Meta Follows Users Into Private Conversations

Chat groups are the new social networks.

Through the years, Facebook has morphed from a place where you could share pictures and stories with your friends to a full-fledged advertising platform. Today, you no longer control what you see. The feed is curated for you, but not with criteria you would probably approve if were explicitly asked. Attention maximization and ad monetization are the drivers.

Mark Zuckerberg explains this change in an interview with Stratechery’s Ben Thompson: (Replace “discovery” with “monetization” where appropriate.)

Today, we think about Facebook and Instagram and Threads, and I guess now, the Meta AI app too and a bunch of other things that we’re doing, as these discovery engines. Most of the interaction is not happening in feed. What’s happening is the app is like this discovery engine algorithm for showing you interesting stuff and then, the real social interaction comes from you finding something interesting and putting it in a group chat with friends or a one-on-one chat. So there’s this flywheel between messaging which has become where actually all the real, deep, nuanced social interaction is online and the feed apps, which I think have increasingly just become these discovery engines.
(…)
Where just going forward, people are not primarily going to be interacting in line, it’s going to be primarily about content and then, most of the interaction is going to be in messaging and group chat.

Even if not explicitly said, Facebook and Instagram have become “discovery engines” because Meta steered both products in that direction, where attention grabbing and monetization is maximized.

Some days ago, Meta announced the introduction of channel subscriptions, promoted channels, and ads in WhatsApp. Now that people are fleeing to WhatsApp for interactions with family, friends, and colleagues, Meta is following them there.

Ads, channel suggestions, and promoted channels will appear in the Updates section of the app. Never heard of that section? The image below is WhatsApp Updates page, taken from the Meta announcement. See the similarities with the Facebook app.

If showing ads and promoted channels in the Updates section doesn’t work as expected, I have no doubt that WhatsApp will start showing ads into the messages itself. Because of end-to-end encryption this can be done without Meta knowing the content of our conversations. End-to-end encryption is for WhatsApp not just a privacy feature, but a competitive differentiator.

Are users leaving WhatsApp because of this announcement? Probably not. Users complain but rarely migrate en masse unless there is a compelling alternative. With the exception of the US, WhatsApp is probably the dominant chat app in most of the world. Even in the US, according to Meta, WhatsApp will be the dominant platform in two or three years.

Have you considered migrating to another chat app?