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The more I think about the acquisition the more I wished WhatsApp would've stayed on their own. $500 million a year is great. I wish they would've pulled a Craigslist and become more of a cultural institution than another acquisition; focus more on making chat amazing.

I feel like that would've had a larger, net positive effect on the public consciousness. People would see WhatsApp doing it for what's right(don't be evil) then what's profitable and I think that's just a good sentiment to have out there in the aether.

They could've easily, easily taken on the Google/Facebook conglomerate.




I wish they would've pulled a Craigslist and become more of a cultural institution than another acquisition; focus more on making chat amazing.

Well, I guess that when you've raised 58M in funding it's difficult to stay as a cultural institution. Your investors would never allow you to do that.


> They could've easily, easily taken on the Google/Facebook conglomerate.

Even better that any of these NSA-friendly conglomerates is the ChatSecure App:

"-UNBEATABLE PRIVACY: We keep your messages 100% private using state of the art Off-The-Record (OTR) encryption. Your conversations cannot be logged or intercepted by anyone.

-AD-FREE: We want your love, not your money" [1]

[1] https://guardianproject.info/apps/chatsecure/


> "I wish they would've pulled a Craigslist..."

EBay owns around 25% of Craigslist.


That's a little misleading. It's not like Craigslist wanted eBay as an investor. An ex-employee sold their stock to EBay.

Craigslist isn't about to change their ways because eBay owns a piece of them.


Then I wish they would've pulled a VSCOcam or something similar. Albeit they're not a cultural institution yet, they seem to be headed in that direction.




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