expect to receive the same back.
I get that a lot of people, especially in the US, don’t notice, but Meta won this fight like a decade ago. I don’t like it, but that ship sailed as far away as Amazon dominating online shopping.
Most people from the US think of the it as the default :/
Currently living in Argentina, if you want to make an appointment with the doctor, plumber, or barber you use Whatsapp. Want to order a pizza without using one of the gig economy ordering apps? You use Whatsapp. Communicating with anyone and everything in this region involves having a Whatsapp account.
Don’t know where you live, but my experience of NL is that everyone and their dog did things via WhatsApp. Even government services, would absolutely struggle to abandon all things Meta-related entirely while living there.
I have had independent contractors offer it as an option, but most still have a phone number or have too many customers who aren’t tech savvy enough to use something like that. There’s really no way a reputable business in my area would survive that way.
I don’t know what your area is, but everybody here is tech savvy enough to use WhatsApp. It’s assumed to be just… part of how phones work. Both my elderly parents use it. My mom is on multiple chatgroups I had nothing to do with setting up. She only reaches out to me for help if she thinks something is spam or phishing. I can’t stress this enough: nobody texts. Text messaging happens over WhatsApp unless you’re receiving TFA notifications or automated messages from companies or the government, kinda like email.
As for the business, I’m sure if I had requested a phone call they would have called me, but it was a telecom firm and it wasn’t really a big conversation. Guy just went “here’s my WhatsApp, we’ll ping you there” and we understood it to be the way it was gonna go. I’ve had delivery drivers reach out to me over it when they had my number on hand, unprompted.
Hah. During the pandemic the government here would reach out to you for vaccine appointments over Facebook and WhatsApp. I personally know at least a couple of people who dabbled in antivax stuff and wouldn’t pick up the phone but still got their shots after the government reached out that way.
Not that Meta has anything to do with that, but it was funny to me to see the government embrace the vectors of misinformation to shame people into not being idiots.
I live near a major city, most people haven’t had to learn anything like that over their existence: we have good cell phone reception over wifi too, perhaps that is it.
Tech is just not reliable enough for me to have any experience working with anyone who I would take seriously or who would work with anyone like that. I thought you should know your experience isn’t the norm, especially in any place I have been in the USA.
Almost anyone who approached with Whatapp is seen as poor, fly-by-night, and likely a grift here. “Why not use your phone number if you are trustworthy?” Would be the opinion here.
No, wait, this isn’t a “my area” as “my city” or whatever.
I mean it works like this country-wide here.
Nobody in the country can operate without WhatsApp. That’s not a thing. I am not in the US and I’m telling you here WhatsApp is just how sending text messages works. For everybody. Apple or Android.
The dominance of WhatsApp in some countries is not because telephones are new to them. I hope this was a joke and not a real American view of how other countries are.
I hope you are joking to act like the Europe is American and talking so authoritatively with just personal experience and frankly you seem very naive. American have to have local numbers spoofed often in order to be scammed by these other countries.
What are the WhatsApp scam rates?
Phone numbers were required for business for the longest to incorporate, so it was a way of showing legitimacy. Even now, a physical location gives customers comfort.
Jesus Christ you just have to be right but you have lived such a small life.
Meta won. They won social media. Worldwide they’re absolutely huge. Entire countries never got the “Facebook is for old people” memo, and on many Android territories the default messaging app is effectively WhatsApp. And of course there’s Instagram. That one’s worldwide.
The only thing I’ve seen threaten Meta’s dominance in this space recently is TikTok. Twitter is a footnote, mostly a residual self-sustaining place for politicians and journalists to talk to each other.
It’s like that in some European countries but in the USA and Canada WhatsApp has far less presence. I understand the pressure though: whenever my family and friends in Europe want to communicate they always suggest WhatsApp.
Same. I never got rid of my Facebook account, though. I still have multiple work relations that will reach out to me that way, and my work phone is the one I have logged in to it. I keep it off my home browsers and personal phone.
But you can’t NOT have WhatsApp. It’s just not an option. If people thought it was hard to get Americans to stop using Twitter, this is an order of magnitude bigger.
Yeah, I’m in the “have to have WhatsApp” camp because it’s the only way I can stay in touch with a bunch of international friends now that I don’t have a Facebook account anymore.
There are alternatives, but I don’t press about it because at least Meta doesn’t monetize WhatsApp…for now
If someone sends me a FB message I’ll usually wait a week or so and then tell them to text/email me for faster response.
Some people, though, already have my phone and email but will send me IG messages, even though I never reply to a single one and ask them (elsewhere) to stop messaging me on there. Several years later they still send me messages.
Trump was elected because the Electoral College voted for him. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, AKA the one you participated in. The American populace don’t decide the president. Your vote is not you deciding who wins, it’s you expressing your opinion in the hopes that the electors your state party officials hand picked will actually listen to the interests of their constituents.
Then I got a job where I had to work with Meta and got an inside look at their company and culture.
I just couldn’t anymore. Yes, my social life has suffered. But it’s because we can’t draw these kinds of lines that we’re stuck with these fucks. And they are bigger fucks than you know.
When you go to work with them, even as an employee of a subcontractor, they ask for your Facebook profile. This has to be your REAL Facebook profile, not a fake one. They will know and it will cause delays. They have AIs checking this so sometimes there’s not much human beings can do. I’ve seen people try to make fake accounts for this that get flagged for being fraudulent and locked and then you can’t do your work and things get slowed waaaaaay down.
Reason being, their work infrastructure is Facebook… and you use your own Facebook for this. Instead of Slack or Teams, they use… Facebook chat. Each of your projects has it’s own Facebook group, with it’s meetings scheduled on Facebook calendar.
I’m sure most people are like “That’s creepy, fuck that!” Just thinking about their employer not only having their Facebook profile but actually sort of being in control of it.
But an affect of it you probably don’t think of right away is… there’s no separation of your personal life and work life… for you. That is, when you look at Facebook to check messages from friends, you also get a whole shit ton of work notifications. When you check invites to see if you’ve been invited to parties or social events, you ALSO see all your meeting invites and project invites… and YES your boss and coworkers can see that you saw their shit.
#2:
They have a management culture of shaming and bullying.
Of course, Meta is a HUGE organization. One of the projects I worked on involved a recently acquired startup who was creating Metaverse content and they were fine, but their project manager was anxious about the pressure her new managers were putting on her. I can’t imagine she lasted long.
My direct contact was also great. BUT she was also always stressed out and talked quite candidly about “pressure”.
However, I also had direct contact with a number of internal project managers who habitually used such management techniques as
Belittling your work / results (“I expect better than this”) for perfectly reasonable work and progress.
Making threats (“There are LOTS of other people that would like to do this work”).
Calling blockers “excuses”.
I’ve worked with all kinds of different organizations, and I’ve seen plenty of toxic bullshit. I won’t say this was the worst ever, but it was a special blend of toxic professional culture. Where everyone’s so nice to you until they’re not and then they’re back to being nice and you know it’s fake nice. Everyone is all smiles… like some fucking Disneyland employees.
#3:
I got to watch Mark Zuckerberg talk about how “important” privacy is to them at Facebook. It’s part of their culture. He unironically said “It’s in our DNA.” It was so cringey. That was a mandatory meeting.
Now, they DO have policies that like… you can’t go look at people’s private information, read their DMs, etc. And they have fairly draconian policies for employees that violate them. BUT when this happened last year I was not remotely shocked. I had access to those tools, they’re right there and I’m sure employees abuse them all the time in ways that aren’t flagged. There are two things that keep employees from doing that:
It’s just wrong! (It really is… this worked on me and probably most people that work there, at least most of the time).
If you get caught it will be VERY bad for you.
BUT that’s it. So if you do it and don’t get caught…
But that’s part of it. When you work at Meta, you don’t know what your coworkers might have looked at and then not told you. You don’t know what their AI sees and flags and maybe brings to HR (or not). They don’t disclose that to you. You don’t know what upper management gives themselves permission to look at (or not). When I went to work there I went through my DMs and was like… “Oh shit, here’s this time I was drunk. Oh, and here’s this time I had a VERY personal conversation with a close friend about their sexual fetishes…” Like… it was really uncomfortable. They tell you “We don’t look at your personal information” and I think that’s MOSTLY true. But they do have bots look through it for various reasons and, like I said, if you come to the attention of upper management, you don’t know what they give themselves permission to see or not. They’ll just corporate speak at you about ethics in the phony corporate way.
There’s more specific details I’m not going to share. But yeah, after that little professional nightmare I was just done. I posted
“Hey friends! I’ve been doing some work for Facebook and I’m DONE using Facebook. If you want to get in touch with me, please text me. Please invite me to stuff.” I didn’t delete my account and I sometimes log in and check my DMs (which I still am getting X years later) and respond to each one with “I did some work for Facebook, it really creeped me out and now I don’t use it. Please text me.”
And yes, not a single person I’ve related this to has stopped using it. This is why we’re doomed.
Second, I think you finally convinced me to delete my FB. I will link to this comment wherever possible to show people what a terrible company Meta is.
FWIW, I’ve done business with Meta and seen their internal culture, or at least a peek at the corner of it I interact with and at the other small corners where people I know ended up working.
I wouldn’t work there if I could help it, but the issues I saw are very much in line with other tech companies I know, big and small.
Meta isn’t special, they just were one of those at the right place at the right time and they grew to be bigger than all of the other ones. Like all other tech corpos I know, they are made up of a mix of well intentioned and misguided people mostly struggling to navigate a self-sabotaging, entirely too large to manage corporate culture.
Meta isn’t the death star. None of these tech firms are. Capitalism doesn’t need your activism to be capitalism.
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Yeah, I don’t know where you’re from, but over here if you don’t have a Whatsapp account in working order you can’t… do things.
I hired a company to wire my house and they won’t communicate over anything else. I am in maybe five friends and family groups where every social event in my life is put together. I recently noticed a family member and I didn’t have each other’s numbers anymore, since we only ever communicate over Whatsapp. At work events people will show you a QR code for Facebook or Whatsapp and expect to receive the same back.
I get that a lot of people, especially in the US, don’t notice, but Meta won this fight like a decade ago. I don’t like it, but that ship sailed as far away as Amazon dominating online shopping.
Most people from the US think of the it as the default :/
Currently living in Argentina, if you want to make an appointment with the doctor, plumber, or barber you use Whatsapp. Want to order a pizza without using one of the gig economy ordering apps? You use Whatsapp. Communicating with anyone and everything in this region involves having a Whatsapp account.
Don’t know where you live, but my experience of NL is that everyone and their dog did things via WhatsApp. Even government services, would absolutely struggle to abandon all things Meta-related entirely while living there.
I have had independent contractors offer it as an option, but most still have a phone number or have too many customers who aren’t tech savvy enough to use something like that. There’s really no way a reputable business in my area would survive that way.
I don’t know what your area is, but everybody here is tech savvy enough to use WhatsApp. It’s assumed to be just… part of how phones work. Both my elderly parents use it. My mom is on multiple chatgroups I had nothing to do with setting up. She only reaches out to me for help if she thinks something is spam or phishing. I can’t stress this enough: nobody texts. Text messaging happens over WhatsApp unless you’re receiving TFA notifications or automated messages from companies or the government, kinda like email.
As for the business, I’m sure if I had requested a phone call they would have called me, but it was a telecom firm and it wasn’t really a big conversation. Guy just went “here’s my WhatsApp, we’ll ping you there” and we understood it to be the way it was gonna go. I’ve had delivery drivers reach out to me over it when they had my number on hand, unprompted.
Whatsapp is so big here that it’s not just that everyone uses it, you are practically require, forced, to use Whatsapp.
I hate whatsapp, but they require it at the university if I want to be informed. Doctor appointments are also. via whatsapp.
Hah. During the pandemic the government here would reach out to you for vaccine appointments over Facebook and WhatsApp. I personally know at least a couple of people who dabbled in antivax stuff and wouldn’t pick up the phone but still got their shots after the government reached out that way.
Not that Meta has anything to do with that, but it was funny to me to see the government embrace the vectors of misinformation to shame people into not being idiots.
I live near a major city, most people haven’t had to learn anything like that over their existence: we have good cell phone reception over wifi too, perhaps that is it.
Tech is just not reliable enough for me to have any experience working with anyone who I would take seriously or who would work with anyone like that. I thought you should know your experience isn’t the norm, especially in any place I have been in the USA.
Almost anyone who approached with Whatapp is seen as poor, fly-by-night, and likely a grift here. “Why not use your phone number if you are trustworthy?” Would be the opinion here.
No, wait, this isn’t a “my area” as “my city” or whatever.
I mean it works like this country-wide here.
Nobody in the country can operate without WhatsApp. That’s not a thing. I am not in the US and I’m telling you here WhatsApp is just how sending text messages works. For everybody. Apple or Android.
I see. I did assume you were from a place that would have had to adjusted to that due to recent infrastructure.
The US has had telephones since 1800. The culture is not as new.
The dominance of WhatsApp in some countries is not because telephones are new to them. I hope this was a joke and not a real American view of how other countries are.
I hope you are joking to act like the Europe is American and talking so authoritatively with just personal experience and frankly you seem very naive. American have to have local numbers spoofed often in order to be scammed by these other countries.
What are the WhatsApp scam rates?
Phone numbers were required for business for the longest to incorporate, so it was a way of showing legitimacy. Even now, a physical location gives customers comfort.
Jesus Christ you just have to be right but you have lived such a small life.
…Nasty, what the hell? Why?!?
because it gained popularity back when mobile plans didn’t include free SMS, back in the feature phone era.
This. The countries where Meta only has “a lot” of marketshare are the ones that were early to make SMS available for free to everyone.
In countries where they were late to that, Meta controls the market.
Meta won. They won social media. Worldwide they’re absolutely huge. Entire countries never got the “Facebook is for old people” memo, and on many Android territories the default messaging app is effectively WhatsApp. And of course there’s Instagram. That one’s worldwide.
The only thing I’ve seen threaten Meta’s dominance in this space recently is TikTok. Twitter is a footnote, mostly a residual self-sustaining place for politicians and journalists to talk to each other.
It’s like that in some European countries but in the USA and Canada WhatsApp has far less presence. I understand the pressure though: whenever my family and friends in Europe want to communicate they always suggest WhatsApp.
@MudMan I only use Facebook for WhatsApp though, I avoid it everywhere I can, their devices, Instagram, Facebook
@hedge @Jeze3D
Same. I never got rid of my Facebook account, though. I still have multiple work relations that will reach out to me that way, and my work phone is the one I have logged in to it. I keep it off my home browsers and personal phone.
But you can’t NOT have WhatsApp. It’s just not an option. If people thought it was hard to get Americans to stop using Twitter, this is an order of magnitude bigger.
Yeah, I’m in the “have to have WhatsApp” camp because it’s the only way I can stay in touch with a bunch of international friends now that I don’t have a Facebook account anymore.
There are alternatives, but I don’t press about it because at least Meta doesn’t monetize WhatsApp…for now
If someone sends me a FB message I’ll usually wait a week or so and then tell them to text/email me for faster response.
Some people, though, already have my phone and email but will send me IG messages, even though I never reply to a single one and ask them (elsewhere) to stop messaging me on there. Several years later they still send me messages.
Trump was elected because the Electoral College voted for him. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, AKA the one you participated in. The American populace don’t decide the president. Your vote is not you deciding who wins, it’s you expressing your opinion in the hopes that the electors your state party officials hand picked will actually listen to the interests of their constituents.
My friends refuse to use anything else for our group chats so I’m stuck with it if I want to keep in touch. I don’t use it much outside of that. 🤷
I was in this boat.
Then I got a job where I had to work with Meta and got an inside look at their company and culture.
I just couldn’t anymore. Yes, my social life has suffered. But it’s because we can’t draw these kinds of lines that we’re stuck with these fucks. And they are bigger fucks than you know.
Can you tell us more about what they are like?
Some things.
#1:
When you go to work with them, even as an employee of a subcontractor, they ask for your Facebook profile. This has to be your REAL Facebook profile, not a fake one. They will know and it will cause delays. They have AIs checking this so sometimes there’s not much human beings can do. I’ve seen people try to make fake accounts for this that get flagged for being fraudulent and locked and then you can’t do your work and things get slowed waaaaaay down.
Reason being, their work infrastructure is Facebook… and you use your own Facebook for this. Instead of Slack or Teams, they use… Facebook chat. Each of your projects has it’s own Facebook group, with it’s meetings scheduled on Facebook calendar.
I’m sure most people are like “That’s creepy, fuck that!” Just thinking about their employer not only having their Facebook profile but actually sort of being in control of it.
But an affect of it you probably don’t think of right away is… there’s no separation of your personal life and work life… for you. That is, when you look at Facebook to check messages from friends, you also get a whole shit ton of work notifications. When you check invites to see if you’ve been invited to parties or social events, you ALSO see all your meeting invites and project invites… and YES your boss and coworkers can see that you saw their shit.
#2:
They have a management culture of shaming and bullying.
Of course, Meta is a HUGE organization. One of the projects I worked on involved a recently acquired startup who was creating Metaverse content and they were fine, but their project manager was anxious about the pressure her new managers were putting on her. I can’t imagine she lasted long.
My direct contact was also great. BUT she was also always stressed out and talked quite candidly about “pressure”.
However, I also had direct contact with a number of internal project managers who habitually used such management techniques as
Belittling your work / results (“I expect better than this”) for perfectly reasonable work and progress.
Making threats (“There are LOTS of other people that would like to do this work”).
Calling blockers “excuses”.
I’ve worked with all kinds of different organizations, and I’ve seen plenty of toxic bullshit. I won’t say this was the worst ever, but it was a special blend of toxic professional culture. Where everyone’s so nice to you until they’re not and then they’re back to being nice and you know it’s fake nice. Everyone is all smiles… like some fucking Disneyland employees.
#3:
I got to watch Mark Zuckerberg talk about how “important” privacy is to them at Facebook. It’s part of their culture. He unironically said “It’s in our DNA.” It was so cringey. That was a mandatory meeting.
Now, they DO have policies that like… you can’t go look at people’s private information, read their DMs, etc. And they have fairly draconian policies for employees that violate them. BUT when this happened last year I was not remotely shocked. I had access to those tools, they’re right there and I’m sure employees abuse them all the time in ways that aren’t flagged. There are two things that keep employees from doing that:
It’s just wrong! (It really is… this worked on me and probably most people that work there, at least most of the time).
If you get caught it will be VERY bad for you.
BUT that’s it. So if you do it and don’t get caught…
But that’s part of it. When you work at Meta, you don’t know what your coworkers might have looked at and then not told you. You don’t know what their AI sees and flags and maybe brings to HR (or not). They don’t disclose that to you. You don’t know what upper management gives themselves permission to look at (or not). When I went to work there I went through my DMs and was like… “Oh shit, here’s this time I was drunk. Oh, and here’s this time I had a VERY personal conversation with a close friend about their sexual fetishes…” Like… it was really uncomfortable. They tell you “We don’t look at your personal information” and I think that’s MOSTLY true. But they do have bots look through it for various reasons and, like I said, if you come to the attention of upper management, you don’t know what they give themselves permission to see or not. They’ll just corporate speak at you about ethics in the phony corporate way.
There’s more specific details I’m not going to share. But yeah, after that little professional nightmare I was just done. I posted
“Hey friends! I’ve been doing some work for Facebook and I’m DONE using Facebook. If you want to get in touch with me, please text me. Please invite me to stuff.” I didn’t delete my account and I sometimes log in and check my DMs (which I still am getting X years later) and respond to each one with “I did some work for Facebook, it really creeped me out and now I don’t use it. Please text me.”
And yes, not a single person I’ve related this to has stopped using it. This is why we’re doomed.
First, thank you for the detailed response.
Second, I think you finally convinced me to delete my FB. I will link to this comment wherever possible to show people what a terrible company Meta is.
FWIW, I’ve done business with Meta and seen their internal culture, or at least a peek at the corner of it I interact with and at the other small corners where people I know ended up working.
I wouldn’t work there if I could help it, but the issues I saw are very much in line with other tech companies I know, big and small.
Meta isn’t special, they just were one of those at the right place at the right time and they grew to be bigger than all of the other ones. Like all other tech corpos I know, they are made up of a mix of well intentioned and misguided people mostly struggling to navigate a self-sabotaging, entirely too large to manage corporate culture.
Meta isn’t the death star. None of these tech firms are. Capitalism doesn’t need your activism to be capitalism.