I don't know what communities on WhatsApp are or how they work; but my work partner is heavy on using WhatsApp and those communities / channels help him to organize his work. So I guess we are not the target audience for that one
The other day I was downvoted here for mentioning not being able to restore a local backup is bonkers. Many people like me lost years of chat history because they moved everything to Google Drive.
The "stories" feature is just plain stupid. It doesn't make any sense.
Also the "business" thing is you with an AI chatbot that just offers a crappy answer and you'll need to contact a human anyway.
One of the worst cases of software enshittification.
I can vouch for a large amount of usage in LATAM, people that won't bother with instagram (like older folks) eat it up, just swipe and you're watching your nephews birthday photos, just like Mr Facebook intended
> The other day I was downvoted here for mentioning not being able to restore a local backup is bonkers. Many people like me lost years of chat history because they moved everything to Google Drive.
I remember how it used to be impossible to migrate chat history from Android back to iOS.
It looks like the feature was only implemented some time this year (!):
I'm sure that's true, as that's how the company operates, but it's always a bit difficult to interpret. Meta has kind of been king of "this feature shows an amazing number of interactions", and large numbers of people seemingly genuinely hating it.
Aside from funny pictures, I rough out concepts for personal projects while commuting or on off time, mostly. It's pretty decent at rough calculations now, but even if you don't trust that, if you have a project in mind and you describe what you want to do, it can tell you what formulas and background knowledge you will need to flesh it out and you have the names that you can look up for further details. Really cuts down on research time and it's better time spent than scrolling memes.
Had an idea to add tracking to my alt-az telescope, asked Meta AI what I need to understand and it explains right ascension and declination and even provides the coordinate transformations needed (and even in a language that I specify). I can audit the code and have it write some unit tests that I also check, flesh it out a bit and I'm done.
Signal added Stories two years ago and they can be deactivated completely. I don't use them but fail to see the problem here. A reason for people to switch to Signal and a non-issue for everybody else.
Signal is a nonprofit; it does not have shareholders.
It does, however have a mission to bring secure communication to a large audience. That means it will add features it expects will expand the audience. I don't like stories in general (they're FOMO-driven engagement bait), but Signal having them doesn't meaningfully impact my ability to use it to message and call people.
I guess is someone messages you on Signal and you do not reply, or notice, it significantly damages Signal’s reputation with the person trying to reach you. They will give up using Signal and try to reach you in another way.
For the vast majority of people, not enabling notifications in a messaging app is a mistake in the sense of something they do want to do but failed to because they're bad at technology or just distracted, not in the sense of an ill-advised decision they made intentionally.
If you're actually part of a community like a run club, the communities feature is pretty nifty. It's the typical "I have no friends and thus am not using social media and don't want to integrate into social circles at all" HN response I guess.
More buggy, more clunky, lists of useless features like "communities", Facebook like pages.
I will soon be leaving it and being exclusively on signal.