Fucking morons. I’ve been looking for a new apartment and messaging a ton of real estate agents lately, and WhatsApp just decided to block me for ‘suspicious activity.’ They already restricted my account a couple of days ago, and I almost missed an apartment viewing because of it. And I‘ve already done that for three moves before with zero issues. I live in a country where literally all communication with real estate agents happens on WhatsApp, so now I’ll have to go out tomorrow and get a whole new phone number if they don’t unblock me or Im gonna end up on the street. Fucking morons. Fuck you, Crapsapp, and your piece-of-shit messenger
Welp, here’s the thing. Real estate agents typically like getting paid. So I figure if you tell them “Hey, I don’t have whatsapp. Let’s email or text instead.”, they would do it, because a sale is a sale. They aren’t agreeing to give anything up. And it’s a very temporary situation from their perspective.
Also, I find it wild that meta (facebook), which owns whatsapp, controls the platform that an entire country relies on for any communication within an industry that dictates where you live. That is crazy. That feels like a lot of corruption must have had to happen for that to have happened.
WhatsApp has market share from the momentum gained in countries that didn’t have free/cheap SMS. I too find it wild that it’s the default in most of the world, and it’s super shady and super proprietary. The messaging that we have in the US is far far far from perfect, but at least it’s not Facebook Chat.
Also, that momentum was gained before whatsapp was bought by Facebook
Bingo, this is an anti-trust question
Dumbfucks. Corporations will always be bought by worse corporations, and if you don’t understand that, you deserve to suffer.
Plus in markets like Brazil, having unlimited use of WhatsApp services, including video calls, is a selling point for most cellular providers. You will have a data cap but could still video call your grandma on WhatsApp when you’re out of data. Every business has their WhatsApp number posted out front and on their websites/social media.
For example, here is Claro, a large Brazilian phone company’s cheapest current plan, 36GB of data but unlimited WhatsApp usage and 5GB for social media.
(Translated from Firefox)Crazy, in my county it’s almost the same but Tik Tok instead of WhatsApp
What the FUCK? Why would the providers do that?
It (potentially) allows them to charge at both ends. I don’t know if that’s what happens in Brasil specifically but it happens in a couple of countries.
The providers charge the users for the data use and the services for being exempt from the data caps.
I betcha this is the answer, they’re probably doing that as a deal with the telecom companies because WhatsApp what’s the market share and control, so that’s why they agree to it.
Yep! That’s why net neutrality is so important.
isnt wechat popular in asia.
If you have 100 applications per apartment and only one wants to do it via e-mail, then we both know what’s going to happen.
In the country I live you can‘t pay to real estate agents (it‘s prohibited). They are getting paid by the landlords, plus the rental market is pretty scarce so usually they don‘t give a fuck about you as they have a ton of inquiries from other potential renters
Effectively, they are getting paid by you, landlords factors that fee into the rent. But I get the point that the market favours landlords where you live and you might not have the privilege to ask for accommodations like communicating over SMS. This WhatsApp situation is fucked up, that your basic life functionality depends on a single unaccountable commercial entity.
My practical advice would be to buy an eSIM with a new number, there are very cheap options (like one used for travel) and you would practically need it just one time to get a verification code.
They’re also typically the laziest people in the world. The hate to expend any amount of effort and they don’t get much from commissions if it’s a rental.
When I was buying my house it took the sellers 5 months to sort out the paperwork. It took them any half a year to process the purchase of a single house.
> drink verification can
Don’t forget to do the dance
That’s actually infuriating. The fact that the real estate landscape is based on Whatsapp should just be illegal. Don’t agree with whatsapp T&C? Go homeless. Do we need to remind who is whatsapp?
Same with cellular providers giving unlimited data on Whatsapp on a 25GB plan. Straight to jail.
Turns out, most of the globe is still charging out the ass for texting. It throws me off when hotels still closely guard their wifi and/or use access tokens.
Fuck Meta… What’s wrong with email? You’re free to choose your provider, and it’s more convenient than a mess of WhatsApp messages. All communication I’ve had with real estate agents in Australia has been via email.
Second time* I saw Meta mentioned here, did Meta buy WhatsApp?
Lol yes
So uh, is Facebook messenger just Whatsapp with a different logo then? (Sorry don’t use any of these apps so I would have never noticed, haha)
I’m proud of you for just being mildly infuriated about this. I’d be pure rage monster. You’ve got the patience of a saint!
A lot of mildly infuriating content is mostly infuriating but posted here due to the lack of extremely infuriating community. So post like this have the “dumbledore asked calmly” vibe.
The downside of this is when the actual mildly infuriating stuff came in it likely not gonna be well received.
For sure. I wasn’t talking shit. Just commiserating about how burn-the-city-down infuriating this is in a jokey way.
!actually_infuriating@lemmy.world
We have a small comm there, we should start to use it.
Pal, you’re a few decades late to the Facebook sucks conversation.
Decades?
Facebook was launched in 2004, and I don’t remember any large movement against them in 2006, that only really started going mainstream with the 2019 Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.
No, it started before that where employers were asking for things like your Facebook page. Now they are requiring a LinkedIn profile. Everyone requires your phone number to register with their service. Then they can arbitrarily decide to ban you from their service. There should be massive lawsuits about this.
Yes, and it was obvious then what a shit show it was.
That is exactly my point, Facebook sucked from round about it’s existence! You nailed it!
Are you copy-pasting the same message across many chats? If so, try varying them a little.
Bullshit, I know.Meta is changing how they price messages sent on the WhatsApp Business API (they’ll start charging for every single message now) and lately they’ve gone haywire trying to ban unofficial WhatsApp Automation services.
If you try to use their crap even a little faster than the average Joe, you get caught in the crossfire.If you send the same message across a couple contacts it’s already enough to flag you (especially in your case, since you’re likely sending messages to contacts you never spoken to before, right?)
And if you’re using WhatsApp Web it’s even worse.
And now that your account already got restricted once, it’s likely to keep getting worse unless you can afford to not use WhatsApp for like, a week for your number to “cool down”I too wish my country’s communications wasn’t so Intertwined with this garbage.
I was looking at visiting Costa Rica for a bit, read that even restaurants were using WA for orders. I couldn’t imagine relaying on Facebook’s company policy for my business
This is the reason you don’t ‘sign in with Google’ or Meta or whatever.
This is the reason digital infrastructure should be controlled by the commons. And punishment for misbehaving users should be decided by the state according to due process in a procedurally fair manner, not by corporations that seek to maximize profits.
I agree that is should just be a part of infrastructure like roads, but I’m not sure about the punishment. As long as people are prosecuted by local laws of residence, e.g. the laws might differ in my home country from the place you live. I don’t want to be judged by the puritan laws of the USA, which seem to be sliding backwards into what the christian religion says is okay. But we should take control away from the mega corporations before it is too late to do anything about it.
I don’t think that needs to be the case. At least in Sweden where I live, local laws apply whether you do something IRL or on the internet. For example slander is still slander even if you post it on Facebook. Meta doesn’t need to get involved any more than the phone operator or post office does.
Any email provider could do this
smaller providers are not so brave and quick with bans, or it would hurt their image. big providers don’t need to care about their image anymore.
Dawg, people in my country are shocked if your provider is anyone but Google.
Since when did real estate parasites, I mean agents, stop taking phone calls?
I get 3 cold calls a day from agents asking if I want to sell.
Different countries different communication networks. A while back Facebook was internet lots of countries because it was a way to get online in those places.
World is a weird place sometimes
out here they moved into television ads. only way to shut them up is a mute button
Yep this has been happening to me as well. I really want everyone to start using Signal but trying to convince people is like pulling teeth. It’s infuriating. WhatsApp fucking sucks.
I downloaded whatsapp because one friend back home used it and within the same day I was getting spam texts for the first time ever. Fortunately I convinced him to switch to signal and deleted that shit asap
We need to de couple from big tech before it’s too late.
META wants more data from you, i would ditch the app.
I’m hoping the age of self hosted chat platforms comes to fruition and I can get Meta the fuck out of my life, but it’s currently a hard sell between by friends
What country are u in that u have to go through whatsapp? Have only ever used my personal cell for stuff like this, if I have to download an app to do something you can bet I ain’t doing it lol. If there’s anything I have learned its that if it needs an app, it doesn’t fucking work.
Could be germany. WhatsApp is very widely used here, because back then in the olden days SMS flat rate was expensive. And WhatsApp was ideal, because it worked even on throttled data rates, so you could use it even if you ran out of data. So making it basically a free alternative to SMS.
Interesting! I didn’t even have a phone with data until after the unlimited minutes and texts were standard on most plans lol.
My take on this one (as a prospective home buyer) is that I don’t want to have to deal with real estate agents at all, particularly if they demand to be paid on commission; When they’re paid on commission, they benefit by being lazy and not attempting to negotiate down the price of the home. I home that real estate agents are automated away in the future.
I said whatsapp is not safe once. Glad (and horrified) to see I was correct. P2P encryption means nothing if the clients just report the data out via a side-channel once decrypted.
