WhatsApp seems set on introducing ads, but they won't appear in your inbox

This seems to follow a progression

No ads
Non-intrusive ads
Intrusive ads, but you can pay to make them go away
Intrusive ads, but you can pay to make them less intrusive
Intrusive ads and you have to pay just to see the content
Content becomes ads
Ads pretend to be content (see Dr. Pepper's "Fansville")
Award categories for ads are featured in major award ceremonies
Award ceremonies just for ads go mainstream

Actually not sure what's real vs hypothetical at this point.

We've been through this before. FFS, the US has a whole event whose entire point for like 99% of the audience is to see which ads will be shown during the half time break. Cable still has 24h advertisement channels.
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This is how you end up with that scene in Demolition Man where they’re singing commercials.
(see Dr. Pepper's "Fansville")

Nice try, Dr. Pepper. If that is even your real name!
- Oh gosh. Did my critique of ads just become an ad?
I’m gonna be real, I prefer fansville style ads over traditional TV commercials.

Textbook enshittification.

Use Signal instead and donate what you can per month! I'd much rather support them than Meta

There's one slight issue with Signal and it's that none of my contacts is using it and I'm not going to be the guy telling them to install it just so that they can talk to me.
- In the EU by next year app communication protocols need to be compatible by law, it is mainly said that it would mean that whatsapp could communicate with telegram but I suppose it also should work with signal.
- You should. If they'll literally stop talking to you over an app choice how good of friends are they?
- Not gonna lie I did this with all of my friends and family and most of them switched 🤣 But I completely get not wanting to go there!
The only thing stopping me would be that literally no one on my contact list wants to do that... including work. I'm sure that's the same for most people.
Yeah great, then I can talk to literally nobody because I've never met a single person in my life who has signal, and now it doesn't even do texts anymore! Hooray!
- SMS was considered a safety issue amd discontinued.
  
  And if nobody in your friends group start talking about, nobody will get to know it.
- I'm using it. Thinking of bringing peoples from lemmy to signal.
- Just today I found out that usernames are available for public testing.
- Signal is this weird middle ground. I would prefer it if the person already has it. But if I am to try convincing someone to at least try another messaging solution, I would rather lead them to XMPP.
  
  Also having to use either signal-cli or Waydroid is VERY annoying, because they arbitrarily decided to screw desktop over.
Legitimate question: would Signal or Matrix be the most desirable place to end up in a hypothetical post-WhatsApp Hegemony world? Or XMPP for that matter?

I've honestly never got my head around the difference in terms of the pros and cons of each.
- I actually haven't heard of Matrix, it sounds like your knowledge on this topic surpasses my own!! I'm gonna research the things you mentioned though because I'm interested!

Time to find your matrix homeserver!

I do love the idea of matrix, but it's definitely not a direct replacement for whatsapp, sadly.
- How do you even search for it. What's it called ? Matrix brings up the film franchise
- Why not? What is missing?.
- Why not? I never tried it so I don't know the details

I hope that they put ads, lots and lots of ads, so I can finally switch to something else.

Waiting for WhatsApp enshittification do that I can move to more open platform

WhatsApp doesn't have an inbox. What are they talking about!?

It has a feed now full of podcasters and tiktokers, the web version offers me to buy ads for the feed right in the front of the messages, every time I open it, disgusting
- I don't see that. There's no feed anywhere as far as I can tell. I just see my chats. I didn't create any communities or join any channels. Is that where you see a feed?