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> Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services

Rounded to the nearest meaningful number - 0%




I don't know, I expect it to be at least %3 as this is the general conversion rate for "free" users AFAIK.

There must be some some number that makes it viable to have free users and paid users. For games, the free users are usually those who provide the "content".

People usually demonize freemium games but IMHO its much more benign than extracting huge sums by artificially making it worse and sell attention.


Most of those are tricked into it by manipulative UI or nearly impossible to cancel trials or forgotten monthly subscriptions.


How is it possible to have impossible to cancel trails? On AppStore it's in your account and takes 2 taps to cancel regardless of what the developer does.

Are you talking for direct, by credit card payments that somehow you can't cancel? Can you explain a bit?


The abuse was so rampant that even the US has had to legislate. US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) introduced a new regulation, known as the “click to cancel” rule.

As for the darkest of dark patterns - give Adobe some money and see what happens.


Right, my rule of thumb is to stick with AppStore and when that's not an option use a Virtual card that I can just abandon if I don't want to use the service.


Play Store also does this now and it's a fundamentally radical departure from the era where if you give the company your card info directly theres a high chance you aren't going to be able to get out of it without paying at least some amount more than you should.

Think gyms where you refuse to cancel even when you are physically there in person with someone to yell at and imagine trying to do the same online where there's not a phone number, or a phone number with a 1 hour wait and a CSR paid based on if they can successfully not give you what you want


you're being too generous, as if people were on whatsbook because of a value they get.

they are just there for the captive network effect, which will take a hit the second or becomes a freemium or ad ridden service.


Yeah, nobody uses Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or Google anymore now that they’re “ad-ridden”


none of those are blasting "encryption! only you can read your messages" as their main message and marketing.

those are literal public forums people go to expose themselves. you don't have a very good point.


Whatsapp is messaging-focused, but I'm willing to bet the quotation you just gave is not even 10% of the reason people choose to use it.

If I understand it correctly, people use it mainly because MMS was a dumpster fire and WA was the first platform which got critical mass in most countries, which it achieved by being both pretty good overall and by being cross-platform.

The encryption is a nice bonus that everybody likes, but you can't prove that is a primary or even major reason why plumbers in India, tour guides in Dubai, and school parent groups in the US all choose to communicate with it, personally and professionally. If anything, I feel like Signal must have by now poached a good number of the people whose main concern is "How encrypted is it?"

Also, Gmail is not a public forum and people don't mind that it's 'ad-ridden' either.


I don't think anybody in my non-tech circle even knows that messages are encrypted. It's just a convenient way to message people and share pictures from android phones. At some point in the past it was viber and before that fb messenger. I know older people who wouldn't know how to attach a document to an email but can share vacation photos via whatsapp, and we have group chats between friends and family. People also care about their chat history, and if they don't know that the data is encrypted and needs to be backed up, they loose it when transferring to a new device. It's happening all the time, a lot of common users would expect chats to just stay in the cloud somewhere and be available.


Gmail is the least ad ridden property on google ever.

i don't think people join because it's encrypted, but they wouldn't use when it's not. it too can became the dumpsterfire that sms was/is.


it's probably under 0% even including the 2% error margin.


Rounding up




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