Still, a unilateral forced migration is the exact kind of change Facebook users hate, and this will onl breed more paranoia that their social network could change without their consent. Taking a slower “We’re switching everyone eventually, so you might as well do it now” might have gone over better than “Your familiar chat interface will be destroyed in two weeks whether you like it or not”.
The only real explanation for moving this quickly is that desperate times call for desperate measures, and Facebook is fighting a war overseas for the fate of messaging. While it bought WhatsApp for $19 billion, it still has to battle lean standalone messaging apps like WeChat, Kik, KakaoTalk, and Line. Unless forced, users might have stuck with the old Facebook app’s messaging interface instead of seeing there was something that could better compete with these other apps. That isn’t going to make this change much easier to swallow, though.
Bron