Wow, I had no idea! I just looked through the list of World Cup balls, and they only used that design, like, twice. But what an impact! I assume they had to get fancy afterwards because every ball started to look like that, so now it looked almost boring. Wild!

That's cooled it's named after the Telstar satellite. There's a high school in Maine that's also named after the satellite.

What is the point of these, and their shape

If you see it as pointing to the right it looks pretty content, actually.

FIFA corruption cup soccer ball by Adidas

Hank Soccer here

I thought people on here of all places would understand the impact of the network effect.

Because most of the world is already on WhatsApp, and changing to Signal would isolate you from most people and businesses.

I could move to Signal, open up a chat with myself and chat for a while but I think it would get pretty boring pretty soon.

Because in my country historically the telecom companies are charging 0.30€ per SMS (text) and 2€ per MMS (text with photo).

So WhatsApp when they launched with their "1€/lifetime" offer on the iPhone 3GS they were the right app at the right time and became the de facto replacement for any kind of messaging. It's insane how basically overnight they replaced msn messenger and Skype because it was so convenient (Microsoft never did a smartphone client for msn messenger, only unofficial ones. It was available on dumbphones but it used SMS from the plan to send/receive, nobody used it because you needed to be a millionaire to afford it)

SMS now in my country is only for receiving OTP codes, for the rest is WhatsApp, because still in 2026 the telecoms are still charging 2€ for each MMS sent and nobody wants to risk huge bills. This includes iMessage because if a chat suddenly goes green and you didn't notice, it costs dozens of euro

I agree, but the other people all use it 🫠

because it's the de facto sms replacement in many european and south american countries

Couldn’t be me… but some people don’t care that Meta can read their messages. Or they still don’t know but I doubt it.

Mark Zuckerberg has a term for these people…

I don't get to choose what app my European friends use

I know we're all saying network effects, but I don't know what the fuck network effects means.

Network effects dude. Network effects.

Because it’s unfair to assume that everyone has the necessary education or awareness of what the internet is and what online privacy means that we take for granted.

You genuinely don't know? 😬

I can't find that shit on Signal 🤷‍♂️

All right, you go first.

It's a softie for the ladies