To be able to send an SMS, you have to pay. Even if it is a small amount. There is at least some resistance. Especially to send junk to a lot of people together. But for Whatsapp, you can send junk to a large number of people absolutely free.
I am sure you are part of several Whatsapp groups where there is that one individual (or God forbid, even more) that spams the group every single day with meaningless junk that 99% of those in the group don't care about. Right?
Thankfully, none of my groups have the irritating Good Morning messages any more. There are some groups though, where there are folks who believe any breaking news has to be posted on the group otherwise people will not get to know about it!
Why don't you leave these groups, you ask? I can't. It is a group where I have some close folks and I don't want to hurt them. Plus there are some important updates posted from time to time. The best I can do is to mute them. Which I have already done.
How is this different from this blog? The blog is somewhere people need to voluntarily visit to see the posts. Not like Whatsapp where the junk comes to my phone without me doing anything to voluntarily access it. That is a very important difference.
I urge Meta, the company that owns Whatsapp to introduce a fee for sending messages. Maybe price it at half the SMS fee. Please don't keep it free. Importantly, if a message is being sent to a group that has 25 people, charge us for 25 messages.
This is really needed. For the sanity of yours truly. And the world.
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