Yes but the original founders did that. Zuckerberg took it from them and immediately lied about data sharing, there's a reason why the founders left in disgust
One of the co-founders, Brian Acton, has funded most of Signal (~100M USD) in his post WhapsApp life. It is a very hacker mindset solution. Instead of turning to the law to enforce nebulous claims against a megacorp, make a better product with the money you got from said megacorp.
I know "nothing to hide" is never a strong argument but even if Signal is a CIA honeypot, if it keeps my personal conversations from becoming marketing fodder, sign me up!
I'm definitely not a "nothing to hide" guy, but if the CIA wants something on me they're going to find it in 5 minutes. They would only be using a backdoored Signal to get the smart guys; so I guess I have to thank the smart guys for the CIA giving us Signal...
I'll never understand why people don't place value on integrity. I mean day to day people and not stockholders. Zuck controls what happens at Meta, it's not a board decision on stuff like this unless Zuck tells them to do it.
The problem with Facebook's products always comes down to one overriding fact, Zuckerberg's desire to win over everybody else; he's constantly been accused of stealing from people, it's not a surprise everything he owns is either extremely coercive or broken from a technical standpoint
Sure, network effects are hard to overcome; my point is that Zuckerberg bought it as a competition killing move so they're not likely to put any quality control into it
I guess you are entitled to your own opinion (which I disagree with, though I recommend using Signal because the clients are open source).
IMO the answer to your original question is: lock-in effect. People are generally too lazy to move to an alternative, and on top of that, if they decide moving to one, they don't necessarily know which one to chose. And many privacy-advocates don't help by being (again IMO) too extreme: "Do NOT use Signal, you MUST use <choose your complicated ultra-secure alternative here>".
I think people are missing the point when they call Metaverse a 'misstep' because it implies Zuckerberg was a good actor who just happened to get this one thing wrong... if you look through his history of things like forced Whatsapp sharing (plus Onavo), Free Basics, all of the shitty things the company does... the Metaverse was never a good faith effort and people need to understand that; newsflash, he's not a shining example of what a good person is
(And the whole stealing Facebook from other people in the first place, anyway)
My first impression of this is literally "So, maybe a good idea, but isn't this Zuckerberg just copying yet another person like he's always done forever?"
There is no mandatory Facebook account, anymore. It's now a mandatory Meta account. Facebook is only linked if you want it to be. Meta has said that this was in response to disapproval of the mandatory Facebook account.
Right, but they took a perfectly good (great for the time and the price) and messed it up for a couple years with a really ugly, oversharing, privacy threatening account system. I am sure many-- probably most-- people didn't care but I think early adopters and developers found it very alienating.
People say that the Meta account-- or the old Oculus accounts-- is the same as the FB account they mandated but really that isn't true. For a while they were essentially forcing you to run FB on your phone or browser to use the hardware. It was super yucky.
I really like their hardware and I appreciate that they are working on developing a platform. I just wish they could be content to sell a platform and sell aps on it, the way Apple does.
I can't imagine they want to support two separate account systems, especially with the amount of potential PII involved (like eye/face tracking training data).
This required change is heavily communicated, when you put on the headset. Nobody will be surprised when their account stops working. Your comment makes it sound like it could possibly happen on accident.
Earlier this year I packed up a lot of my computer gear and stored in at the in-laws house, because we were putting our house on the market and this got us ahead on moving into a new place. Then the housing market tanked, my stuff including a Quest 2 is still sitting there, many months later, and I'll maybe be able to get back to it now mid next year.
I'm learning from you here now that I'm gonna lose all the paid content I have on my account?
The thing is, I wouldn't want to use Whatsapp considering how Facebook got it: spy on people with Onavo and then basically pressure the original founders out of the company, and then do stuff like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215... that doesn't sound like stewards I'd trust
