… is it possible to do any kind of business and/or have regular conversations without having to use whatsapp as a main way of communication?
If you’d like you can say in what country you’re living.
USA here. No we don’t use WhatsApp at all. I communicate with all friends and family on Telegram or SMS. For work we use Slack. I refuse to have any Facebook anything installed on my phone (I don’t use social media anyway…except for Lemmy now I guess if that counts haha)
I’m a proponent of breaking social media into two categories. There should be “personal media” or something where you use your real name and information, and some other name for social media that you use an alias. The fact Reddit/Lemmy are in the same category as Facebook seems dumb. We need a better way to describe it. Depending on how you define it, news sites with comment sections could be called social media if you wanted to, but it’s clearly something different than Facebook.
I’m from Europe, and for years I’d been using WhatsApp because everyone expected me to even though I didn’t feel comfortable using it at all (because I care about my privacy and apparently not all of my friends/family members do). At some point I was forced to accept new terms that basically said it was okay for them to sell my data and that’s where I drew the line and told everyone that I would no longer be using WhatsApp and that if they wanted to reach me they could call me, text me or message me on Telegram. I immediately uninstalled it.
I noticed friends and family found it a bit odd and inconvenient that I’d stopped using WhatsApp. And many companies seem to use WhatsApp to contact their customers (why can’t they just email me instead…) and it seems they automatically assume everyone uses it, which I find a bit annoying. But ever since uninstalling it no one has been able to convince me to reinstall it and I plan to keep it that way.
UK here. Most people I work with will have Signal or Telegram. However my kids and the parents groups and schools all use WhatsApp.
None of them could get their friends to switch from WhatsApp. Nobody gives a shit at all about Meta and their dodgy data practices. Convenience is king. “aLL mY frIEnDs aRE oN WHatSaPp!”
They will literally be excluded if they don’t use it.
Super-frustrating and makes me feel pretty helpless tbh.
Basically the same here. WhatsApp is basically “dial-a-boomer” on my phone.
Little sad that Signal dropped SMS support, but I get it.
I’m in the US. Never used Whatsapp in my life, and don’t know anyone that does. I just text people. It would be weird if someone tried to get me to use WhatsApp and tbh I’d probably just say no.
At work we use Slack and Google Meet.
+1, in the US Whatsapp is the thing you download when you’re traveling abroad, and has no other presence at all
Yes? And America? Wtf kinda country forces whatsapp?
I don’t think the implication is that the government is forcing anyone to use WhatsApp, but that in some places it controls enough share of the messaging market that people are forced to use it because that’s what everyone else is using.
No one said it is forced. It ia relatable to me as I live in East Europe and all my people use WhatsApp. It really is the main way of communication.
Businesses also use WhatsApp. Like boutique or handmade good stores, to have special requests or, for anything you can name as a conversation.
We have family group in WhatsApp. Any special occasion or events, we communicate on that group.
Like, 10-15 years before, it was MSN or equivalents. It evolved to WhatsApp. Telegram, too.
edit: Sorry I misread the title :) But I still don’t think people are forced to use WhatsApp. This is the way it goes.
No one said it is forced
The OP uses the word forced in the title
Yeah but one can infer that it’s not a literal governmental force but a societal force
Thank God we’ve kept the Reddit tradition of not reading the article, the comment, or the post title.
I was starting to miss that.
/s
Isn’t it so cool? It keeps me motivated to argue.
Yeah, like context and reading comprehension. Are we still doing that?
I instantly edited my comment when I re-read the title to check if op actually said “forced”. Thanks for reading my full comment.
Remember when it used to be $0.10 or like a quarter per sms message or something ridiculous? Back when you didn’t have a proper web browser etc on your phone. You know before smartphones were a thing. The companies were able to hold us hostage for text messaging etc because of that.
Now imagine you live in a country where they tried to do that post smartphone’s. Everyone in those countries de facto turned to alternate services like WhatsApp for texting and even calling. So it wasn’t like a government mandated thing. But it was more of an effective mandate because of carriers. This includes most of the world outside the United States. Over in Europe. WhatsApp is common for this very reason. South America again same thing. All because of carriers trying to overcharge but forgetting the internet had become a thing in everyone’s life.
US here. Companies I work for use Teams, Zoom, Outlook, WebEx, RingCentral, GChat for comms.
Personally among friends and family, we use Signal.
Nobody I know uses WhatsApp or even has it installed.
USA here - I work for a fortune 500 technology industry company…We use MS Teams internally for most stuff, mostly use MS Teams for organized conf calls internally and with customers, and then use regular text messaging for one-off messages with each other and customers. We don’t use whatsapp at all for anything - I am pretty sure I don’t even have a whatsapp account.
None of my friends use whatsapp either. I communicate with most of my friends and family via text message, a few of my more paranoid friends will only chat via “Signal”, and then for bigger group chats we use Discord.
‘MS Teams’ Shudders
Unfortunately, after you eliminate all the collab services blatantly handing their data to government-backed built-in spy services, and all the services with off-shore backend servers, and all the services with poor track records for security, MS Teams is one of the only options left…as shitty as it is. Our customers insist on it, so we bend to their will.
My company used to use WhatsApp for official communication. Then it came out that Facebook was going to start collecting a whole crap ton of information from users, so I downloaded Signal and told my small group of coworkers that WhatsApp was not secure for official communication. They all downloaded it and eventually the whole company moved to it.
All it takes is a few people to switch over in a friend group or work setting and for them to advocate for its benefits to get large groups to move. Gotta keep pushing for it.
Edit: This is the US where most people use SMS for personal communication though.
I’m in the US and we use SMS instead of any specific app. It’s a pretty shitty protocol, but it’s at least not tied to any company.
Maybe in 2040 we’ll get an upgraded protocol when companies megacorps actually decide to try and bridge protocols.
Modern Android devices already use RCS, we just need Apple to get on board.
Apple is well known for their love of open standards, of course…
Edit: I really wish they would. I have an iPhone and cannot stand how they hold back multimedia messages when non-Apple phones are included.
Unfortunately, iMessage’s proprietary format is far more common than RCS in the US, it works better than RCS, and apple makes a lot of money using it to keep people tied to their ecosystem, so it’s unlikely anything is going to change without government action
Though I wouldn’t say Androids get it. More like Google Messages and a very few select apps get RCS. It’s a standard protocol in theory. In practice, not so much. I think there’s like 3 total apps. You’ll probably never see a FOSS RCS app, or one that isn’t tied to a big corp. Server implentations of RCS also aren’t standard, but most use Google Jibe.
That’s exactly what I was getting at
German here. My last employer was visibly confused when I told him that I neither have a Whatsapp account nor a smartphone, and didn’t want either one. Apparently it was his preferred way of changing shifts last minute and he was pissed that I didn’t want to participate in that bullshit. So you want to send me a notification after effing midnight that I have to come in at 5 AM instead of 6 AM? Miss me with that shit.
Luckily I found a better job elsewhere (and they do NOT require any social media accounts - if they want to change something, they call me and ASK whether I am ok with it).
That’s crazy, my employer won’t even call my cell phone unless it’s a dire emergency, which pretty much never happens.
My employer is the same and they added it to my pay when they did have to once.
Mine used to give me a stipend and when they stopped that I told them I won’t be using my personal phone for work anymore. They never called or gave me shit over it. My old boss called me once after that but that was to go get a beer.
Did you get a beer with him/her?
Yup, we ended up doing happy hour on a semi regular basis with a few people from work up until the pandemic.
Wouldn’t be easier to use them instead of him/her? Just curious
If you want the real answer, I had already typed him realized it could have been a woman so then did slash her. Them would have been easier if I had started that way. The way I did it I’m not sure which was easier. But it’s what I did and I’m sticking with it.
Ah kk. Nothing wrong with it at all, I was just curious why.
Japan. I’ve never used whatsapp. It is neither popular here nor important for business communication.
Norway. For whatever reason, Whatsapp hasn’t really taken off as far as I know. Instead people are all over the place with messaging services. Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, Instagram DM, Signal, Telegram and SMS. I’m sure there’s more.
South America, Brazil. Everything has been taken by meta. From private to business. If you don’t use it, you get that look as if you were some strange unfit person. Try to challenge somebody asking why there is no alternative, you’ll get that look again. Doctors, lawyers, real estate, rentals, pharmacy, schools, online classes, local business, everyday communications, online purchases, receipts, invoices, returning items you bought, financial advices, government related stuff (gov won’t do a damn thing to include another official channel of communicating, it suites them very well, “Please use whatsapp for your convince, we want you to be satisfied”, not the other way around. You ain’t survive without this crap. Don’t resist or else.
That is fucking horrifying. How did it ever get to that point?
Cellular carriers were charging disproportionately for sms and calls, so people where looking for cheap alternatives and unfortunately meta/facebook zucced the entire nation by being in the right place at the right time (with enormous help of word-of-mouth marketing that sealed the deal and some additional help coming from meta I suppose). Government never cared nor questioned why everything was provided for free, zero cost, no questions asked and regular folks didn’t have time or even bother to do some research. And on the top of it, local carriers to make things even better, introduced the zero-rate for zucced app which basically elevated this crapp to some divine status. And now we have wechat called ZAP, as a solution for every kind of communication. Nowadays even if you proved that this crapp is doing some harm to you in alot of ways, nobody would care. It’s as normal as flipping on a light switch, simply nobody think about it anymore, it’s there and that’s about it.
That’s absolutely awful. I wish there was something we could do or some advice that might help but I have nothing. I hope some radical change comes along in the future and fixes this ☹️
Australia here.
None of my friends or clients have ever contacted me in whatsapp.
I use telegram with my friends.
In SEA it seems like everyone is using Line. Fuck me I hate line.
Salvadorian here. Ppl here definetly use whatsapp as a pretty much jack of all trades, including work stuff. Weirdly enough people don’t care about privacy, despite the fact that any other messenger app is far way superior that whatsapp, people just don’t use it or put any excuse to not even try.
Hell, if you tell em “I don’t have an account/wa installed” like myself, they pretty try to exclude you or advice you to install it and to stop being a pain in the ass to deal with, it’s just plain ridiculous
