It reminds me of this: Every time Yahoo sneaks into the tech news, somebody posts a comment along the lines of:

"TIL Yahoo still exists"

or

"What? There's still a Yahoo?".

It's almost like there's a bot that adds these comments.

Apparently, there is no overlap between Yahoo users and people into cool tech. (I am still a Yahoo email user, so I guess I don't like cool tech).

Whats a yahoo?

In Europe it's common for businesses to use whatsapp for customer contact and not even be setup to receive phone calls. That despite how unfavorably meta as a whole is viewed. I'd in fact attribute X's steep decline to how much it has become a single message platform and pushed out those niche communities to other technologies.

I still remember my own shock at learning how huge of a Brazilian user base Google+ had years after falling into obscurity in the english speaking world.

Might you be mistaking Orkut for Google+? Orkut was the social network (owned by Google) that was hugely popular in Brazil.

And India too I think.

I think you can even see your old Orkut data in a Google Takeout (I saw it a few years back)

This makes me wonder what my Orkut email address was. My Gmail was a beta test one from 2004, so that is post-Orkut.

Orkut was launched in 2004 too

That's wild, thank you. I could have sworn it launched in 2000 and was very much earlier than Facebook.

Europe's infatuation with WhatsApp is bizarre. The EU is supposedly a bastion of privacy but goes all-in on a proprietary, siloed communication channel. Given their predilection for enforcing standards usage, you'd think there'd be a move for a federated SMS successor that works with IP clients to counter the risk of dependency on an American company with so much power.

Not bizarre at all. Many EU countries mobile users have "prepaid" SIMs. Whatsapp came at the perfect moment - mobile operators were starting to offer decently priced data plans but were also still very stingy with SMS (which was a bit of a cash cow for them, infra costs were very low) and essentially never added at the time advanced features (like MMS) to any prepaid plan ever. Many of these operators never really recovered from becoming dumb pipes.

Now the network effects have set in and it's hard to remove "naturally" WhatsApp, combined with the rise of VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate (like they tolerated things like premium ringtones and numbers until they were forced not to)

> VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate

The fact that this still hasn't been solved in the year 2026 makes me wish nothing but bankruptcy on the entire legacy POTS system. Burn it all to the ground.

>Whatsapp came at the perfect moment - mobile operators were starting to offer decently priced data plans but were also still very stingy with SMS (which was a bit of a cash cow for them, infra costs were very low) and essentially never added at the time advanced features (like MMS) to any prepaid plan ever.

Right, this explains the history of why Europeans (and others) don't use SMS any more and use chat apps, namely WhatsApp. But still, that was many years ago, and there are many other (and better) chat apps out there now. The EU has been agitating a lot against US tech dominance, but they seem stuck on WhatsApp from Meta; they should have been moving to something else a long time ago.

I don't think the dependency from Whatsapp (it's arguable other apps are "better" or not and on which axis) is critical. WA has alternatives (up to "no app at all" thanks to RCS).

The real issue with US tech dominance is B2B (i.e. Microsoft)

In my experience most people have at least one other chat app installed. Signal, Telegram, Facebook (I think there's a built in messenger), discord, and snapchat are all common. It's just that practically everyone has Whatsapp, so that's the common denominator.

Not only does Facebook have Messenger, but it's actually a (pretty) good privacy option. It went full on default end-to-end encrypted a couple years ago. Telegram doesn't do that, you have to jump through some hoops. Signal does but it's honestly pretty niche. Everyone from your grandma to your kids has Facebook though and somehow Zuckerberg decided his data-Hoover shouldn't extend to everyone's conversations. It's surprisingly good.

WhatsApp became popular long before Meta bought it in 2014. Signal and Telegram both came late to the scene, both around the time of the WhatsApp acquisition. Whatsapp was simply in the right place at the right time with little competition, and a combination of network effects and Meta mostly leaving it alone make it hard to get enough traction for anything else

The US has more of an Apple-monoculture and apparently moved to unlimited SMS plans much earlier than Europe, so iMessage was able to fill the same niche

And to give them credit: WhatsApp also had brilliant engineering that was able to scale with their popularity.

Green bubble / blue bubble social and culture wars are not a thing in Europe.

They're not a thing almost anywhere outside the US (and maybe Canada).

They're not really a thing in the US either, outside of people trying to engagement bait on social media.

Not that bizarre when you are paying something like 5-10 cents per SMS (~2010), you will quickly find alternative solutions. WhatsApp was just there, communication for free. Then you Viber, Telegram and others.

I had an iPhone and I was considering iMessage to be just fancy name for SMS, so I have avoided using it. Only years later I have found out that it was actually communication platform similar to WhatsApp, which can fallback on SMS.

My pet theory is that it's just because don't have a critical mass of iOS users to make iMessage viable and still wanted features at least half a decade before RCS got to a usable state.

Whatsapp was just too convenient at a time no good alternatives existed, and when Smartphones were not ubiquitous.

It was free while SMS was not, and it ran on basically every cellphone that existed, no matter how shitty it was.

Network effects mean that replacing it is extremely hard. I tried getting people I know into Signal, Telegram, anything else. All those attempts were short lived.

I can't see it changing without some actual external intervention (e.g.: Meta being barred from operating it in Europe, etc).

The example was just mentioned as an extreme thing that would move this particular needle, not as something I think can oe will realistically happen.

That might be more likely now given recent events

Its definitely not the norm though. I live in central europe and never had whatsapp. Sure some companies offer whatsapp support but they also take email.

This seems like the sort of anecdotal experience the post to which you’re responding is talking about haha

Yep, it is a thing in a handful of Western European countries.

Media outlets frequently cite Twitter posts which perhaps adds to the perception that its use is more widespread than other social media.

None of my Asian friends live in China or India, so clearly there’s no one living there.

I work on a product with >200 million monthly active users and see this all the time. If you only read our product's subreddit you'd think we're a failing business with customers dropping like flies. Meanwhile in the real world we have an incredibly enthusiastic userbase that's growing at a clip.

How many of your monthly active users are bots?

Very few. It's not a social media app, news site, forum or anything that would benefit from scraping or posting. There's no public "feed" or anything like that. It's a tool.

You're right. I don't think many HNers realize what a bubble HN is, within a bigger bubble of the SF tech scene.

Your comment remind me of the ~15 year old hype around Q&A sites. You have VCs say things like "everyone I know uses Quora" and that helped hype it up. But for anyone a little removed, Quora was just Yahoo Answers 2.0. And still is. This was a couple of years after Stackoverflow came out.

Remember the hype around location and Foursquare?

Anyway, it is important to remember that if you're actively on HN, you're not a normie and you probably have a very skewed view of what normies do and use.

Another example of what you're talking about (with essentialy isolated communities) was Orkut, which was hugely popular in Brazil and a couple of other places.

> Remember the hype around location and Foursquare?

There are dozens of us still doing regular check-ins with Swarm, the check-in app that Foursquare rebranded years ago. Maybe hundreds even! It's a good time to join, mayorships are easier to get than ever and there are no busybodies left pushing pointless app updates!

> Anyway, it is important to remember that if you're actively on HN, you're not a normie and you probably have a very skewed view of what normies do and use.

And what if you're on HN and don't use what other are using there? I don't use AI. I don't use social media. I don't use JS frameworks. I don't use Go or Rust. I bang out HTML/JS/CSS by hand in an editor that is not VSCode when I write UIs. I also don't use Docker. Am I even allowed here?!

Yes, you are in fact absurdly overrepresented on here, not just compared to general populace but even in tech -comparison would e.g. be techy subreddits. Ironically proving GP's point pefectly.

Never mind foursquare, clubhouse had it beat even more as “product that absolutely captured HN power users (including VCs) and approximately no one else”.

For a month or two at least, then even those groups got bored

> People keep claiming that Facebook has no users anymore and that Meta's numbers must be fake

I only ever hear this stuff from people that don't use Facebook. It's a self-selecting crowd and they have their fingers in their ears and theirs eyes closed shut while yelling into the void trying to convince themselves everyone else is just like them. Except all that's out there is the same echo chamber of people that also are doing the exact same thing.

I hear this stuff from people who do use Facebook. They just don't consider their use "use." It's weirdly dissonant.

that's what happens with stuff that is so popular it becomes infrastructure. It's like the guy who goes "ew I haven't touched Java in ten years" while half the stuff he uses runs on it. WhatsApp in some countries is less of a ChatApp you use than a thing you live in.

Like the psychology bit that Freud seems absurd because all that's left to us are his mistakes because the rest has been so thoroughly absorbed you don't even realize it

I found with FB if you’re in some community that uses it then that’s it, you either use it or miss out.

For a long time my running group used it, and while it still does, the WhatsApp community is more used now. My (Catholic) church still uses Facebook for many announcements along with its own website.

You're probably being downvoted as most here are conflating WhatsApp and FB as both are owned by Meta so you're distinction is moot in the context of this discussion.

Nah, I'm getting the impression from having a Facebook login and it looking like the platform best representing Dead Internet Theory. That's compared with other Meta platforms I've invested a lot less time in trying to cultivate a social network on which friends actually still communicate on, so it's not like I'm part of some self-selecting group of hardline opponents.

I can remember when my Facebook feed was full of travel and baby pictures (not to mention much earlier days when it was how you got invited to parties) Now when I log in, the feed is full of slop, with maybe one actual update from someone I last saw in high school 20 years ago. That's not just because they're filling the feed with slop for the sake of it. If I navigate to a friend's profile their most recent updates are probably their last three birthdays, each with generic greetings offered by 3-5 people presumably not close enough to have their phone number. My last few friend requests are all bots. I'm sure people still habitually click the app and scroll for a few moments, and also sure it might be different for communities in India or Brazil but yeah... it really isn't what it used to be for regular people who heavily used it for at least a decade and couldn't care less about privacy concerns or Zuck's politics. It's gone from social network to third rate clickbait feed which happens to be a default app on more phones than the better ones...

As for Threads, there was something about the way they tried to entice signups with the world's dullest clickbait that just didn't induce me to see if anyone actually used it for stuff.

I still log into Facebook monthly to see updates from my parents/relatives, who still use it somewhat regularly. I can't remember the last time I saw a post from anyone I know personally under the age of 60, aside from the one guy who posts political rants every day.

I hear a lot of people talk about Facebook Marketplace, but that's not a thing where I live, that probably pushes up the numbers a lot. When I do log in I sometimes check on some of the retro tech/homelabbing communities and they seem pretty popular with many posts a day, so there are definitely people there.

I still don't know anyone who uses Threads, literally.

I know tons of people who use Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc. I don't know a single person who uses Threads.