Madis

https://youtu.be/JOIp4s4YNEs

Okay, that is a very good point that I did not realize.

Because that way people thought they were directly paying for the service they were using, instead of being the product of said platform, having their personal data harvested and sold to the highest bidder?

Are you saying that people perceived WhatsApp as better than SMS or better than Facebook?

The red flag is to look at a free meal and not wonder what the catch might be. Especially to this day, with all we learned about what the tech majors do with all the data.

That’s not my point. My point is why would the majority of the world do this when they knew it was going to be paid.

I can’t think of other product examples where people would so gladly accept trial versions of otherwise free feature-equivalent services. Maybe WinRAR, but that could be replaced with any other product instantly anyway (no network effect), should it ever get enforce its trial.

Ironically, it got popular when it still tried to get users to subscribe to a monthly payment. And as it was one of the few messaging platforms to be (in the future) paid at all, I cannot understand why it ever got popular…

Well, sure, Meta cancelled the subscription plans later but to me it sounded a red flag in the first place.

Who knows what skeletons are still hiding?

Go and have a look? https://github.com/brave/brave-browser

My argument is that Brave is a Chromium browser with questionable business goals, but it is also the most private and secure, open-source, mainstream* Chromium browser. These keywords cannot be said about Vivaldi, Ungoogled Chromium and many other projects unfortunately.

That said, I primarily use Vivaldi because of its customizability and added features, something Firefox seems to reduce with every new version.

• Not quite on Edge or Opera level, and no accurate data can be found due to the removal of unique user agent, but nonetheless I’d argue it is more popular than others of similar kind.

For real though, how could AI be used to enhance browsing?

Well, in the 90-00s search engines were taught to be used with keywords. Then Google started to make it work with sentences and speech as well. Now AI is supposedly* answering complex questions and getting organized data for you.

• as long as the data is factual, which depends on your question, language model and availability of answers

I personally think it would be good if people had access to AI the same way search engines exist, but most AIs are still locked down to an account or payment, mainly for accountability and marketability purposes I’d say.

Well, at least the full app has the opt-in E2EE chats.

Well, true. But it is more reasonable to hate the manufacturer who refused to update, not the app devs who would have to do more work for small gain. Or unofficially update your own device, if possible.

Could be a library or feature that the devs didn’t consider worth maintaining on older devices.

For context, the OP appears to be using Android 5 or 5.1, released in 2014/2015 respectively and is used on 1.1-1.3% devices worldwide.

Well, the tweets also need login to see nowadays, so here’s an article for you: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-users-being-forced-sign-in-see-tweets-2023-7