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

You're absolutely sure they won't take a phone call about a quarter million dollar sale or whatever?

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.

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

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.

Yes I can call, but it‘s much less preferred as I‘m not a native speaker and it‘s easier for me to communicate in a written form, plus our timings can be different. Anyway I‘m not buying a house, I‘m just looking for a rental apartment, and in the country I live you can‘t pay to real estate agents for this purpose (it‘s prohibited). They are getting paid by the landlords instead, 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

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!

I'd just SMS them and see if they respond. I mean, you're setting up a viewing. That shouldn't take that many messages.

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.

Also, that momentum was gained before whatsapp was bought by Facebook

For sure. I wasn't talking shit. Just commiserating about how burn-the-city-down infuriating this is in a jokey way.

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.

Living as someone who's in a WhatsApp country, they absolutely won't respond to texts. Nobody texts anybody, even old people don't use SMS.

If I get an SMS I won't even see it because I have notifications disabled because all I ever got was spam.

If we could just get people to use Signal.

This is the reason you don't 'sign in with Google' or Meta or whatever.

META wants more data from you, i would ditch the app.

isnt wechat popular in asia.

I've never used Whatsapp and never will do.
Team Signal since the time it was called Textsecure 🫡
Then again I don't rely on Whatsapp to stay housed 😐

If it's more than one person they may use Whatsapp for business with a direct channel without a phone.

I'd tell/ask that to every company I'm in contact with there. If that's their platform they surely want it to work reliably.

Pal, you're a few decades late to the Facebook sucks conversation.

no remorse for people still using wa

> drink verification can

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.

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)

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.

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.

!actually_infuriating@lemmy.world

We have a small comm there, we should start to use it.

We need to de couple from big tech before it's too late.

it's just a shame that a majority of the world uses it for communicatiom. My family switched to Signal a few years ago, but had to switch back to WA because we had to talk to the relatives who were still on WA. too many of them to convince to switch to Signal, and unlikely to work even if we tried. similar to OP, not all are tech savvy but can use WA. I tried getting my family to go back to signal, but no dice. eventually I gave up. I've heard that Europe is looking to switch away from Meta products, at least that is happening though.

In China for sure. I have no idea about other countries in Asia though....

I badgered mine repeatedly for years and now basically everyone I know is on it.

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.

Use Telegram, Signal, SimpleX, Matrix or one of the other alternatives...

I think you've got the power dynamic wrong here

If OP is having to contact loads of estate agents, it's probably because they live somewhere with in-demand property.

That means those estate agents are going to have loads of potential people to sell to

Someone who wants to do something differently than everyone else is going to get a lower priority over someone who just does everything they are asked without question.

The estate agent doesn't really lose anything by doing this, OP risks reducing their chances at getting a place, ostensibly one they need to live in at some point soon.

Spam their public corporate accounts with complaints, in public comments. That's the only way.

Reading comprension of a fungus

I live in a country where literally all communication with real estate agents happens on WhatsApp

Guess OP should just go homeless lol

Imagine reading the post before leaving a judgemental comment

There will only be big tech. It takes a lot of finances and relationships to even have a tech industry you'll never have a mom and pop tech industry.

We need better politicians to deal with this shit

What the FUCK? Why would the providers do that?

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.

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.

Don't forget to do the dance

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.

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.

We have one (I think) provider who does free WhatsApp traffic in Germany, but it never took of.
WhatsApp itself is used a lot though.

Persobally I have 20 or 30 GB of data, not sure. I use like 3 to 4 each month.

If you check who's the topmost billionaire with a Brazilian nationality, you'll likely find out part of why. Hint: he is portrayed in "The social network" film.!mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world

fuck fb - also kinda waited to the last minute to find a new place, no? hope things works out for you

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.

My practical advice would be to buy an eSIM with a new number, there are very cheap options (like one used for travel) OP would also have to buy a new smartphone and activate it in a cafe or anywhere not their current location (due to both the GPS/AGPS and wi-fi hotspot MAC address), otherwise whatsapp would straight up lock the new account, too, given how these PII (geolocation, wi-fi hotspot and, especially, the device) are tied to an account that got suspended earlier (and this goes against most of plafforms' terms regarding "ban evasion"). Hard resetting the smartphone doesn't work, as smartphones have unique identifiers (such as the phone's wi-fi adapter MAC), and using the same wi-fi may add to the factors leading to automatic locking of the account.!mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world

Yes, and it was obvious then what a shit show it was.