… 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.
America. Most everyone uses SMS. Unlimited SMS texting is standard for nearly all cell plans.
NW Europe here.
I can’t stop using WhatsApp without taking a significant hit to my social life.
Australia, I have never used whatsapp
Australian here. Don’t know of anyone who uses WhatsApp. Different organizations and demographics uses a range of different platforms like Facebook messenger, MS Teams, Slack, Discord etc. From my perspective those are all about the same level.
At least most official comms either government or business is SMS, phone, or email.
Happy for other Aussies to correct me of course, thsrs just my quick perspective
Norway. I’ve never used WhatsApp and don’t know anybody that uses it. Everybody is on Facebook messenger, snapchat or discord.
South America, Brazil. Everything has been taken by meta. From private to business. If you don’t use it, you get that look as if you were some strange unfit person. Try to challenge somebody asking why there is no alternative, you’ll get that look again. Doctors, lawyers, real estate, rentals, pharmacy, schools, online classes, local business, everyday communications, online purchases, receipts, invoices, returning items you bought, financial advices, government related stuff (gov won’t do a damn thing to include another official channel of communicating, it suites them very well, “Please use whatsapp for your convince, we want you to be satisfied”, not the other way around. You ain’t survive without this crap. Don’t resist or else.
That is fucking horrifying. How did it ever get to that point?
Cellular carriers were charging disproportionately for sms and calls, so people where looking for cheap alternatives and unfortunately meta/facebook zucced the entire nation by being in the right place at the right time (with enormous help of word-of-mouth marketing that sealed the deal and some additional help coming from meta I suppose). Government never cared nor questioned why everything was provided for free, zero cost, no questions asked and regular folks didn’t have time or even bother to do some research. And on the top of it, local carriers to make things even better, introduced the zero-rate for zucced app which basically elevated this crapp to some divine status. And now we have wechat called ZAP, as a solution for every kind of communication. Nowadays even if you proved that this crapp is doing some harm to you in alot of ways, nobody would care. It’s as normal as flipping on a light switch, simply nobody think about it anymore, it’s there and that’s about it.
That’s absolutely awful. I wish there was something we could do or some advice that might help but I have nothing. I hope some radical change comes along in the future and fixes this ☹️
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?