You have to appreciate the complete transparency, gently nudging towards giving without ever begging for it.
Refreshing compared to the alternative that Wikipedia is showing, with the tantrum-like emails we receive from their CEO like "LAST REMINDER" or "We've had enough" ; which they ironically send to people who gave.
Those are just non-profit fundraiser consulting tactics. Don't take them personally, just ignore them. The reason they exist is that Wikipedia has too much money, so they spend some on consultants who say they can raise more. It's weird, but that's how the world works.
I would much prefer the Wikipedia endowment model of non-profit orgs. They have a standard operating procedure with a predictable budget, and endowment that let's them run indefinitely, and we just have to suffer through pledge drives. I just block them with ublock filters. I gave them 6 dollars back in 2012, and according to their marketing that is enough for life.
No. They are meant to manipulate me personally, as well as other persons I care about. I will take them personally.
More broadly, I don't have to excuse bad behavior just because somebody's making money off it or because it makes some too-narrow metric go up. Yes, it's a complex and imperfect world. But to me that's a reason to work harder to make things better, not a reason for people to say, "fuck it" and make the world worse.
> They are meant to manipulate me personally, as well as other persons I care about. I will take them personally.
This, absolutely! they play on people's psyche and mental cabling by trying to guilt you in the same way your parent would ; it's manipulative, and I have an absolute hatred for these tactics.
I'm good at detecting manipulation now, and the more someone tries to manipulate me the less I will give in.
I just put my money toward people who don't do that crap, and I want the manipulators to see that I'm giving money to their non-manipulating competitors.
Companies do it because it works. You're blaming bad behavior on the people that are being manipulated because, according to you, they have psychological problems. As if the people being manipulated being disabled somehow excuses the company taking advantage of them.
Exactly. Taking advantage of vulnerable people is not a legitimate defense, the fact that they are easily exploitable makes the behavior even less moral.
I'm not saying they are not wrong - it's unfortunate that there is a second hand market for fundraising consulting. It doesn't accomplish anything productive, yet here we are. The key point is to understand that this is caused by Wikipedia having too much funding, not too little. As internet denizens, we can be proud that an open source store of knowledge has money to blow on wasteful consulting, and then proceed to create our ublock filters worry free.
This is different than what is currently going on with venture backed services like reddit and youtube. I would argue that we should block ads there too, but there it is an arms race where we have to consider ways to protect ourselves from encroaching privacy violations. It's much ruder, and that is something we should actually be mad at.
I donated regularly until I learned the darker side of their behavior. If they’d be more transparent, I might start donating again. Is it so awful to ask for organizations to act better to receive voluntary support?
It's a good idea to be careful where to donate your money to. Most of us have limited resources, and while we should donate to worthy causes certainly, we have the responsibility of at least trying to put those resources to good use that reflect our own values.
You ever checked out Uncyclopedia? Nothing on that site is not like, hysterically funny and random. I'm glad Wikipedia has been such as inspiration to us all XD
> Those are just non-profit fundraiser consulting tactics. Don't take them personally, just ignore them. The reason they exist is that Wikipedia has too much money, so they spend some on consultants who say they can raise more. It's weird, but that's how the world works.
It's still shitty, even if it's a shitty "standard practice" and not a shitty thing being done to me particularly.
Honestly, it seems like Wikipedia's goodwill is seen as an exploitable resource, that people in Wikimedia are using to do other, unnecessary things (probably building little personal fiefdoms).
Sort of like Mozilla, actually. IIRC, they literally won't let you give them money to fund Firefox development, and any donations you give them go to fiefdoms almost certainty entirely unrelated to why you gave them money.
Yeah I agree. But that's consulting for you. There is a lot to not like about the evils of consulting, but wikipedia being free and doing pledge drives are on the more mild side of what's wrong.
I donated to the Southern Poverty Law Center a few years ago. A physical address was a required field on the donation form. I have never stopped regretting it, because GODDAMN! They started hammering me with physical mail asking for more money immediately and have not stopped.
In case you're still giving money to them, perhaps consider not donating to an organization that marks people as bigots for speaking against religious extremism.
edit They do do a lot of good work in marking actual hate groups though, so I suppose it's a net positive still even if they miss a few strikes.
Just curious why you used an address that's associated with you. Choosing the address of a place like a park, which is a real address that has no mailbox or direct association with you, ought to be the default if you don't want to be spammed to hell and back.
I was young and naive!
Also, I wanted to make the donation immediately, while I was thinking about it. I didn’t want to put it on a back shelf of my mind and forget about it for a few years, and I assumed “The Good Guys” wouldn’t use my information in a negative way.
Apologies in advance as I may be saying contrary to the sentiments here against Wikipedia fund raising. I also get the same emails and the banners. I diligently donate what I can. I don’t know where my funds will go. But what I do know is that I use that website practically twenty times a day and get something of value.
Wikipedia is particularly insulting because they make enough money to cover the actual costs of running Wikipedia (the site) in days if not hours, and could operate for years without any additional donations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32840097
It's personally insulting that they lie and make it seem like they need the money to keep running, and that your donation will go towards helping Wikipedia itself, when they do not and it does not.
There's a difference between "donate if you appreciate this website" and "donate if you appreciate this website because we will have to shut down otherwise (not really though)"
Wikipedia is... nuanced. Keep in mind that the entity doing the fundraising is the Wikimedia Foundation. They pay the hosting costs, but return nothing to the actual Wikipedians (editors, admins.) Instead, what's left is used to pay the salaries for hundreds of administrative employees, fund third-party charities, and so on. You can love Wikipedia but have misgivings about the Foundation.
It includes staff, but not new stuff. The new stuff seems to be mostly things not directly related to Wikipedia, like funding third-party projects or causes. I'm trying to be politic here: many people don't like the projects they are funding with donation money, and others just don't like that they give money to any projects, and other people don't like that they keep the banner up after they've paid for salaries and keeping the lights on.
The point of Wikipedia is not to have some servers ticking over. The project has a vision: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."
I agree it's not ok for them to lie, and am bothered enough by their dubious fundraising tactics that I stopped donating. But that's a totally separate concern than whether Wikipedia's mission is complete.
What is the mission for Wikipedia beyond doing what they already do, which is just hosting the largest internet encyclopedia? Purely curious because I thought Wikipedia was pretty much at its end game for what it wants to accomplish that is the job of the organization rather than the job of all of its volunteers.
> The Wikimedia Foundation's mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."
Its mission is not just "hosting" - actually creating an encyclopedia is much more than paying for the server costs.
Wikimedia produced many very useful projects which often integrate into Wikipedia, but work well standalone as well, and work towards the stated mission - projects like Commons, WikiData, WikiSource. Some projects are more useful than others, but that's just normal.
Wikipedia is the marketing face of Wikimedia. People donate to the first, but the money gets used by the second, and Wikimedia grows to use all of the money it receives. Wikimedia has no solvable mission, its just a mechanism to turn donations for a project people like into donations for arbitrary causes.
> The project has a vision: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."
That's not their vision. Not only do they require entries to be notable, they'll remove information from articles that are, in their editorial judgment, too long. Neither action is compatible with the goal of sharing the sum of all knowledge.
It is, because removing this barrier to entry and editorial power would lead to spam and SEO bullshit, which arguably already exists. Knowledge does not equal amount of content.
Seems almost mundane, as if they’re running a very effective foundation that’s actively achieving their goals. See the recent Cambridge study that explored how their governance has been effective at promoting moderate discourse while suppressing misinformation and hateful content: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...
Uh, the opening paragraph of that second leads reads to me like wikipedia effectively got ideologically captured and got rid of all editors who didn't agree.
Seems off. They have 250 million in net asset and hosting costs 2 million a year while they spend 88 million on salaries and still beg for money each year?
I'm a lifetime member of my university's alumni association. This means I routinely get physical mail with headlines like, "YOUR OFFER INSIDE," and then the "offer" is to give them more money.
There was a comic I've never been able to find about wikipedia asking for money, it basically had them being that one crazy dude yelling at you to donate, and getting worse as time passed and you tried to ignore them. Then it showed a raw screenshot of wikipedias nag screen. Unsure who drew it or where it went, but I regret not archiving it, because it conveys what it feels like every time. I just don't want to donate if I have 0 control of where my money goes. If it's straight to paying the bill for the infrastructure, then sure.
Aside from the salaries, which I agree are a problem, I think there are a lot of architectural issues that are both costly and not so secure.
> We use third-party services to send a registration code via SMS or voice call in order to verify that the person in possession of a given phone number actually intended to sign up for a Signal account. Simple solution, go distributed.
6M $ for that. Stop doing that. What do dictators control? Mobile phone networks and other infrastructure. And, yes, they really do go after people any way they can.
This "cost" puts people into danger. Coupling identity and operator infrastructure is a critical privacy flaw. And a costly one too apparently. If your #1 goal is to be the most private solution, this cannot be tolerated to continue to be the case. Get rid of it. Your identity should be your cryptographic key.
Are they? These salaries are much lower than most tech competitors. I know we like to call out "high" salaries when a useful service is struggling - but they'll struggle even more if they can't retain good talent because their pay is too low. There's a reason tech skill in government is generally lower than that in industry, for instance.
I tended to agree with your sentiment. But the reality is that for some unknown reason to me, it's companies from SV the ones that get famous and used globally.
Why didn't this start from say Mexico? Or Singapore or Vietnam? Or at least Germany which has a good record of freedom conscious tech scene .
My bet is in something related to the "maslow pyramid": people in SV have so much money that have everything solved in their lives, so they have the luxury of spending their time in this sort of problems.
1. It's a network effect. If you're raised around doctors, go to school with prospective doctors, and your school gets many university recruits from a good doctor college, you will strive to be a doctor more likely than not. SV had a bunch of tech companies and falls into the same kind of environment.
2. It's probably a matter of Venture capitalists. Even if you aren't from SV, you may strive to go there to get funding for a pitch or find talent. Similar to your prospective actor that moves to Hollywood. Go where the crowds are.
Now, we can ponder why SV became a tech hub, but current market forces makes it ripe for tech startups.
Nonsense. Asking for donations as a millionaire (which is what these people are) is a bit awkward.
This only makes sense if you ignore the world outside the Bay area and assume it's a talentless wasteland. Bay area salaries are vastly inflated in terms of value for money.
There is lots of talent elsewhere of course. I live in Europe. Lots of smart people here. I think I personally know quite a few people that could do at least as good a job as Signal has at building a messenger app + platform. No offense, but this isn't exactly rocket science.
And of course the elephant in the room here is that money is running out because this organization has a cost problem. Inflated salaries, insane cost for things that they should arguably get rid off (like the SMS bills), etc. That's a leadership problem. They aren't even getting value for money despite those salaries.
>I think I personally know quite a few people that could do at least as good a job as Signal has at building a messenger app + platform. No offense, but this isn't exactly rocket science.
They are building a secure communicator that a normal person can reasonably use - and succeeding. Something nobody else before them managed to pull off. If this isn't rocket science I don't know what is. Not to mention that they pioneer cryptographic protocols in this area, which other messengers later use.
>This only makes sense if you ignore the world outside the Bay area and assume it's a talentless wasteland.
I'm also from Europe (and love it, despite its flaws) but this comes off like whining. If it's really so easy, maybe the smart people here should create their own Signal and reap that overinflated salaries, what do you think?
Or maybe smart people are not enough and you also need VCs, reasonable taxes, laws... Oh btw, did you hear about those plans of EU to get rid of E2E encryption?
Their #1 goal is not to be the most private solution. Their goal is to make day-to-day communications of most people difficult to surveil.
Day-to-day/People is why they keep the registration process familiar to other platforms like WhatsApp/Telegram. "Most" is why they try to compete with Telegram/WhatsApp on features to drive adoption (see Stories and Announcement Groups).
Outsourcing identity to operators just moves the problem. And it adds a lot of privacy and security concerns. Besides, other platforms manage just fine without phone number based authentication (which is what this is).
They know this, but it's likely a precondition of not getting Joe Nacchio'ed. It's a feature, not a bug. Signal's partners* in FVEY IC/LE have given them a lot of latitude in developing a very solid e2e cryptographic protocol and application as long as the users themselves are identifiable.
The pigs don't need to backdoor the protocol or the keys as long as there is more than one party to a conversation and each party is identifiable. The prisoner's dilemma, in real life, almost always gives the pigs a defection.
My pet conspiracy theory is not that Signal is evil, but that Signal is being allowed to operate by the pigs as long as account identifiers are very difficult to anonymize. They are likely very good people with good intentions, but when the FBI or NSA makes you an offer you can't refuse, you do the best you can.
*: I'm not suggesting Signal is in bed with IC. Just that if you operate a communications service of any scale, IC/LE will be your partners whether you want them or not.
The reason I don’t use signal much is this link to a phone number.
Both because sometimes I don’t have a phone number. And I don’t want participants to know my phone number.
I don’t get why they have this requirement as it’s not like having a phone number means anything significant. For me, I think privacy includes my ability to not reveal my identity to the network.
Why does an organization with about 50 employees need 4 C-level executives, totalling about 2M compensation per year? Or perhaps it's 7 C-level executives (3 hiding under the "Software developer" title) totalling about 3,7M compensation per year?
I'm absolutely not donating money to such a thing without an answer to this question. As a counterpoint, I am a member of a local (Finnish) non-profit organization, one of whose many services is Matrix. This costs me 40 euros per year and none of that money goes to C-level executives.
I find this hypocritical. C executives of tech orgs with world class products often have eight figures compensation -- if not from salary then from stock options. I do not see any excess here. You need to pay to compete.
> I do not see any excess here. You need to pay to compete.
What you mean with pay to compete? The goal of Signal to exist is to offer a privacy oriented chat app. Non-profit companies serve a propose, and people not aligned with that, shouldn't be working there in the first place. If you join a non-profit to make money, you are doing it wrong.
So all the programmers who work there should live on thin air? I agree that ideally the management should not be there for profit, but come on, the salaries are not even that crazy. I suspect FAANG key employees in that area easily earn multiples of that.
That line of thought is exactly why FAAMG companies tried to lower salaries for CoL when they opened up to more remote roles. I don't know if thst was fair, but it wasn't something appreciated by many engineers during the pandemic.
It's also how and why long ago they tried to outsource a lot of engineering. They still do try. But that's not an easy transition either.
What is the problem of managers of a non-profit company earning around 700k/year and the company is writing blog posts complaining that the the company operation is too expensive? I think if you read it aloud, you will understand it.
When the numbers total $50m in operations and the CEO is making about as much as a principal Google engineer: no, I don't see the issue. Even if he made $0 the issue remains given that every part of the server operation costs more than him.
But sure. What do you think is a fair salary or totalccomp for a founder and CEO of a popular, privacy focused app?
> CEO is making about as much as a principal Google engineer
From a company living from donations... It is illusion (probably a California thing), to think that you are going to compete salary wise with FAANG. The time will tell (well their complaining about money, is already hinting it)...
But they aren't. A principal engineer is not a CEO but probably makes more at top companies.
I don't even work at a FAANG and I was making almost as much as the director there who lists 200k or so total comp. Probably with 20 years less experience to boot. I don't live in SF either; High CoL area but not SF.
That's why I asked you what's a "reasonable" salary. I'm wondering what your POV here is in terms of compensation.
Signal is competing with for profit companies for talented engineers and their talented leaders. You can't just cobble together something "good enough", this thing must be airtight given some of the dangerous situations it is used in.
And you get a world-class service that a lot of people can use for free and keeps their communication private in return. I'll happily keep donating for that.
I'm sure there are some costs that they could theoretically cut without consequence. Because the same holds for any other product I buy.
Indeed, I’m blown away these numbers are so low. I know multiple senior software engineers at FAANG companies who make more than the software engineers on that list, and they contribute roughly nothing to society. I have zero qualms with Signal executives and employees being paid at that level.
Absolutely. A former student of mine worked for a non profit in Afghanistan (his home country) for a few years. Said non profit was flying in McKinsey consultants for very short gigs at six figures (USD).
Same can be said about many LGBT non profits that have shifted their goals in the developed world on the "T" part of the acronym. On countries where marriage equality is a given, no one is going to fund an NGO focused on gay marriage... so they need a new cause to fight for.
How is it transphobic to say organizations focused on LGBTQ shifted their alignment for the one part that isn't widely accepted in developed because others for the most part are?
Its a transphobic conspiracy theory to say, as moravak1984 explicitly did upthread, that they did it for money not because its an actual real issue where they perceive an injustice, whereas the issues where they've already won, and thus are shifting some attention from, are not, or less so, specifically because they have succeeded in shifting the situation on the ground.
Why is it transphobic? Is it not possible for an organization to do something for money? I am not accusing any particular organization of doing so, but it absolutely should be a legitimate concern/question.
In fact, I would consider it transphobic to not call out organizations with ulterior motives.
The reply to my suspicion from the same person was so transphobic it got removed. I can smell these people from a mile away. Fragments of it survive in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301956
> safeguarding of children against mutilation and sterilisation,
I am so, so tired.
None of that happens.
GnRH analogues are commonly used in gender affirming care, these are reversible.
Surgery is not done on minors.
> the protection of women's single-sex spaces,
Predatory men have absolutely no problems finding opportunities to predate on women. This made up crap need not happen.
You are parroting sound bites on issues you have no understanding of. For the sake of humanity, literally, please stop and start reading. You are on a very dark path.
There have been cases of minors getting genital surgery too. For example Susie Green, who used to run the Mermaids charity, is infamous for taking her child to Thailand on his 16th birthday for penis inversion surgery.
> Predatory men have absolutely no problems finding opportunities to predate on women.
Exactly, any male who disregards women's boundaries and imposes himself on a female-only space is exhibiting predatory behaviour by ignoring the lack of consent. Those males who call themselves women are no exception to this.
> Trans women are not males who call themselves women, though.
They are male, by definition. If they were female then they would actually be women, rather than men trying to mimic women - which is the reality of 'trans existence' for these males.
They really have no business imposing themselves in female-only spaces. Rejecting this form of male entitlement and keeping them excluded from these spaces that are not for them isn't 'genocide' by any means. That is sheer hyperbole.
> However, sterilization (aka genital surgery) still is not a thing.
Genital surgery for minors is rarer but it actually a thing that happens. For example, reality television victim Jazz Jennings was sterilised at 17 years old.
Idk man, I think this shit should be between the trans person and their doctor. We already pierce the ears and rip the foreskin off babies, and minors can get boob jobs and nose jobs already. Minors get all manner of drugs prescribed. If a doctor thinks some treatment is appropriate for a kid, okay. If it turns out to be medical malpractice we have the court system for that.
Also, I disagree that men in women’s bathrooms is inherently predatory. Frankly, this discriminates against fathers of young children because often one has to bring a daughter into the bathroom or change their infants diaper. Also, the bathroom thing is super weird, like how are you gonna enforce this in a non imposing, non disregarding of boundary way? Already butch women experience harassment for not performing femininity, and there’s news articles where nosy weirdos harass them in bathrooms…
> Also, I disagree that men in women's bathrooms is inherently predatory. Frankly, this discriminates against fathers of young children because often one has to bring a daughter into the bathroom or change their infants diaper.
I don't agree with you on this, in almost all circumstances they should be using the bathroom appropriate for the sex of the adult, which in this case is the male one. If there genuinely is no baby changing facility available that isn't in the ladies' bathroom then for the welfare of the child an exception can be made, but the father needs to check with the women using this space first.
This scenario is very different to the males who feel entitled to use women's spaces whenever they please and for their own satisfaction, rather than to provide for their child as in your example.
> Also, the bathroom thing is super weird, like how are you gonna enforce this in a non imposing, non disregarding of boundary way?
All that's really being asked for is for males to understand that female spaces are not theirs, to voluntarily refrain from entering, and to acknowledge that women have the right to have violators expelled.
The problem is that far too many males truly cannot conceive of the idea of simply respecting the space and boundaries of women. It literally doesn't cross their minds, so they immediately jump to whether or not women can forcibly stop them. The belief seems to be that if a woman cannot enforce this, they may take anything they like from her with impunity.
Perhaps that's not the connotation you intended, at least not consciously, when you wrote 'how are you gonna enforce this'. But I believe this form of male entitlement is what this implies, even with the best of intentions.
“How are you gonna enforce this when it primarily harasses the women you claim to protect” isn’t a male claim. Way more women who never experienced male puberty and don’t have/never had a cock and balls are sexually harassed about this shit than trans ever are, just because there’s probably 100x more short-haired small-titty chicks than trans women.
Also, frankly banning fathers from protecting their daughters in bathrooms and changing their diapers is discriminatory. There’s nothing predatory about a dad changing his infants diaper and it’s utterly disgusting to portray it as such. This is precisely the gender discrimination we should be fighting against as a civilized society. Women aren’t fragile creatures who cannot see context and understand what is and isn’t a threat to them, and men aren’t inherently dangerous for not even interacting with women just being attentive fathers! This is so insulting to both sexes, I can’t even.
Like I said in my last comment, if you're thinking about female-only spaces only in terms of how women can forcibly stop men from entering, then you're looking at this from the perspective of male entitlement instead of focusing on women's needs. How about instead, the males just respect women's spaces, and stop trying to convert every female-only space into a mixed-sex space? Every time a so-called "trans woman" disrespects the space and boundaries of women for his own selfish pleasures, he's adding to this problem. It really shows how little these men actually understand and empathise with women, when they're exhibiting this dominance behaviour.
Also, some female-only spaces can be and are enforced by authorities with the resources to do so, for example prisons. It is well understood by most people that prisons need to be separated by sex for the safety and dignity of female inmates. The problem is that in some places, women's prisons have been incarcerating men who say they have a "female gender identity" in there too. There have been numerous cases of these men raping, sexually assaulting and even impregnating the women they have been imprisoned with. It is appalling and shows exactly why women need single-sex spaces away from these predators.
> Also, frankly banning fathers from protecting their daughters in bathrooms and changing their diapers is discriminatory. There's nothing predatory about a dad changing his infants diaper and it's utterly disgusting to portray it as such. This is precisely the gender discrimination we should be fighting against as a civilized society.
No, what is needed in this case are baby changing facilities in male and gender-neutral spaces. Not carte blanche access to female-only spaces by men.
Also please actually read my comments before responding. In no way did I say or even imply that a father changing his child's nappy is predatory. I believe it's a good thing when fathers are more involved in child care than is traditionally the case. You are railing against an argument you invented inside your own mind.
Nah you said Carte Blanche anyone male in such a space is predatory, including dad changing diapers and trans women peeing not talking to anyone. You’re also still not addressing the fundamental fact that women who have never experienced male puberty experience far, far more abuse by other nosey weirdos trying to get into their genitalia just because they don’t perform the sort of femininity demanded to enforce who gets to take a piss in the McDonald’s.
> Exactly, any male who disregards women's boundaries and imposes himself on a female-only space is exhibiting predatory behaviour by ignoring the lack of consent. Those males who call themselves women are no exception to this.
Then it was you who brought up this unlikely scenario:
> I disagree that men in women's bathrooms is inherently predatory. Frankly, this discriminates against fathers of young children because often one has to bring a daughter into the bathroom or change their infants diaper.
To which I replied with the following, consistent with my earlier comment in that the father needs to ensure that if such a rare and urgent scenario should arise, he receives consent from the women present and to ensure he isn't disregarding boundaries and imposing himself:
> I don't agree with you on this, in almost all circumstances they should be using the bathroom appropriate for the sex of the adult, which in this case is the male one. If there genuinely is no baby changing facility available that isn't in the ladies' bathroom then for the welfare of the child an exception can be made, but the father needs to check with the women using this space first.
> This scenario is very different to the males who feel entitled to use women's spaces whenever they please and for their own satisfaction, rather than to provide for their child as in your example.
Of course the best option is that baby changing facilities are provided in unisex or male-only spaces too, which is often the case these days.
As for this part of your comment:
> You're also still not addressing the fundamental fact that women who have never experienced male puberty experience far, far more abuse by other nosey weirdos trying to get into their genitalia just because they don't perform the sort of femininity demanded to enforce who gets to take a piss in the McDonald's.
Firstly, there are no women who have experienced male puberty. The people who experience male puberty are boys and then men.
Secondly, this isn't a "fundamental fact", it's something you're claiming because you want to try to justify the invasion of women's spaces by men who pretend to be women.
Thirdly, I see you're still narrowly focusing on bathrooms and are ignoring the growing problem of these men demanding and gaining access to other spaces that were female-only up until their incursion. Any comment on, as I discussed above, that in some jurisdictions these men are being incarcerated in the female prison estate, and how harmful this has been for women prisoners?
Profit or non-profit is not about paying market rates. Even non-profits have to pay reasonably competitive salaries to attract and retain good employees.
> 501(c)(3) tax-exemptions apply to entities that are organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, literary or educational purposes, for testing for public safety, to foster national or international amateur sports competition, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals.
Signal foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3). It is literally and legally a charity.
Charities aren't charities in the colloquial sense of the word. It's not a truly altruistic collaboration of volunteers giving their time to help a cause.
Non-profit simply means that every bit of revenue made goes back into the company instead of given out to shareholders. Which includes paying your labor.
It being a non-profit is exactly why we can view the operating expenses and salaries of the public facing executives. For accountability.
They don't break out salaries specifically, but personnel costs are in this paragraph:
> To sustain our ongoing development efforts, about half of Signal’s overall operating budget goes towards recruiting, compensating, and retaining the people who build and care for Signal. When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.
From the same link, it seems like his compensation was much higher in all the preceding years. Not sure what changed this year, but I agree it's a bit refreshing to see. Especially since he's probably made good money throughout his career
I think the lower 2022 numbers reported for Moxie Marlinspike reflect that he was only involved as CEO until February 2022, so $80k would make sense as ~2 months of salary before Meredith Whittaker stepped up to the role.
Salaries:
Pretty abusive salaries for a non profit but that seems to be pretty much the standard nowadays, right?
Bandwidth:
I took at quick look and see that chat.signal.org resolves to AWS. If they are paying AWS for a lot of bandwidth, that is very expensive. Let's take a quick look:
They say they use 20PB per year of bandwidth for voice calls alone, this costs them $1.7M a year.
According to AWS pricing for great customers (suckers) of over 150TB per month, the cost per GB goes waaaay down to $0.05, yay. 1.6PB per month is 1600000GBs, that's $80K a month and therefore $960K a year.
Very roughly, a 10Gbp/s link to the Internet, from a Tier-1 provider will be around $800 (eight hundred dollars, you're reading this right) a month in a low-bandwidth-cost country like the US, possibly double that in say Asia.
A 10Gbps link fully utilized (minus some overheads), translates roughly to 3 Petabytes per month, that's 36 petabytes per year, almost double their advertized amount of bandwidth needed for calls per year.
So we have ~$10K a year (negotiable) for 36PB which is double their bandwidth needs but let's not forget that AWS graciously (geniously) charges for egess only, this means that their actual bandwidth needs are 40PB per year for whatever they are reporting. So we have $10K for 36PB a year vs $960K a year for 20PB (actually 40PB) of bandwidth from dear Amazon.
1. Not sure why they are saying the cost is $1.7M per year.
2. Even at 960K it's daylight robbery.
3. AWS makes an absolute killing on bandwidth costs. Best. Business. Model. Ever.
4. Don't these guys have a Devops pro at $300K+ a year? weird :)
Servers:
I won't get into the numbers here as that's a lot more involved, and impossible without more data, but buying and maintaining your own infra, or possibly easier, renting it, would still be quite a lot cheaper than using AWS.
Takeaways:
- Storage is something you should buy and maintain (Thanks B!), you swap out old/dying storage devices. See Backblaze.
- Bandwidth, compute and storage costs at your favorite CSP are absolutely f'ing *outrageous*
- If you care about your money, your bottom line, do things differently than the *insane* mainstream way of clickity-click on some UIs to provision services without understanding what's really happening under the hood (not saying Signal doesn't understand that part, I'm sure they do), or caring about the added costs of whatever gets so easily "added" to your "infrastructure".
- By having your stuff on a CSP you don't even have "infrastructure", but that's juts me.
Anyway, I do love Signal, what they do and what they represent. Keep up the good work.
Signal, mail me at m aaaat zynk.it if you'd like to talk.
> A 10Gbps link fully utilized (minus some overheads), translates roughly to 3 Petabytes per month, that's 36 petabytes per year, almost double their advertized amount of bandwidth needed for calls per year.
I understand this is napkin math, but shouldn't we consider that the load isn't evenly distributed? - in which case 50% average utilization seems extremely high
> I’ve got a recurring donation of $5/mo I set up ages ago
Thanks for that, I did a one off 300 euro donation back in '21 during the bubble market; Meredith has been doing the rounds [0] and she hits on lots of good points, and even went to the UK over their now failed bill during the Summer.
Because this isn't the only one way to donate, and if it were subject to the 30% cut, most people would want to know they could spend a couple extra hours steps for 30% additional impact on their donation.
Very few people are going "No apple pay? No donation."
> if it were subject to the 30% cut, most people would want to know they could spend a couple extra hours steps for 30% additional impact on their donation.
I had an old Apple Store & iTunes gift card laying around so I redeemed it and attempted to use it to donate via Apple Pay, but get "Apple Account - Not enabled for in app payments". Google isn't very helpful about exactly why. Am I missing some KYC somewhere or are payments of this type prohibited from "Apple Account" balances?
I guess maybe I'm missing the purported point of signal, attaching your phone number to use it notwithstanding, but attaching payment identity to it as well? Like, what's the point of going through the pain required to use it?
Most people using Signal - and particularly most people likely to donate - are not using it to hide their identities, but to decrease the chance of unknown parties reading their conversations. My Signal account has my full name on it, and checking my top contacts, most of them do too (some only have their first name).
> I guess maybe I'm missing the purported point of signal, attaching your phone number to use it notwithstanding, but attaching payment identity to it as well? Like, what's the point of going through the pain required to use it?
Your payment info is not connected to your account.
There doesn't seem to be a way to pay annually, which I'd prefer to a monthly payment. £5/month is just a little high, but I'd merrily pay half that or £30/year.
There are two forms at https://signal.org/donate/, the second one lets you set a yearly donation at a custom amount (and both forms a monthly donation at a custom amount).
Seriously consider setting up a recurring donation if you prefer Signal. They have delivered consistently over the years. I set the $20/month back when they introduced the option.
I'm curious what the breakdown of donations is. I only have 1 contact with a $10/month and 1 with a $5/month badge. Of course there could be others not displaying the badge. Signal really needs 500,000 people giving $20/month and plus the rich guys giving some millions on top of that to be in a safe financial position.
Maybe something that could be done to encourage donations is have the client estimate how much raw infra costs your usage created and display in the donation screen.
20/month for every chat service I use is very steep. I'd be spending more on chat services than on mobile data + unlimited calling + landline + DSL + streaming services combined!
They actual costs are apparently about 1 USD per year per user. I usually at least double (usually more) my incurred cost when the donation is optional, to cover for those who can't or won't pay, but paying 240× the cost price seems wasteful as well when there are other nonprofits that can do more good with every dollar you give them (be it solving poverty, climate change, whatever you find valuable) rather than one which has mostly fixed fees
I'm not suggesting every chat service get donations. I'm only giving to Signal, the rest of the chat services I have to use get 0.
I'm donating more than my costs deliberately because I fully understand that most users are not going to contribute money, full stop. I need those users though, because they are the people I want to privately communicate with. So the obvious thing to do is pay for as many other users as I can. If there's 50M monthly active users, and if 1% of them are like me and highly value Signal, then each of us 1% users can pay $20/month and cover the entire operation. Then the contributions of the super rich donors can be saved to rebuild the war chest.
$20/month is nothing to me considering the value I get. I understand that most won't feel that way, which is why I'm only appealing to those who do feel as I do to just get that recurring donation going now.
- whatsapp cuz some friends dont really get signal
- imessage cuz some friends dont get whatsapp nor signal
- viber cuz family across seas and that's whats popular there
- slack with some friends cuz it's nice to have focused discussions in channels
- discord cuz its better for gaming
- ig messaging cuz i stay in touch with less close acquaintances and some friends that way, comment on their stories and chat about whats going on in the moment
There's also Wire, IRC, Telegram, and Threema. SMS I also have a subscription on, but that feels different so I didn't include that in my count, and Keybase I haven't used in a while now but that might also be part of the list for some people
I fail to understand the point of supporting an organization that is completely against self-sovereignty like Signal is. Why would I want to pay someone to develop something that traps me into their platform and does not offer a way out?
Great, you go ahead and get all your friends in family using Matrix. I'll join you there when all that is sorted out and it's practical to get my lawyers and doctors and accountants and friends and family onboard. Until then, we'll keep using Signal.
First, you talk like Signal never had any issue with usability or functionality, which is far from the truth. Signal amount of bugs and security issues with their client is notorious, and the insistence of requiring phone numbers is just a silly "let them have cake approach" that is conveniently ignored for too long.
Second, are you hedging your bets and supporting Matrix or XMPP as well, or will you only encourage people to "donate" to the platform that you happen to have picked already?
Yes, I am encouraging people to donate to Signal because I prefer it. Why would I be soliciting donations for something I don't favor? If you want to contribute to something else go right ahead, but this is a thread about Signal's financial needs so it shouldn't surprise you that Signal supporters encourage other supporters to donate.
I also use Matrix. Element has been pretty good for a few years now, but it's still not smooth enough for mainstream use. (Encryption state in chats gets messed up sometimes, for example. It feels like Signal 10 years ago, and it's had security issues in its client also)
The Matrix protocol is also inferior to Signal in that all metadata is stored in cleartext on the server. You get to choose or run a server, but the protocol still leaks the user info to whoever runs the home server and to any foreign server that has a user in the same channel if you are using it in a federated context. Signal manages all of this by peer to peer messages where cleartext is only available to clients, which is really slick.
XMPP is just dead. Forget about XMPP. Matrix is the clear leader in the federated messaging system category. I'd like to see Matrix displace things like Telegram, Discord, and Slack. I may donate to Matrix affiliated projects in the future, as I also donate to other open source projects from time to time, but I'm not going to promote any of those things in this thread.
> Why would I be soliciting donations for something I don't favor?
Because you are (consciously or not) creating a self-fulfilling prophecy for one champion over the others. Worse still, you are asking everyone else to devote resources to your preferred champion when we have no reason to believe that this is long-term sustainable.
> The Matrix protocol is also inferior to Signal in that all metadata is stored in cleartext on the server.
As I said in another thread: I honestly care less about the security guarantees from one protocol over the other than I care about the fact that pushing for Signal would mean that everyone's communication would be tied to one single provider. This is a systemic risk that no amount of "you don't need to trust us, you just need to trust math" can ever mitigate.
I don't care about your preferences. I'm consciously using and giving money to Signal, and I'm encouraging others to do so. Go ahead and work on or use or donate to whatever you like.
You can export to markdown apparently. Who's locked in? It might be a pain to import that into any other app but I don't think any messaging app is going to make that easy. You still have all your data if you want to bail
Given how many activists have used it in overthrowing dictatorial governments, self-sovereignty seems an odd choice of words to claim it doesn’t support.
Perhaps it was a bad choice of words. What I mean is that they say "you don't need to trust us", yet they require you to run through them. They refuse to build their system in a decentralized way, and the more that time goes by the more the decentralized alternatives are showing they are as secure as Signal without forcing us to accept their restrictions like mandatory use of phone numbers for authentication.
you literally don't. It's a fully encrypted service. The literal purpose of encryption is to move data securely through insecure or even adversarial channels. Which you can verify, it's audited and open source.
They refuse to build the app in a decentralized way because decentralization is an ideological obsession that is useless in this context, and because centralized organizations can actually ship polished software that works for normal people and move quickly.
Centralized supply chain, and metadata protection is anchored on SGX.
They can use their pick of SGX exploits to undermine the weak metadata protections and they (or apple/google) could, if pressured, ship tweaked versions of their centrally compiled apps to select targets that use "42" as the random number generator. No one would be the wiser.
Signal is a money pit with a pile of single points of failure for no reason.
Matrix is already proving federated end to end encryption can scale, particularly when users are free to pay for hosting their own servers as they like, which can also generate income.
> They can use their pick of SGX exploits to undermine the weak metadata protections and they (or apple/google) could, if pressured, ship tweaked versions of their centrally compiled apps to select targets that use "42" as the random number generator. No one would be the wiser.
Signal builds on Android have been reproducible for over seven years now. That's not to mention the myriad of other ways that people could detect this particular attack even without build reproducibility.
Moxie made it very clear he never wants third parties like f-droid -actually- reproducing and signing packages for distribution to de-googled signature-enforcing android distros etc. Providing side-loadable apks as an alternative a joke.
Third party builds and distribution would serve as public canary and be better for privacy forbidden. He argued the tracking advantages of centralized development and distribution outweighed any wins of allowing third party clients.
In reality a build published with a breaking change and a subtle crypto backdoor omitted from public sources may not be discovered for days or longer. Long enough to decrypt most every convo on the planet.
Something built like any other internet protocol with staying power.
A federated network with multiple strong client and server implementations that are able to be built, reproduced, and distributed by multiple independent parties. Like Matrix.
Matrix is far from perfect yet but it is miles beyond Signal in being a sustainable solution that can survive any single point of failure.
> can actually ship polished software that works for normal people and move quickly
They can ship it, because they got a fuckton of money. But apparently they can not maintain it, because now they are crying about how expensive it is to run it.
Signal is acting like a sprint runner who signed up for a Marathon and wants to be carried out to the finish line after showing how much faster he was in the first mile. That's what I think is dishonest here.
> Given how many activists have used it in overthrowing dictatorial governments
How many? There's some news about it being recommended for use by BLM protesters, and about it being blocked in China, Iran, etc. Where is this info about it being used in "overthrowing dictatorial governments"?
You're moving the goal post from "self-sovereignty" to supports federation with an infinite number of servers. Nothing is stopping you from compiling your own Signal server and modifying a Signal client to use your server.
Given that Signal is free as a service, supporting federation only increases their expenses.
Because centralisation provides ecosystem agility, which they absolutely value as an upside. Find a way of doing post-quantum secure key exchange? Just roll it out to the server and all the clients essentially overnight.
I'm well aware of their justifications. I'm also aware that centralization brings systemic risks, which they don't talk about.
The internet would be a lot more efficient and able to evolve if we just had it controlled by one single entity like Google or Microsoft. Do you think is a good idea to do that?
The economy would be a lot more efficient and allocation of resources could be a lot more fair if we could put it all in the hands of one single corporation or government. Do you think it's a good idea to do that?
Agricultural output would improve significantly if all crops used the exact same genetic strain and if all soil was artificially managed. Do you think it's a good idea to do that?
In case you are wondering, "ability to quickly roll out post-quantum key exchange" is waaaaay down the list of my worries compared to "facing a catastrophic Black Swan affecting all of the world's communications".
Security is extremely important, but it is not the only concern one should have when considering the design of a global communications infrastructure.
I worry a lot more about not having one single actor responsible in dealing for the communication of millions of people than about "quantum-resistant encryption".
> I worry a lot more about not having one single actor responsible in dealing for the communication of millions of people than about "quantum-resistant encryption
I'm glad you worry about this. Me and other people have other priorities.
You're putting an awful lot of effort into projecting your values onto other people, which is a bit weird.
Did you watch "The Big Short"? You are sounding like one of those jocks-turned-real-estate agents that are bragging about how easy it is to make money and thinking the analysts were idiots.
> You're putting an awful lot of effort into projecting your values onto other people.
We live in a world where people are bullied for not using iPhones and showing up with different bubble colors on the chat apps and family members will refuse to call you on the phone and only accept you if you use WhatsApp.
All I am saying is "please let's not collectively put ourselves in the hands of any single entity". Are you sure I'm the one projecting values, here?
> Did you watch "The Big Short"? You are sounding like one of those jocks-turned-real-estate agents that are bragging about how easy it is to make money and thinking the analysts were idiots.
I've literally no idea what this means. Who thinks who's an idiot in this analogy?
> All I am saying is "please let's not collectively put ourselves in the hands of any single entity". Are you sure I'm the one projecting values, here?
I don't care what messaging platform you use. You appear to deeply care what other people use, and therefore what should be important to them. Yes, I'm pretty sure.
Genuine question: Does Tor fall under the definition of federation? Either way, a Tor-like model would have security benefits over a centralized system like Signal, right?
Tor is distributed, not federated. And it has drawbacks, like high latency and a lack of a centralized system for human-friendly names (because that would mean a system like DNS, which is centralized). As far as security goes, there's probably little benefit. E2EE doesn't get more secure because there's more encryption.
The most comparable system to Tor that has practical properties I can think of is maybe ipfs, but nobody will store your encrypted chat blobs for you out of the goodness of their hearts. Ipfs also tends to have high latency. A slow system of uncooperative nodes isn't what you want your messaging app built on.
A federated messaging system looks a lot more like Matrix. The obvious problems are that splitting users up over multiple nodes mean encrypted data doesn't live on your instance, it lives everywhere the people are you chat with. Another problem is what you see with bsky, where identifiers come with a domain name (like an email).
IRC is also federated (sort of), and there's a long list of tired, age-old problems. The most common one is simple: different servers have different features, so you can't reliably "just use it" like you can with Signal.
Because code is law, centralized systems that grow bigger than the polity they started in are inherently problematic. See Facebook in Burma/Myanmar as one recent infamous example.
Some centralized systems. But I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that's universally true. Nor is the implication that non-centralized systems don't suffer from similar problems, or other problems which result in substantially bigger drawbacks.
bro, you're working for one of chat programs, yes? never heard of communick before. won't ever use it. if people ask me about it, i will show them how a person related to communick behaves in public.
You are creating an ad-hominem by thinking that I can not criticize Signal because I have a competing offer. And to add insult to injury, you seem to have a misconception of what Communick is.
Communick is not "a chat program". Communick is a service provider, which promotes and works only with truly open protocols. There is no custom client or lock-in based feature that I have. This means that if you are my customer and you want to move out you are absolutely free to get your things and move to a different place instantly.
yes, it's an ad hominem. people need to know who are you and what incentives behind them. if you're from a competing provider, other will need to take that into account.
also, if you want to peddle your stuff, make your own announcements or something.
I'm somewhat flattered that you think Communick is a "competing provider" to Signal. Or anything, really. Maybe I will add that to the "testimonials" section of the website along with other nice things I get to hear from my 8 customers.
Whether Communick exists or not, even if I close it down next week (because if we are being honest it is nothing but a money pit which I keep running out of spite and stubbornness, and unlike Signal I'm not panhandling for donations) my criticism of centralized messaging platforms would still stand: whether it's Signal, or WhatsApp, or FaceTime or Telegram... we should not be supporting any platform that centralizes all communications in one single place, no matter how "well intentioned" or even how "provably secure" it is.
I almost skipped reading into this article because I love Signal and it's mission (and their rare commitment to stick to it) and would have known it's good. Yet, the details on expenses and infrastructure was a good read. $1.3M/yr for temporary storage! $6M for verification codes during sign-up!? Toll fraud!? GOOG & FB data center spend, data breaches from GOOG, MSFT, et. al 50 full-time employees vs 3K or 4K for similar apps! All interesting.
The link about the Google "data breach" appears to be about some tax companies being sued for using Google Analytics tracking pixels. Calling this a data breach may be a bit of a stretch.
Thanks. I hadn't dug into that link, but I did based on your comment. It is a Congressional investigation that is rooted on a report from The Markup [1] that, as you note isn't about an accidental breach by Google, but one where multiple companies send extensive PII to Google about site visitors. While not necessarily a "breach", I think this lead of personal data plays to Signal article's point though. The Markup article's git repo with HAR files of what was sent to Google was convincing.[2]
I have held off donating to signal so far exactly because there is no clarity around this token, why it was even added to signal and who profited from that.
I don't think they ever confirmed that this was why they stopped updating, or did a postmortem on how poorly that launch went. I vaguely recall there was also an unexplained spike in MobileCoin trading shortly before the public launch that looked quite a bit like insider trading, though right now the stories I can turn up about it here are about similarly disconcerting and unexplained issues in its provenance: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It's hard to take this fundraising plea seriously when this financial disaster is never even mentioned. I hope I've just missed whatever Signal has done to try to repair trust after the, but the fact that they haven't even removed it from the app is not promising. Can anyone share updates?
I for one will never donate to signal, and consider my $1000 (or $20k of never realized "fake" money, explained later) lost to mobilecoins to be my lifetime "donation" to them.
Short timeline of events from my side:
- Signal announces/endorses mobilecoin support, as their new and only cryptocurrency option
- I figure I'll get on it early this time after missing out on Bitcoin, despite Signal only supporting this in the UK (for now)
- Mobilecoin and Signal websites both mention FTX as being the only exchange where you can currently buy mobilecoin, never used it before but I go ahead, transfer $1000 worth (at the time) of bitcoin to buy mobilecoin
- There are currently no other wallets for mobilecoin (except maybe some difficult to use or obscure ones that looked sketchy? don't like leaving money on the exchange but didn't really have other options)
- Mobilecoin spiked on ftx, sold and bought back a few times, at the right time with some good luck, now have $20,000 of mobilecoin
- Signal finally adds support for mobilecoin in my country, proceed to try and withdraw it
- However, my country just announced legislation to require ID in order to buy/sell cryptocurrency, but it's not planned to go into effect for at least another 6 months or so, but FTX decided to start requiring it immediately and wouldn't let me withdraw without it (I could see they were still willing to take more deposits from me without it though!)
- FTX had trouble verifying ID, I already suspected what was about to happen, tried my best to get my crypto out but they kept having excuses, the ftx fall out and everything became known some months later
> I figure I'll get on it early this time after missing out on Bitcoin
So you only aped in because you were hoping to get rich without doing any work, and then you fraudulently opened up an account on a shady ass centralized exchange when you knew you couldn't KYC, and got your pretend money stuck, and then when FTX fell over it turns out it was never really there.
Cryptocurrencies are awesome. Greedy people who can't do research and complain loudly when their "get rich quick" schemes blow up in their face make everyone look bad :-/
> So you only aped in because you were hoping to get rich without doing any work, and then you fraudulently opened up an account on a shady ass centralized exchange when you knew you couldn't KYC, and got your pretend money stuck, and then when FTX fell over it turns out it was never really there.
> Cryptocurrencies are awesome. Greedy people who can't do research and complain loudly when their "get rich quick" schemes blow up in their face make everyone look bad :-/
Normally I wouldn't acknowledge this, but I find your assumptions and accusations about me quite rude, for someone who has been on HN for at least 12 years you should know the rules. I simply stated the timeline of events as is, because there is no denying the connection between Signal and FTX through mobilecoin, and I only spent what I could afford to lose, I was well aware of the risks.
Yeah how can I trust the security of an app which is engaging in potential financial fraud. Like ffs, if your whole thing is trust and principles, don't start fucking around with things for personal financial gain.
Probably not much at all. Thankfully they didn't shove it down user's throats - its kinda hidden behind a setting.
I guess if they did push it harder to users it may have generated more revenue, at the cost of users who won't put up with cryptocurrency rubbish.
Signal had 40 million active users in 2021 [1]. With 14 million in infra cost, that comes to .35 per user/year. Total expenses are about 33 million, so about .825 per user/year. All in all that seems very reasonable.
Mastodon org + Mastodon.social also have costs of 0.6 EUR/year, though they have two orders of magnitude less users [1]. This is really what most social media costs. These rates are even payable by many in poorer countries.
With how much Mastodon.social tends to fall over when Twitter does something stupid (again), their rates are probably a bit too low for a more robust service like Signal.
Signal also intentionally doesn't store too much data, long term data costs will slowly grow over the years. I imagine for a bigger platform, costs can grow to multiples of the rates for Signal and smaller Mastodon servers.
€10 per year should be more than enough for most users, though, and it should be quite affordable for most countries.
Yeah, the issue is more that there is substantial friction in paying any amount of money, especially in poorer countries with no access to e.g. banking or payment cards. I'm sure no one here, and few people even in comparatively poorer countries, would object if Signal/their messenger of choice cost 0.60$ per year to use. The problem is that making the service have a ~1$/yr price tag (as WhatsApp once had) is itself a barrier to a huge portion of the target audience.
In Pakistan at least, sometimes you can donate to charity etc by texting a special number [1]. That subtracts some fixed amount from your prepaid mobile balance (which the vast majority of people use) or adds to your postpaid bill. I imagine its possible for some business to charge customers this way as well.
Then again, instant C2C and C2B digital payments using mobile phones is growing extremely fast in most of the global south.
It’s beginning to sound like the 1 EUR/year that at some point WhatsApp wanted to charge and it seemed reasonable to me at the time. Signal is even better and even more so justified.
They used to "require" a subscription of 1$/year but it was not enforced. If you missed the deadline, nothing happened. It was basically the WinRAR model but for an online service.
This is kind of the number I was looking for -- "Cover your own costs: $1/year. Cover yourself and five other people: $5/year." I feel like something pointing out that the costs are around $1/year on signing up, maybe with a reminder once a year, would get most people self-funding pretty quickly.
And I was SOOO happy when I heard WhatsApp's business model: Finally, I'M THE CUSTOMER! I gladly signed up for the "free year" and started getting other people to sign up for it... only to have it bought by FB, and never charged my $1 yearly fee. :-(
Then I tried to get people to use Telegram, but hey never implemented encryption by default, instead implementing things like chatrooms with millions of people... then I signed up for Signal, but waited to see what would happen -- and they started doing some weird crypto thing. Thankfully that all seems to have not been an issue, so I might actually start recommending Signal.
If you pay Signal $1/year, they'll realistically see about 60-70 cents of that – and that's only considering payment processor fees.
Now add the cost of providing support (it's a paid product now!), payment handling on their end (in a privacy-preserving way, which excludes most common payment methods), and top it off with the immense damage to the network effect by excluding all the users that can't or simply don't want to pay $1/year...
You can also charge for a 10 year minimum and get to a higher retained %
You don't need to provide support, even much more expensive consumer services live without a proper one, so being explicit about the fact that you only pay for infrastructure could suffice
Not sure why payment privacy has to be so strict for everyone
The network effect damage is real, but maybe it could be limited with donations :)
Selling a service automatically opts you in to all kinds of consumer protections, either legally or de facto through the dispute mechanism of the payment methods your customers use.
Just ignoring customer complaints and selling the service "as-is" is usually not an option.
Why is it not an option when it already exists in many places (all these protections fail all the time)? Your first sentence doesn't imply high/expensive level of customer service
Besides, even now they're not ignoring all the complaints, the do fix bugs?
Maybe to be more specific, how much did it cost WhatsApp when they had $1 price and a tiny team? How does it compare to the cost of SMS?
In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users used the service each month. The year 2013 ended with $148 million in expenses, of which $138 million in losses.[1]
FB acquired them next year and if my memory is correct there were 19 in the team then.
That $ figure tells us nothing as it includes those same huge SMS costs that Signal is on an unsustainable path to rack up
With just a bit more effort you can see that most of those $148 are not related to the extra customer support we're discussing, but rather to the things that Signal is already doing
Costs and expenses in 2013:
Cost of revenue 53 (payment processing fees, infrastructure costs, SMS verification fees and employee compensation for part of operations team)
R&D 77 (engineering and technical teams who are responsible for the design, development, and testing of the features)
So for $10M revenue, they had $53M cost of revenue. I think asking for $1 is never going to be sustainable, even if leave all other costs. My guess is that "employee compensation for part of operations team" is the primary one taking all the cost, as payment processing fees couldn't be more than the revenue itself and one message is pretty cheap.
Thanks for over-analyzing my comment. $1/year, $2/year, $5/year, is all insignificant in the wide array of things I pay for. Sure, I'd pay $10/year for Signal as it is today if they really needed me to. And I never said to make payment mandatory. You're just way over analyzing a simple comment.
I'd pay substantially more for Signal if I could bot accounts.
I'd like a signal daemon on all my servers for alerting which could message me via Signal. This is worth a monthly fee to me.
I know people running small businesses who would really like to have a business Signal account: an ability to send Signal messages as a business identity without tying it to some specific phone number. This would be worth a subscription even if they had to get their customers to install Signal.
Signal need to figure out what product they sell that's going to fund the privacy objective: because there's plenty and they're worth having.
I know I could do these things, but the problem is (1) it's a cat and mouse game of trying to keep up with functionality they don't want to support and (2) means I'm not paying them for a service, which is the point of doing it.
IMO Signal need to figure out what they sell to people with the money to say "yes, this service helps me make money" so they fulfill the big mission statement. That's true viability.
Within that bucket there's some real obvious ones: server monitoring and alerting (I have Signal, let my severs have Signal so they can talk to me, maybe at an agreed reduced throughput rate so someone doesn't just try to run TCP/IP over it), and letting businesses have a secure multimedia messaging channel to their clients for notifications.
I find signald better. It also supports acting like a desktop client... so you can just add it to your account easily. signal-cli might do that also, but I stopped using it in favor of signald when I found that one.
But yeah, I hear you. It would be nice if it had a official bot interface where maybe all the bot's receipients have to be whitelisted so that it's easy to use for stuff like server monitoring but not easy to use for spamming.
I'd pay much more than $2 if they offered account identifiers other than phone numbers. Trying to get a burner SIM or DID while still staying anonymous is getting increasingly difficult.
But I think it's pretty clear by now that this is a feature for FVEY IC, not a bug. FFS, they burned development resources on stickers, but abjectly refuse to offer alternative account identifiers. The standard apologist response is, "but phone numbers make adoption easier". Sure, but nobody is asking to replace the identifiers, or even to make them nondefault. We're just asking for the option. It could be hidden behind a developer mode for all I care, but it should be there.
The fact that they abjectly refuse to do it is enough to tell you about what their true motivations likely are.
Agreed, at this point I don't believe the "privacy" aspect of Signal's sales sheet means anything. Most that I know use it primarily because they can have clients on all platforms, including desktop.
Indeed, the Wire messenger is done like this - it offers phone number, but has an option to not use them and only rely on the usernames (although I think you need to register in the web browser for that)
The sms decision made signal go from THE messaging app on my phone to an app I only use with a very small subset of my contacts. It is infuriating that they didn't allow users to retain that functionality when it costs them nothing, and they could have disabled it by default.
I still use Signal a lot, since most people I frequently talk to use it. However, this was extremely frustrating. Having 1 messaging app for so long was incredibly nice.
Many people care about Signal, and it is okay to dislike their decision. OP didn't demand from Signal to support SMS, but they expressed their emotions about the change.
Signal is an awesome project but some of their decisions annoy many users. E.g. Signal does not allow to automatically save all pictures in the gallery. It's a privacy feature, but it's inconvenient since it forces me remember to download each image seperately.
> and register for a new account with a phone number (you can use the same one you’re using in Production).
I hope that they make it so you can register WITHOUT a phone number. Perfectly fine if it's not the default. This is post is currently implying that is not currently the case.
Pay attention to WhatsApp's wording (all privacy/security claims start with "your messages"), and their privacy policy, and you'll see that while message involving with individuals (non-Business users) are secured, your contact list is not, neither are chats with businesses or the metadata about you chatting (destinations, frequency, time)
I encourage you to read the article, but Signal minimizes the metadata it stores about you, doesn't hold on to you contact list, doesn't keep information about your IP address, etc.
WhatsApp instead makes tons of money from this kind of metadata.
Hmm but then how did they manage before asking for that 1 euro? There were a whole lot of years where it was completely free (yes before the Facebook takeover). Here in Europe we've only needed to pay once or so until it got taken over.
There must have been some kind of venture backing because there was no money coming in at all from users for a long time.
I've been using WhatsApp when the nominal $1/year fee was still around, but somehow never ended up being actually charged, and I don't know anyone that did.
It's possible that they were only enforcing it in some regions, though.
Indeed. I just ignored the dialog box the first time it popped up. But next year I paid. It was quite a big deal because back then it was equal to my entire monthly cellphone bill in Pakistan.
But I remember other people started to en masse switch to other messengers like Viber(?). And Whatsapp had to stop enforcing the fee.
I was billed 0,99€ (Germany) exactly once, but was able to use WhatsApp without payment for most of the time just by ignoring the notification. I remember that they repeatedly gave grace periods and just set another payment date a few weeks later.
I'm paying what works out to about 15 cents per "booking" in my app due to API fees. Maybe more,.. and I'm just now realizing we'll probably be losing money if people used their accounts to their limits. Like 500 bookings would cost me at least $75 but we charge about 50.
Anyway $1/year is great
Sure, but privacy isn't black or white. A donation to signal does not compromise the content of your messaging.
So what you've leaked is the information that you have an interest in private conversations. This might be a problem in some countries, but I think it's fair to ask folks in affluent countries with working (sorta) democracies to shoulder that burden. I.e. you don't donate if there's elevated threat to your safety, there are enough people who aren't under elevated threat.
There's also the possibility of using a donation mixer like Silent Donor, though I'd evaluate that very carefully. (There's a record of the transfer in, and the mixer needs to keep temporary records for transferring out. There's also the question how you verify the mixer doesn't skim.)
Some donation mixers accept crypto currency, so for maximum paranoia, I suppose crypto->crypto mixer->donation mixer->charity might be workable. Or hand cash to a friend who donates in your stead.
As always, the best path is to set aside paranoia and build a threat model instead to see what the actual risks are.
There's never enough talk like this and I'm not sure why. It's always about the threat model. In this respect I always like to think of it in terms of probability. Probabilities and likelihoods aren't just about capturing randomness like quantum fluctuations or rolling dice, they are fundamentally about capturing uncertainty. Your threat model is your conditions and you can only calculate likelihoods as you don't know everything. There are no guarantees of privacy or security. This is why I always hated the conversations around when Signal was discussing deleting messages and people were saying that it's useless because someone could have saved the message before you deleted them. But this is also standard practice in industry because they understand the probabilistic framework and that there's a good chance that you delete before they save. Framing privacy and security as binary/deterministic options doesn't just do a poor but "good enough approximation" of these but actually leads you to make decisions that would decrease your privacy and security!
It's like brute forcing, we just want something where we'd be surprised if someone could accomplish it within the lifetime of the universe though technically it is possible for them to get it on the very first try if they are very very lucky. Which is an extreme understatement. It's far more likely that you could walk up to a random door, put the wrong key in, have the door's lock fall out of place, and open it to find a bear, a methhead, and a Rabbi sitting around a table drinking tea, playing cards, and the Rabbi has a full house. I'll take my odds on 256 bit encryption.
They take checks by mail. You definitely can do a cashier's check and I'm sure they'd take the "cash in an envelope" method that places like Mullvad do too. Looks like they also support crypto, and that includes Zcash. So I don't think this is a great excuse. The only "can't easily donate" aspect is going to also be tied with the "can't easily get a cashier's check or find an anonymous person to sell me bitcoin for cash" kinda issues, and when you're operating at that level I'm not sure anything is "easy." (but that's not that hard usually)
Oh yeah, I have an old checkbook that I've had since like 2010 because the only ones I've ever used are for random landlords. Otherwise it's literally easier to get a cashier's check, which you can (in America) do at any bank or grocery store. Note that some are free and some aren't, so check beforehand. I don't think these will ever really go away tbh
I think they will, America is just very traditional. Things tend to stick around for longer. The magstripe also lingers there even though we've got rid of it for years (though unfortunately our cards still have them in case we need to visit the US - I don't like having them because they are skimmable).
Nobody would accept a check here anyway as they're not guaranteed. These days I pay with my watch or phone everywhere (Samsung Pay). I don't even use the chip on my card anymore. And payments between people happen digitally too (a system called Bizum here in Spain).
Maybe, but these some big utility to cashier's checks. They're essentially cash that can only be deposited by a specific party. I also don't think cash is going away anytime soon. And while it isn't common for me to issue a check, it isn't uncommon to receive a check. They're just always form businesses. Even ones that have my direct deposit information.
Fwiw, in America I use my phone to pay for everything too. But there are edge cases and tools like these often have utilities in domains that might not be common to the average person but are to specific groups. For example, these are often used in situations where cash is preferable but you wouldn't want to cary that around, like real estate down payments and buying a car. Some settings are sensitive to the exchange times (though that money looks like it is in your account instantly, it isn't).
I just wouldn't be so quick to make such a conclusion because it's pretty likely that your experience is not general. Despite America treating corporations like people, I'm pretty confident you aren't a corporation.
> Nobody would accept a check here anyway as they're not guaranteed.
Btw, a cashier's check is. Like I said, it is as good as cash.
There are clever ways around that. I use posteo as my mailprovider. They have a system where you can pay anonymously: https://posteo.de/en/site/payment
It's possible in the US, but it's getting very difficult. I don't know anywhere you can buy or or borrow a DID with Monero anymore. Looks like they got to Telnum recently.
You can still buy a SIM, a prepaid PIN, and a phone with cash, but you'd need to pay a non-correlated person to be seen on CCTV to do it, at a non-correlated time, and hope they don't just take your money and leave you nothing at the dead drop.
Then there's the hassle of setting up the account in a way that's not correlated with your location, normal waking hours, etc.
All of this could just be avoided if Signal did the right thing.
Refreshing compared to the alternative that Wikipedia is showing, with the tantrum-like emails we receive from their CEO like "LAST REMINDER" or "We've had enough" ; which they ironically send to people who gave.