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Comment by mintplant | Hacker News Reader

In case someone from Open WhisperSystems is reading: please add stickers. Seriously, I know so many people who are on Telegram just because of its sticker system and won't consider anything without that feature. This comes up again and again in online discussions where Signal is mentioned, and it hurts to see all the care and effort the OWS team has put into providing real security rejected out of hand because of it.

For the uninitiated, stickers are essentially a UI layer on top of image sending. Each user has a collection of stickers which they can add images to. This collection can be scrolled through quickly and any sticker can be sent to a chat with a tap, like a sort of custom emoji. Other users who see a sticker can add it to their own local collection by tapping on the sticker message. I see no technical reason why this couldn't be built on top of the Signal Protocol.

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Signal needs a desktop app that doesn't suck too... Wire, WhatsApp, and Telegram all have very decent desktop apps. And WhatsApp is default end-to-end now - and I think Wire is even for groups... Had some call quality issues with Signal and started using WhatsApp again - and will test Wire for calls soon.

I find it really unfortunate that this is stopping people from adopting Signal.

However, I believe that this feature was added last year:

https://signal.org/blog/doodles-stickers-censorship/

No, that's a different feature with the same name. That allows you to quickly layer graphics from a built-in set on top of existing photos, like in Snapchat. The "stickers" I'm referring to, in the Telegram/WeChat/LINE sense, are essentially custom emojis, or macros for sending one of a collection of reaction images as its own message.

https://telegram.org/blog/stickers-revolution

Various communities absolutely rely on this style of communication, so it becomes a dealbreaking feature.

I'm not criticizing you when you say that you need stickers, but please help me understand: how do you rely on stickers to communicate?

I can understand them being a nice UI/UX feature that makes the app more fun, but I cannot possibly imagine that people actually rely on stickers to communicate.

Maybe you mean something different and I'm misunderstanding you?

Not me as an individual, but various communities I'm in contact with have stickers ingrained into their culture and social norms. People collect up to hundreds of stickers for different situations, make their own based on shared iconography, and some even have custom stickers commissioned from artists, of themselves, of characters they've created, etc. For groups that are really invested in stickers, migrating to an app which lacks them would significantly alter their dynamics.

You don't understand. I live for stickers on Telegram. It's an essential part of communication for millions. This is not a joke. Especially in Asia

To succinctly convey emotions, opinions, viewpoints, "feels". To simply have a non-verbal vocabulary, to have a different quality to certain parts of the communication, to signify a different quality of seriousness/playfulness/feeling.

It's the new emoticon. :-)

So basically emojis?

Sure, if emojis could be infinitely extended with arbitrary images and were sent as their own messages instead of being embedded inline with other text. Replying to another message with a sticker also fills the role played by reactions on Facebook Messenger.

I'm curious, are they used anything like memes that you can easily send more than once?

Not sure what you mean by "like memes". They are just funny images with thousands of variations that you can send. If you're going to sleep - send something cute that shows it.

Some examples http://www.line-stickers.com/

The only thing I could see that would potentially top this would be talking animated emoji....The feces one comes to mind specifically

It it talks, it takes too much time to parse, and it becomes too specific.

Pictures, maybe with a max 0.5 sec animation are okay, and no sound. (At least that's my hunch.)

I use some of them to communicate moods, or recurring ideas that are bothersome to enunciate over text.

E.g. these:

https://stickers.acidodivertido.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...

If you pass links to known sticker images, and the recipient has to retrieve them by means outside the Signal protocol, that reduces security. An observer can detect when a receiver fetches a sticker image, and they can tell which one. For example, noting that a message has forced the loading of collection "Gay"[1] provides much useful information to an observer.

[1] http://chpic.su/en/stickers/Gayer/

So send them entirely inline. Sending a sticker is not fundamentally different from sending an image that isn't called a "sticker".

Having to send stickers every time ups the overhead. Also, if stickers are well known variable length files, it may be possible to make good guesses about which stickers are attached.

You could negotiate sticker sending by hash: the first message only contains the hash value, if the recipient already has that sticker stored, it can be displayed immediately. Otherwise the full data can be requested.

EDIT: That scheme can be used to probe whether or not someone already has a specific sticker stored, so it might have to be separated per-contact to avoid leakage.

Thank you. It only took me a couple of years in East Asia to start feeling frustrated by the lack of nuanced, instant and effortless communication provided by stickers when I message over Signal. I, too, have many friends who would otherwise consider Signal and instead stick with LINE and Messenger for this reason.

Is this referring to the same type of "sticker" I hear about in iMessage? Because I still have no idea what those are about, but I hear people talking about them all the time.

That looks kinda similar, except it seems iMessage allows you to slap stickers in arbitrary positions on top of other messages, whereas the implementations I'm thinking of just treat a sticker as its own message. Also Apple has some sort of sticker store and approval process, whereas on Telegram for example anyone can add their own image files for use as stickers.

You can already send arbitrary images and attachments in Signal messages.

Sure, but compared to the stickers UI paradigm it's far clunkier to browse for an image file every time and to collect and arrange image files sent by other people, particularly on a mobile device.

Also, stickers display with proper transparency, giving them the appearance of arbitrary shapes, whereas images on Signal are displayed in a rectangular frame and transparent areas get a black background.

Compare:

https://image.ibb.co/niKWUQ/IMG_20170926_135611.jpg

with:

https://preview.ibb.co/fg21UQ/IMG_20170926_135627.jpg

It may seem trivial, but this matters to people in the real world.

LINE even autocompletes with stickers! Writing "happy" will show a list of suggested stickers to send.

Using this feature instead of stickers is like using imageboard on your phone.

In case someone from Open WhisperSystems is reading: please do NOT add stickers and junk to your clean and pretty system. I know a lot of people that would leave the service if it turned into WeChat (including me). Stick to the fundamental engineering of privacy as you are doing, and forget the gimmicks.

I don't understand your motivation here. Every time I advocate using Signal I run into a wall of "but it doesn't have stickers"; for those users, all the privacy engineering is moot if the app doesn't fill their needs. Adding another attachment type would do nothing to degrade your experience, nor would it turn Signal into WeChat.

It does degrade it tho. There have to be ui elements to interact with them, you need to be up to date on packs, a market needs to be implemented, maybe payment needs to be introduced, the chat looks ugly full of graphics, etc. Plus, every feature adds vectors of attack and things to maintain. I want this to be a Snowden'ish tool for adults, not giffy. I'm not saying my preferences are any better than yours, just highlighting that there are varied preferences out there. If signal started looking like WeChat or Messenger I'd probably leave.

> you need to be up to date on packs, a market needs to be implemented, maybe payment needs to be introduced

You don't need any of that. Certainly none of that is present in Telegram. I don't think you read my original comment in full.

> I want this to be a Snowden'ish tool for adults, not giffy.

Ironically Signal already has Giphy integration, but I suppose you didn't notice because you don't use it—as would be the case with stickers.

> I want this to be a Snowden'ish tool for adults, not giffy.

Not sure how you could be more condescending here.

Look, I get it. I don't use stickers on messaging apps that support them, and I don't have a "GIF keyboard" or whatever. But plenty of actual adults use them and like them, and don't consider a messaging experience complete without them.

If Signal's goal is to be a niche messaging platform that only hyper-privacy/security-conscious people use, then by all means, leave out the user-fun features that the masses want. But if they actually want to raise the bar for mass-market security and privacy, those features are essential. Maybe that's "lame"or "childish" to you, but that's just how it is.

If the addition of stickers makes you leave the platform, then that's certainly a loss for you and those like you, but it's a huge win for the much-larger group of people who will be attracted to the service.

What do you imagine is the point of proselytizing the use of secure apps to people for whom this is a concern that would override security? They aren't likely to adhere to secure practices anyways, so it's moot.

Moxie has stated in the past that the goal of Signal is not to cater to "security people" but to "make mass surveillance impossible".

> I know a lot of people that would leave the service if it turned into WeChat (including me).

Where will they go? To some less secure alternative simply because of stickers?

To some equally secure alternative not bloated down by useless cruft, I'd imagine

> To some less secure alternative simply because of stickers?

I'm afraid you really can't rule that out, no.

In my opinion the signal ios client is significantly less polished than the telegram client. I could convince my girlfriend to switch to telegram, after she found signal to be intolerable on her android device as well.

> In my opinion the signal ios client is significantly less polished than the telegram client. I could convince my girlfriend to switch to telegram, after she found signal to be intolerable on her android device as well.

My reaction is the opposite. I love the signal iOS app because it doesn't try to do SMS. It lets you enter the code which is great if I want to use a Google Voice number instead of a carrier number (and I don't forward Google Voice texts to the carriers). I am not a fan of SMS fallback and I am glad I get the "Enable Signal for SMS" on Android as opposed to just sending a text.

How much do you use it? I sometimes do 1000+ messages a day and find that it's constantly breaking on me.

Can you make sure any issues are filed over at github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-iOS ?

You think the Signal app is more polished than the Telegram app?!

I have very limited experience with Telegram. I was comparing Signal for iOS vs Signal for Android. Sorry for the confusion.

I think this is an unhelpful suggestion. It seems to me that you're advocating that the developers take an approach which will give them a smaller install base in favor of engineering focus on privacy and security. But communicating privately and securely with someone is impossible if they aren't also using the app.

This is the same problem with PGP/GPG -- it may be incredibly secure, but if no one uses it, it doesn't matter.

Obtusely refusing to use a good system which has broad appeal is working contrary to your own goals.

Perhaps it could have an opt-in system, where stickers don't work unless both sides in the conversation enable the feature.

Couldn't you just not send any stickers?

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