alt Hacker News> Did you miss Myspace and Friendster?
MySpace was a) awful, b) only used by a tiny tiny fraction of people (1% maybe), and c) rarely had people's real names & photos on it. Not remotely comparable to Facebook. Even fewer people used Friendster and Orkut, at least in the UK.
> I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput
Free. No ads. Reliable. E2E encryption. Group chats. Cross platform. There's so much that's great about it. It was successful because the alternative was SMS which was shit. I'm guessing you're American.
> rarely had people's real names & photos on it
This is a feature, not a bug. There is nothing worse for a society's collective privacy than a surveillance machine where people willingly post every detail of their lives. Stalin would have dreamed of today's anti-social media as a surveillance tool.
> There's so much that's great about it.
There is also so much that's truly awful about it, such as Meta vacuuming up your contact list, photos, and recording extensive telemetry. And that's assuming messages are truly encrypted and not analyzed behind your back by Meta. E2EE is kind of meaningless when the endpoints cannot be trusted. SMS is insecure in transit but it isn't controlled by a single for-profit company with close ties to government agencies.