I remember making an account in FB, post the 2008 US elections, and me being one of the couple of people from my group to have an account till 2010-11, post which FB took off like crazy and orkut died some years later. It was a couple of nice years for socmed.

It's already very difficult to avail banking if you don't carry a smartphone. I have a very inactive social media and I am working towards reducing my dependence on smartphones, at this point my most viable option is to move to another country that hasn't "modernised" their banking infra.

> It's already very difficult to avail banking if you don't carry a smartphone.

I think it depends. I never use my smartphone for banking purposes and it doesn't make anything difficult for me at all. But I'm in the US and I know there are other nations where this isn't at all true.

Lifers are common in manufacturing/industrials in India. Jumping ships is the norm in tech as it is in the US.

Turkey?

Same for me, I would've been happy if they atleast allowed sideloading extensions by flipping a switch in about:config.

Sliceline. Almost the same business model as the Doordash story that broke a week or so ago.

That story gave me a good laugh! Not really funny, so, as it was real businesses suffering from it.

Please share the studies which show the decline in polarisation, really interested in reading them.

Wouldn't accessing Google services from an unofficial client violate the Google ToS? I'm also concerned about the Yalp store mentioned in the article which is introduced as a way to install Play Store apps without actually using Play store. Based on my reading, Google bans and locks out accounts without any remedial measures regularly.

I've been using yalp store through a secondary account only for that purpose, in case it does get banned. Hasn't happened yet, though (~6 months).

I'm curious what they use now.

WhatsApp is huge. It's an international market and end end encryption is valued.

My firm prohibits whatsapp for business use and I know it's not the only one.

Yes it's a compliance nightmare. Context for my WhatsApp comment is SE Asian market if that makes a difference. Also curious if prohibitions are effective or if people still negotiate on other channels and then document on official one.

At least in my products negotiation really does happen over compliance approved channels.

HKG, SIN would shut down if WhatsApp wasn't available.

ICE Chat and Cloud 9 come to mind.

In general it's going to vary from product to product.

Development tools were a strong suite of Microsoft from the beginning. But, VSCode is really great and admirable.