Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 333 posts

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#321

Post by postmodernbrute »

vxNsr wrote: post #184
perardi wrote: post #60

I quite like Telegram, because I am apparently an old man at the age of 37, and I greatly prefer typing on my real physical keyboard, and not on my phone. Telegram’s desktop client for Mac is great—it’s fast, it has feature parity with mobile clients, and it works . Messages get delivered and stay in sync, and I don’t need to somehow link my phone to my main machine via QR code to act as a gateway. And if they introd…

Only quibble I have with Telegram is their “find nearby” feature, it’s clearly abused by bad actors to funnel users to porn, so my family sees the whole app as not family friendly, bec they don’t want their tweens and teens with phones, that are mostly locked down, having this loophole. There no way to turn it off, or lock it behind parental control, so until then we’re still stuck on WhatsApp.

Just deny location access to the app.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#322

Post by postmodernbrute »

tw04 wrote: post #28
Huwyt_Nashi031 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I would be happy to pay for it in principle, the value of Telegram to me is that is has provided a platform for many political dissidents - individuals and groups - who might otherwise be persecuted for their beliefs and activism, and denied a platform for learning and discussion. I could be wrong but I believe this is a popular reason for Telegram's appeal. How many of those would be comfortable trusting Teleg…

I'm not sure why that would be a problem. Telegram could easily make bitcoin and/or cash a payment option like countless VPN providers have. No "real info" necessary.

Bitcoin and other crypto coins are very inaccessible. Even disregarding transaction fees, you can't really get bitcoin without giving your payment details to someone.

Yes, countless VPN providers do need your payment details. And that is a risk. The comfort in that risk however is that anyone with knowledge of your VPN payment still doesn't know what you did with that VPN. With a messaging app however, you are risking your entire online identity.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#323

Post by gojomo »

mercacona wrote: post #286
gojomo wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marlinspike in the linked comment is clearly also disapproving of the use of Signal's servers, so it's more than branding. Unless he's blessed 'MollyIM' explicitly since, there remains some risk it could be locked out at any time.

Yes, certainly, but Telegram states officially in their FAQ, that Durov’s fortune pays for their servers and now it seems there’re creditors too. Risk are everywhere, but an unofficial opinion doesn’t alters the fact that there’re third party clients that are promoted in the official community forums.

When the foundation co-founder & CEO of the development LLC says something – and the same thing, repeatedly, when the topic comes up – that's not as weak as an 'unofficial opinion'.

Of course, it could be reversed, and if you find any more-recent official welcomes from Signal for third-party clients to use its servers, I'd love references.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#324

Post by qwerty456127 »

elastolin wrote: post #287
qwerty456127 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody cares I have stimulated many people to switch to Telegram because it is the best and all you have is to try it, realize that and motivate your friends to switch with you. Obviously many of these people will go with me once I find a better alternative. The situation probably is the same for many other people.

> Obviously many of these people will go with me once I find a better alternative. People will go only if there's another service that's good enough and has enough user density. You may find the best privacy-oriented, ad-free messaging app, but if it's empty or if it's hard to use, it's essentially useless. By this point, it's hard to compete with the behemoths like WhatsApp or Telegram and people will not care about…

I have been told the same about Telegram just a couple of months ago.

Most of the people I know have less than 10 contacts they actually care about and communicate regularly and it is not hard to convince the most of them to install an app you would sincerely recommend.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#325

Post by Aachen »

socksy wrote: post #314
Aachen wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't mind not having that feature of searching so far back instantly on a new device. How often do you login to a new device and want to immediately instantly search back to the beginning of time? I get that it's nice but... is that necessary? There are various solutions to the problem of storing and searching history with different trade-offs. One of them is having the server store and be able to read everythi…

Communicating with the majority of my friends through telegram, and having access to the records of all of our conversations, has revolutionised my usage with computing. I use the "saved messages" (previously messaging yourself) to act as an append only log of info I need to search, and unlike emailing myself the UX is actually good. Search is extremely fast, and the fact I can see all the photos I ever sent someone…

That's not what I'm saying at all? (Edit: ah maybe I understand the confusion. I meant "to a new device and want to immediately instantly search back to the beginning of time" literally the way I wrote it, so if you give it a little while to download history and decrypt it upon first use then it can work the way you want from then on. /edit)

Look at Wire, I can instantly search for arbitrary parts of words (no indexing going on as far as I can tell) and it returns results somewhere between instantly and a second or two depending on how far down the thousands upon thousands of messages the result is. It's end to end encrypted and doesn't use any homomorpic encryption magic (not sure if that's production-ready yet, but if it is, they don't use it here). It's all local and in a browser at that, no need for some special optimized C code either.

There are definitely solutions here that support exactly what you want without requiring plaintext server access. We just need to use them.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#326

Post by AndriyKunitsyn »

ash wrote: post #202
AndriyKunitsyn wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to trust WhatsApp, because it is closed-source. Nothing stops them from planting a backdoor and enabling it specifically on your device, or from updating the E2E protocol to make it insecure. If your threat model includes WhatsApp/Telegram developers, you can't use WhatsApp but you can actually (carefully) use Telegram's E2E chats, because Telegram's client is an open-source app with reproducible builds. E2E…

Closed source WhatsApp is a problem. And a backdoor is possible. However, it's still detectable, albeit not easily. I'm sure researchers are closely looking at WhatsApp binaries. WhatsApp backdoor would be a scandal. Sure, open source WhatsApp would be better. However, we are comparing detectable potential backdoor with totally undetectable existing access to all non E2E chats on Telegram servers. Telegram developers…

Your comment is based on two assumptions:

- That backdoors are routinely detectable in closed-source applications. They are not just "not easily" detectable, they are impossible to detect without a good amount of luck, and even so, the knowledge about a new backdoor will come after years, after all of the damage was done. Numerous discovered RCEs in Windows, some of which laid there for more than a decade after being found, confirm this.

- That there are incentives for security researchers to routinely disassemble WhatsApp binary and provide results of their inspection to the public, and not just report to employers or use the knowledge about a Facebook-authored backdoor to blackmail Facebook. There are none.

If you discard these two assumptions, you can see that Telegram model is better because it gives users clear choice between passing data to Telegram (in exchange for chat sync) and using E2E, with strong guarantees of E2E that are backed by reproducible builds, not by trusting Facebook or "oh, but that would be a scandal". The "almost useless" E2E of Telegram (I don't see how it's almost useless, it's there, it's working, and it provides value for users) is better than the completely useless E2E of WhatsApp.

(But yeah, group chats have no option of E2E in Telegram, that sucks.)

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#327

Post by elastolin »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #324
elastolin wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously many of these people will go with me once I find a better alternative. People will go only if there's another service that's good enough and has enough user density. You may find the best privacy-oriented, ad-free messaging app, but if it's empty or if it's hard to use, it's essentially useless. By this point, it's hard to compete with the behemoths like WhatsApp or Telegram and people will not care about…

I have been told the same about Telegram just a couple of months ago. Most of the people I know have less than 10 contacts they actually care about and communicate regularly and it is not hard to convince the most of them to install an app you would sincerely recommend.

You don't understand how hard is for a messaging app to gain traction. Telegram has been growing for years and years, and it offers some significant advantages over WhatsApp. Even with all this marketing and effort, I'd say only about 10% of my WhatsApp contacts are on Telegram. Now you want to get people to move to yet another app? For what? Why would they? Because no ads?

If a new app ever manages to become big (as in, Telegram-level big, let alone WhatsApp), it would take years of raising money and marketing. And how would they pay for that exactly? You think people pay a mensual/anual fee for a messaging apps when there are free alternatives? No, the answer is, again, ads. That or selling user data, which is much worse.

You're too focused on the tech, but you have no understanding of how business works.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#328

Post by nomel »

cwhiz wrote: post #297
nomel wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this unlikely. If I had a random sampling of ads shown to me, 50% would be for women, and the majority wouldn't even be in English. I definitely exist in some relatively small demographic, where the majority of any non targeted scatter shot would be annoying noise.

You're mixing up relevance and efficacy. Just because an ad is relevant doesn’t mean you’re more likely to buy. And it’s that second part, efficacy, that the ad industry can’t prove. To you, it’s obviously superior. But if it were obviously generating more revenue, the ad industry would easily be able to prove it. They can’t. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/

> doesn’t mean you’re more likely to buy.

I know the chances goes to 0% if it's for authentic, period correct, women's laderhozen. If it's a book about data science, then there's a good chance I'll click through. Of course, this is all anecdotal, especially since I always had ad block on back in the days before targeted ads, and have never really been subjected to ads that's weren't somehow related to me or the immediate context. If you've ever been around a child, you know how much targeted ads can work. They want the toys that they see. Showing them ads of Bentleys won't result in any sales.

I would recommend talking to someone that does A/B testing.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#329

Post by andi999 »

Aachen wrote: post #220
andi999 wrote: post #63

How did Telegram spend a billion?

Have you used it? And any other messenger? I find the difference in quality (speed, features and their consistency, synchronisation of data and notifications in realtime, data transfer speed, few if any bugs, cross platform, etc. etc.) quite noticeable. I'm actually moving away because it's too good to have no known business model and still no encryption to speak of after a decade of claiming they're the privacy mess…

Briefly, so far I didn't see a difference to other messengers. But still 1 billion is equivalent of about 5000 man years of effort.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#330

Post by skinnymuch »

corobo wrote: post #317
skinnymuch wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t wip.co telegram a secondary feature? The payment is for the community at large. Namely the website, no?

Fuck knows, I only remember it starting as a telegram group.

Oh wow. That’s pretty interesting. Yeah I don’t know either lol. Crazy price to me
Post reply on HN