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Comment by nv-vn | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, I think you can have an open platform and keep spam low. I have yet to encounter any spam on Telegram for the past 8 or so months I've been using it. I think that might partly be a result of the openness of the platform -- since they provide an official API for bots, nobody is going to go to great lengths to reimplement that functionality through an unofficial API (especially for positive reasons... most Skype spam bots likely rely on some well-intended library somebody wrote for legitimate purposes). And since they're able to apply rate-limiting to the bots and let users report them, it makes it much easier to control those bots (as they're not even "real users" and have many more limitations on what they're able to do). I think that because of that, people with a legitimate reason to use bots are the only ones who actually put effort into making bots, which caused the apparent lack of spam bots.

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As far as I can tell, Telegram keeps spam at bay through:

1. Requiring a unique phone number for signup, and heavily restricting accounts which appear to have used a VOIP phone number for signup (including Google Voice numbers). Restricted accounts can't initiate conversations, so they can't really send spam.

2. Allowing users to report spammers that get past #1, and limiting the accounts of users that get reported.

For details, see: https://telegram.org/faq_spam

So those of us that do not have a unique phone number shouldn't be allowed to communicate?

Yes, you should and the choice exists, like the root comment mentioned. There are other services which allow you to communicate with people without having to associate your phone number with the service.

The existence of an alternative protocol doesn't help without interoperability between the protocols, which will never happen. If I have to first convince anyone I want to communicate with to first e.g. make an account on my XMPP server, communication is going to be much more difficult and sometimes impossible. Telegram isn't the only service that assumes a 1-to-1 mapping of phone numbers to people; Signal also has this problem.

While you enjoy your "spam free" service, some of us will have to work with the separate but not equal alternative. In case you haven't noticed, as the common communication environment has become more and more locked-down (starting with mobile, and now spilling over into desktop), fewer people are using open alternatives. Simply observing that open protocols exist doesn't make them an actual de facto alternative.

Get a phone number like everybody. You are like 0.0000001% of the market. Nobody is going to twist their product to cater to you.

> Get a phone number like everybody.

Are you paying for it?

I can be reached by telephone. What I don't have is a unique telephone number. This works perfectly fine for actual voice communication. If you think I can simply afford an extra monthly expense, you're wrong.

> You are like 0.0000001% of the market.

Made up statistics reveal your presuppositions.

There are a lot of people that don't have a unique phone number. It's a minority position, but that's kind of my point: chat services do not inherently depend on traditional phone numbers, and requiring one is going to exclude more people than you probably realize.

In any civilised country a prepaid phone number is almost free (if not free) so requiring a unique phone number will only exclude people I don't care about.

And of course that statistic is made up. It was a joke.

Err. A SIM card which comes with a phone number costs me £0 for the SIM and £5 minimum top-up. £10 for the phone, though half my friends seem to have old phones they could probably lend me.

Are you in a country which doesn't have pay-and-go service?

Apparently even pay-as-you-go plans in the US have a fixed monthly payment: http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/pay-as-you-go

You can always use Freedompop or ringplus, where after a signup fee the plans are free.

I'm in a country with a crazy healthcare system. Medical disability barely covers the absolute bare minimum; spending that 15 on a SIM (assuming I could find a phone somewhere) would require not paying of one of the drugs that are keeping me alive.

Where do you have a fundamental right to use any and every service in the world?

Yet I've received spam and been joined into groups without my consent multiple times since starting to use Telegram. Never received anything on iMessage, and I've been using iMessage since it came.

time to revisit this old macro: craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

but for IM

The funny (or sad?) thing is that I have received spam to my craphound.com email address, too. Guess the subscriber database got leaked at one point.

Spam is probably low because it's not yet a platform that spammers are interested in. That may very well change. From what I can tell most of the big networks have found that the only way to cut down on spam is to be aggressive abou securing the protocol.

It's not security. It's obfuscation. If you can use a client program to send messages, you can implement your own client code - if you put in enough effort.

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