Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by skinnymuch » Sat, Mar 20, 2021, 2:06 PM UTC

fernandotakai wrote: post #313

skinnymuch wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re essentially not helping the YouTube creators from the numbers they’ve given on their payout from Premium. It is incredibly small.

probably as small as the money they would get if i was watching ads. but instead of watching them with an adblocker, i just use yt premium. as i said, i do pay for my fav creators on patreons, because if i started paying for all of them, i wouldn't have money to do anything else.

Ah I think I confused things. I must’ve responded thinking you were one of the people saying Spotify is essentially worthless to artists. Which is true in a financial sense like YT equivalent things, but yeah, you support in other ways.

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

#332

Post by ash » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 9:24 AM UTC

AndriyKunitsyn wrote: post #326

ash wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for summarizing my assumptions, but it was not fully correct:

- I'm not saying backdoors are "routinely" detectable, I'm simply saying it's possible to detect them. In contrast, we have zero possibility to find out if Telegram is doing something nasty with your chats. Telegram may well do it already, and we may never learn.

- Regarding the incentives - security researchers often disclose vulnerabilities to the public. Obviously they have the incentives to do it.

As for the optional nature of Telegram E2E encryption - Signal and WhatsApp successfully demonstrated it's possible to make E2E the default (and only) option. There's no competition here. I wonder what proportion of Telegram users understand the ramifications. Many people migrating from WhatsApp to Telegram probably don't.

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

#333

Post by rfoo » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 1:48 PM UTC

vondro wrote: post #291

meibo wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give Telegram or Matrix a try. They are both miles ahead of Signal and their teams on both sides actually seem to care about openness and usability. Signal actively discourages third-party clients and doesn't accept community contributions in most cases(not that you'd actually want to, because their codebases are trash.) We can do better. Matrix with bridges and your own server is quite a nice experience. Have a look…

I get why Signal's approach can be unpopular, but I don't understand the fascination with Telegram to be honest. Sure, the Android app is nice and fluid, but if I needed to use an app that is not e2e encrypted, I can use sms, or Facebook Messenger. Both have much wider adoption than Telegram.

> I can use sms, or Facebook Messenger

A large part of the world can't afford sending images (and even videos) via SMS.

And no, Facebook Messenger is not fluid, it's laggy as fuck.