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700M users and Premium

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Re: 700M users and Premium

#111

Post by izacus »

rejectfinite wrote: post #74
rg111 wrote: post #70

Many people are asking what are in Telegram that aren’t anywhere else? I can provide some answers. Telegram is my primary chat app. - It offers you to simply share an alphanumeric handle and you can connect with anyone in the world. I can do a voice chat or normal chat really quickly and easily. It is the only famous truly Instant Messenger there is. And I can do it without sharing my name (unlike FB), email address,…

Discord does all this too? + the server rooms.

Discord UI is also all kinds of awful for personal messaging and full of gamery features. :/

Re: 700M users and Premium

#113

Post by kitsunesoba »

scrollaway wrote: post #14

Telegram blows my mind. Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none. Discord is a close second. But the quality and polish of telegram blows me away to this day. And it’s lots of small features and details such as built in translation for messages in a foreign language, all the smooth animations, quick look and summaries of channels with agg…

What's more is that the quality of UX manages to be mostly consistent across clients with entirely disparate codebases written in different languages with different UI toolkits.

That's awesome. You have your pick of a massive variety of clients… one of them bound to fit your device setup like a glove. No lowest-common-denominator one-size-fits-all compromises like is so common with cross platform software these days.

Re: 700M users and Premium

#114

Post by ce4 »

geerlingguy wrote: post #8

Quoted post unavailable.

I guess the downvotes happened because the message just gives an outsider's view - the reason for that spam is easy, just like with Email spam: it's cheap and works - Telegram is easyier to integrate than their competitors. Thats the downside of its developers friendliness (APIs and open source Clients), feature richness and finally their sizable userbase. It's actually a cat & mouse game between spam creators and the Telegram developers implementing countermeasures (on the proprietary backend) - you could see the evolution in spambot behaviour over time just like what happened with email: from simple text + links to misspellings, then screenshotted text ads and now to "plz dm me" comments outside of Telegram or join group xyz (i.e. joins/chats initiated by victims to circumvent reporting cold call chat invites)

Edit: better wording, typos fixed. Also: Telegram is not exactly new with an age of 8 or 9 years.

Re: 700M users and Premium

#115

Post by dopa42365 »

neals wrote: post #10

So who here is using Telegram and for what? I'm consider myself pretty well connected, but I don't have the app. Tell me what I'm missing.

One-way media sharing. It's the only chat app that realized how fucking great galleries are, being able to post a ton of pics (or videos) in one message, with smooth full size opening of the media. Not re-encoded into mush, no endless scrolling down or left (cough instagram cough).

Not much in terms of restrictions to message size, or file size, or storage, or bandwidth.

You're not spoon-fed by some algorithm, no recommendations, you only see the channels that you manually joined/followed/subscribed to. Feels very old-school in that regard, but in the best possible way.

It has great desktop app support (I'm not much of a mobile user).

No ads, ever, anywhere.

If you just want to follow some content creators without much interaction, it's perfect (that being said, of course there's regular group chats too, I just don't use any of those).

Re: 700M users and Premium

#116

Post by fritigern »

rvz wrote: post #49
scrollaway wrote: post #14

Telegram blows my mind. Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none. Discord is a close second. But the quality and polish of telegram blows me away to this day. And it’s lots of small features and details such as built in translation for messages in a foreign language, all the smooth animations, quick look and summaries of channels with agg…

Of course. Telegram seems to be the clear winner here at convincing the masses to move off of WhatsApp and have them stick around in Telegram. 700M tells us that it is a viable alternative for many users. Signal on the other hand seems to have failed to stick with the rest of the users and instead of trying to attract users from WhatsApp, not only they can't get backing up messages working properly, they instead were…

The main thing keeping me from using Signal is that their Linux client is really really bad. In contrast Telegram has a great Linux client.

Re: 700M users and Premium

#117

Post by f1refly »

rejectfinite wrote: post #74
rg111 wrote: post #70

Many people are asking what are in Telegram that aren’t anywhere else? I can provide some answers. Telegram is my primary chat app. - It offers you to simply share an alphanumeric handle and you can connect with anyone in the world. I can do a voice chat or normal chat really quickly and easily. It is the only famous truly Instant Messenger there is. And I can do it without sharing my name (unlike FB), email address,…

Discord does all this too? + the server rooms.

Discord drowns me in notification I neither need nor care about, is not customizable and doen't have native clients. Their "haha see we are a gamer community" is very alienating.

Re: 700M users and Premium

#118

Post by einpoklum »

neals wrote: post #10

So who here is using Telegram and for what? I'm consider myself pretty well connected, but I don't have the app. Tell me what I'm missing.

Some of my family chat on Telegram.

LibreOffice user groups (e.g. Right-to-Left)

Some activism.

My ex-girlfriend.

Re: 700M users and Premium

#119

Post by danpalmer »

blitzar wrote: post #61
danpalmer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also my experience in the UK. Messengers are extremely network-based services. Everything depends on your network, and experiences will differ dramatically between countries. For me, WhatsApp is everything legit and personal, Telegram is for extremist groups, Messenger is for parents, Instagram is for millennials, Twitter is for politics nerds, Discord is for gamers, iMessage is... for adverts from takeaways…

I have started getting WhatsApp spam …

No!! The only spam I've gotten so far is recruiters who do actually have my number but who I really don't want messages from on WhatsApp.

Re: 700M users and Premium

#120

Post by the_third_wave »

danpalmer wrote: post #104
the_third_wave wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://backlinko.com/telegram-users#telegram-popularity-in-... If this stat is to be trusted Telegram is the 2nd most popular messaging app in the UK. There must be an awful lot of anti-lockdown protestors, anti-vax groups, anti-semitic, far-right, and so on in that country to make is so popular. By the way, where do the far-left extremists go for their messaging needs? Are they on Whatsapp? Signal? Telegram maybe?…

Firstly, I think there are a lot of people on the fringe of the extremist groups. Maybe they are only in a "concerned parents" group who talk about vaccines, but it's an on-ramp. Secondly, I think there are methodological issues with that analysis. Measuring by App Store categories is hard to do accurately, only presents a snapshot in time, its numbers that fluctuate a lot, and it only represents new user acquisition…

> This isn't really something we have a problem with in the UK. I'm sure there are some, but the bulk of our issues are growing far-right, nationalist, and/or authoritarian groups

Are we talking about the same United Kingdom as the one where Yougov has been doing polls on the subject of extremism [1]? If so I wonder what gives you the impression that the bulk of [y]our issues are growing far-right, nationalist, and/or authoritarian groups given that those who answered those polls come up with the following ranking:

#1 islamic extremism (58%)

#2 right-wing extremism (31%)

#2 left-wing extremism (23%)

Unsurprisingly the results differ widely based upon the political affiliation of the interviewee with left-wing voters placing larger emphasis on right-wing extremism while right-wing voters do the opposite. Nevertheless, left-wing extremism seems to be almost as 'popular' as the right-wing version while both are far less 'popular' than islamic extremism.

[1] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/0...

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