> People didn't know I wasn't getting their messages.

They saw 2 ticks, meaning delivered to your device? Or did they see one tick, meaning only delivered to the server?

If it's the latter, that's a reasonable choice for the server to make. The server has acknowledged receipt of the message, and failed to send it to your device.

If you wanted WhatsApp to advertise to your contacts that your account was inactive, you could have maybe sent them a message yourself?

> The server has acknowledged receipt of the message, and failed to send it to your device.

Doing this without explicitly telling the other party is a dark pattern.

I would wager that most people using WhatsApp know the difference between one tick (server receipt), two ticks (client receipt) and two blue ticks (client actually read it).

Marking "Server received message and is holding it for user" with the same icon as "server received message and determined there is no such user" is dumb and bad and wrong, and probably also a dark pattern in this case.

If you click on the message you get a Message Info screen which shows you exactly what the state the message is and the timestamps. It explicitly says "Sent"/"Delivered"/"Read" alongside the ticks and at what time it happened.

I would take that wager. I certainly know what it means, and I imagine many users do, but the majority? I doubt it.

I can confirm my mother has no idea what these ticks mean. She can't make the difference between WhatsApp and iMessage either. At the time I left, I told her so and she kept wondering why I was not getting some of her messages (the ones she was sending on WhatsApp, that is).

I didn't know that until just now.

I didn't know that until after having used such apps for some year -- never thought much about those small symbols

@heipei: the curse of knowledge, i learned yesterday, via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25658216

Were you a regular user? I’d wager most regular users know this. It’s a verb among my friends, like “she’s blue-ticking me”.

What’s more, if you tap on “info” after long pressing any message, the app explains it to you.

Most users don't search for extra info screens and extra information in apps. ESPECIALLY not the older generations. I'd argue that the majority of people may understand the blue tick, but that _very_ few understand the difference between a single check and a double check.

Even the ones who do understand a little about the checks probably don't bother thinking about the difference between "sent" and "delivered". They'd understand it if it was pointed out to them, they aren't stupid. But they don't care enough to realize it because they shouldn't _need_ to understand it most of the time.

And even so, the checkmarks are very subtle and easy to not notice if you don't expect to need to look at them. A user is more likely to say "well it didn't give me an error so it must have sent, I wonder why nindalf is ghosting me" rather than "huh, I wonder if WhatsApp actually _delivered_ the message to nindalf, let me check"

I use it multiple times a day. I'm in half a dozen groups.

I use it somewhat reluctantly which might reduce the degree to which I actively seek out understanding. I wish we'd all go back to vendor neutral channels of communication but I also apprecitate the fact that it is less sucky than SMS.

I’ve been using WhatsApp a few times a day for the last year, a d infrequently for several years prior, and I had no idea.

What is with HN and throwing around words like dArK pAtTeRn?

No it’s not a dark pattern. They’re being as transparent as possible. If you long press the message and click “info” they even explain what each tick means and when each event took place. It’s literally not possible to be more transparent than that.

And before the privacy brigade who’ve not used the app show up, this is configurable. You can opt out of sending and receiving read receipts. And since it’s a closed app with no other implementation, you can’t circumvent that either.

You're wasting your time. This is HN - any decision made by by Facebook or a Facebook-owned company is automatically evil.

he deleted his account. it's absolutely not reasonable to accept my message without informing me the user I'm sending to is not on the platform anymore

I can only guess that people sending messages to my cancelled WhatsApp account saw only one tick. That's still meaningless to less skilled users and there's no way to tell if the user has gone forever or if they're just offline for a bit.

Anyway, my point is that WhatsApp shouldn't silently accept messages for a non existent user no matter what weak signals you get. When you send a text message to a non existent number, you get an error. Same for an e-mail.

I can't help but think it's a way to deter users from leaving WhatsApp.

Did these marks even exist 2yrs ago? I know they didn't when I started using WhatsApp ages ago, but I don't recall when they were added...

They've been present for at least 5 years

> WhatsApp kept accepting messages on my behalf. People didn't know I wasn't getting their messages.

As an FYI to you and anyone reading this, you can convert your account to a business account using WhatsApp for Business. It has an auto-reply feature that you can enable with a custom message, to inform people you've moved to whatever platform you've decided to move to.