Wow all these comments are so negative. Do the smart thing, spend some hours building a bot and put some money in the bank instead of complaining.
right!?
Telegram to award grants to bot developers
41–50 of 91 posts
Re: Telegram to award grants to bot developers
#42So telegram is a non-profit. And they splurge 1M USD? What am I missing? Edit: to clarify, what I meant is that I expected non-profits to make good use of their money and not give away large sums of money in prize competitions. Certainly, no NGO or non-profit I know of does this. Raises a red flag for me.
You are confusing this with the people in non-profits using that as an excuse to be cheap
Re: Telegram to award grants to bot developers
#43So telegram is a non-profit. And they splurge 1M USD? What am I missing? Edit: to clarify, what I meant is that I expected non-profits to make good use of their money and not give away large sums of money in prize competitions. Certainly, no NGO or non-profit I know of does this. Raises a red flag for me.
By now I haven't heard anything of how they make or will make money. It's like nobody addresses that. I know a messaging app is not exceptionally expensive to run but still. Anybody has any hints?
Re: Telegram to award grants to bot developers
#44Telegram user here. I'm not anti-bot but puh-lease, spend this money on audited open-source crypto and secret-by-default chats rather than gimmicks like 'stickers' (yuk) and rewards for promising bots. I want a messaging app that's simple, secure, open and cross-device. Not one that's splurging on daft bloatware features while the key issues go unaddressed. [edit] to clarify the term 'cross-device' - I mean I want to…
I think you're missing the point. Bots now use ML and other forms of weak A.I. Facebook is building something closer to artificial general intelligence with Facebook M. The early forms of bots we'll see will do basic tasks but in the future they'll be as smart or smarter than us. This is a great long term play Durov took by incentivizing bot developers. Besides, Telegram doesn't have the same scale as Facebook (FB Messenger) and Microsoft (Skype) so they sorta need to do this to remain competitive in their hyper competitive market.
If I had any gripes about Telegram it's their lack of audio and video calling but I'm not going to complain about an excellent free product.
Re: Telegram to award grants to bot developers
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I figured someone would say that. I want actual cross-device, not Signal's weird "link your phone up to your MacBook" solution. So not Signal as it presently stands. Also (last time I checked; maybe it has improved) Signal's support for inline media within conversations was light years behind Telegram. Don't get me wrong, I applaud Signal's focus on security, but its usability simply isn't there yet.
> (...) not Signal's weird "link your phone up to your MacBook" solution What are the properties of this solution that you dislike?
My main criticism is that it requires Chrome, which I don't want.
Re: Telegram to award grants to bot developers
#46So telegram is a non-profit. And they splurge 1M USD? What am I missing? Edit: to clarify, what I meant is that I expected non-profits to make good use of their money and not give away large sums of money in prize competitions. Certainly, no NGO or non-profit I know of does this. Raises a red flag for me.
You're missing that the founder also founded VK and thus has a net worth of $260 million (according to Wikipedia)
What is the relevance of VK's net worth to Telegram's decision?
Re: Telegram to award grants to bot developers
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I figured someone would say that. I want actual cross-device, not Signal's weird "link your phone up to your MacBook" solution. So not Signal as it presently stands. Also (last time I checked; maybe it has improved) Signal's support for inline media within conversations was light years behind Telegram. Don't get me wrong, I applaud Signal's focus on security, but its usability simply isn't there yet.
> (...) not Signal's weird "link your phone up to your MacBook" solution What are the properties of this solution that you dislike?
I may be wrong but doesn't this solution also require an Android device?
Re: Telegram to award grants to bot developers
#48Telegram user here. I'm not anti-bot but puh-lease, spend this money on audited open-source crypto and secret-by-default chats rather than gimmicks like 'stickers' (yuk) and rewards for promising bots. I want a messaging app that's simple, secure, open and cross-device. Not one that's splurging on daft bloatware features while the key issues go unaddressed. [edit] to clarify the term 'cross-device' - I mean I want to…
Telegram really doesn't seem like they're trying to be a secure chat client at all at this point. It seems like the focus is more on making a follow-up runet social network now that Durov no longer has control over VK.
It echoes VK in a lot of ways (pirated media abounds!), but channels are some weird cross between Twitter and 4chan as opposed to being a blatant Facebook clone. Direct messaging is still there but it doesn't seem like the network is focused on that at all anymore.
Re: Telegram to award grants to bot developers
#49Does anybody know what sort of bots they are looking for?
Re: Telegram to award grants to bot developers
#50Telegram user here. I'm not anti-bot but puh-lease, spend this money on audited open-source crypto and secret-by-default chats rather than gimmicks like 'stickers' (yuk) and rewards for promising bots. I want a messaging app that's simple, secure, open and cross-device. Not one that's splurging on daft bloatware features while the key issues go unaddressed. [edit] to clarify the term 'cross-device' - I mean I want to…
Don't discount stickers. Telegram's sticker support (and its ease of creating your own sticker sets) is one of the reasons I and a lot of my friends have moved to it for most of our messaging lately. I personally went crazy and did a set of like 50 stickers with one of my own characters, which can add a ton of whimsey to my casual conversations.