… is it possible to do any kind of business and/or have regular conversations without having to use whatsapp as a main way of communication?
If you’d like you can say in what country you’re living.
USA here. No we don’t use WhatsApp at all. I communicate with all friends and family on Telegram or SMS. For work we use Slack. I refuse to have any Facebook anything installed on my phone (I don’t use social media anyway…except for Lemmy now I guess if that counts haha)
I’m a proponent of breaking social media into two categories. There should be “personal media” or something where you use your real name and information, and some other name for social media that you use an alias. The fact Reddit/Lemmy are in the same category as Facebook seems dumb. We need a better way to describe it. Depending on how you define it, news sites with comment sections could be called social media if you wanted to, but it’s clearly something different than Facebook.
Yes? And America? Wtf kinda country forces whatsapp?
No one said it is forced. It ia relatable to me as I live in East Europe and all my people use WhatsApp. It really is the main way of communication.
Businesses also use WhatsApp. Like boutique or handmade good stores, to have special requests or, for anything you can name as a conversation.
We have family group in WhatsApp. Any special occasion or events, we communicate on that group.
Like, 10-15 years before, it was MSN or equivalents. It evolved to WhatsApp. Telegram, too.
edit: Sorry I misread the title :) But I still don’t think people are forced to use WhatsApp. This is the way it goes.
Thank God we’ve kept the Reddit tradition of not reading the article, the comment, or the post title.
I was starting to miss that.
/s
Remember when it used to be $0.10 or like a quarter per sms message or something ridiculous? Back when you didn’t have a proper web browser etc on your phone. You know before smartphones were a thing. The companies were able to hold us hostage for text messaging etc because of that.
Now imagine you live in a country where they tried to do that post smartphone’s. Everyone in those countries de facto turned to alternate services like WhatsApp for texting and even calling. So it wasn’t like a government mandated thing. But it was more of an effective mandate because of carriers. This includes most of the world outside the United States. Over in Europe. WhatsApp is common for this very reason. South America again same thing. All because of carriers trying to overcharge but forgetting the internet had become a thing in everyone’s life.
UK here. Most people I work with will have Signal or Telegram. However my kids and the parents groups and schools all use WhatsApp.
None of them could get their friends to switch from WhatsApp. Nobody gives a shit at all about Meta and their dodgy data practices. Convenience is king. “aLL mY frIEnDs aRE oN WHatSaPp!”
They will literally be excluded if they don’t use it.
Super-frustrating and makes me feel pretty helpless tbh.
I’m in the US. Never used Whatsapp in my life, and don’t know anyone that does. I just text people. It would be weird if someone tried to get me to use WhatsApp and tbh I’d probably just say no.
At work we use Slack and Google Meet.
I’m from Europe, and for years I’d been using WhatsApp because everyone expected me to even though I didn’t feel comfortable using it at all (because I care about my privacy and apparently not all of my friends/family members do). At some point I was forced to accept new terms that basically said it was okay for them to sell my data and that’s where I drew the line and told everyone that I would no longer be using WhatsApp and that if they wanted to reach me they could call me, text me or message me on Telegram. I immediately uninstalled it.
I noticed friends and family found it a bit odd and inconvenient that I’d stopped using WhatsApp. And many companies seem to use WhatsApp to contact their customers (why can’t they just email me instead…) and it seems they automatically assume everyone uses it, which I find a bit annoying. But ever since uninstalling it no one has been able to convince me to reinstall it and I plan to keep it that way.
