HN user

ommz

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Ah... There's a pattern here. Soon enough, just like with Facebook pages eons ago, they will nerf the reach of WhatsApp channels then prod channel owners to pay for more eyeballs.

It should be a law of nature that whatever Meta/Facebook acquires will surely be ad-riddled & 'spyware' infested regardless of the "we won't" promises they swear to abide by.

Tangent, I find Instagram to be one of the most egregious battery drainers amongst mainstream apps. A former IG employee made a claim here on HN that the inefficiency was due to ghastly experiments being run on clients devices. Shame, I cannot seem to find that comment.

Guaranteed anti-features from Facebook's playbook:

- Non-chronological home feed (to force-feed ads & gate-keep influence)

- Nerf users' reach to force them into buying ads

- Perpetual PII data-gobbling

- Draconian account control rules (to pad user numbers?...hmmn)

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The disclaimers, or more succinctly, the anti-feature section.

Xiaomi phones and their apps especially the freaking weather app are routine offenders on my firewall. I use NoRoot Firewall (beta version), that runs a local VPN, to whitelist connections and man, it's horrifying. I've enabled the "Always on VPN" and "Block connections without VPN" settings (Android 10) so NOTHING goes out unless through the firewall