This situation to me is it seems like it’s a echo chamber bubble situation. The way Signal gets feedback for their app is kinda bullshit. It disproportionately values the input of their own developers and the very most evangelical signal users. They don’t request feedback from users at all before making changes. They push out notifications of upcoming changes through banners at the top of the app, but they never use this same mechanism to be like “Hey, doing a quick poll. Whatchu folks want?”
I don’t think it’s malice in this case. Just blind incompetence.
Agreed. Another change that got me was removing the ability to set a unique color for your contacts.
“We’ve removed the ability to set color for your contacts. Our users are too sophisticated to need at-a-glance ID of chat by color, but we’ve added the useless ability to change the color of your own messages you send. That’s useful, right?”
There’s no shortage of loud feedback from the userbase in their forums, but they dismiss it all and force ahead indifferently.
I think you’re absolutely right.
The announcement of dropping SMS at the time gave those vibes. They were basically saying to users “we know what’s good for ypu better than you do”.
It was a huge strategic misstep. SMS was the perfect route to get people to use Signal - you’d start with SMS conversations and then as people joined signal conversations could switch to secure chat. Now its very hard to persuade people to switch to Signal.
Now google has used the same trick to push its own messaging standard RCS.
Yeah and when people were like “hey, this decision sucks, can you not?” They were like “where was this feedback before, we’ve been discussing this on our forums for months” and its like… Obviously most people who use your app aren’t on your forums. The usage patterns of people with that much dedication to signal will be different from people who are just using the app to talk to their friends and family and treat it as a tool.
