Hacker News Reader

Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

As someone who knew Durov personally, I'd say that it's very unlikely that the UX will be ruined by ads, and even more unlikely that users will be manipulated and/or tracked in any way. If there's one thing he does well it's respecting his users. He knows what "we're earning enough to cover our expenses" means. The company is privately owned so no one will be pushing him into anything either.

Many popular Telegram channels already have ads in them, posted by their creators. My understanding is that Telegram will be taking control of this by acting as an intermediary, taking a cut and possibly deciding what goes through. Thinking of it, it makes sense, and doesn't alter the UX at all for the average user.

View on HN

Come on, ALL UX is ruined by addition of ads. I bet there is not a single user of any app anywhere ever that can claim that their UX was bettered by ads. Also, users WILL be have to manipulated and/or tracked for the purpose of monetization via ads. By now everyone is well acquainted with these monetization techniques, so no point in pretending otherwise.

Disagree. I like musical instruments. I don’t mind ads for guitar companies. I like embedded systems. I love seeing ads for new esp32 variants or low cost e-ink screens. Also I never object to women’s swimsuit ads. Just sayin’.

Still, ads will distract you in moments that you don't want to be distracted.

If you like guitars, you can visit a good, large online guitar store, say once a week, and you will always be up to date. Same for swimsuits.

Thanks for telling me how my attention span works. Your insights are lacking but at least you make up for it by being condescending.

The service must be sustained somehow. Either through ads or fees.

I don't understand why people act like they can avoid ads, and enjoy a free service.

Hopefully there is a paid option that hides ads. Would you pay for it?

>>As someone who knew Durov personally, I'd say that it's very unlikely that the UX will be ruined by ads

The Google founders were pretty idealistic when they started too and no doubt many swore by their intentions.

Google has investors though. Telegram is wholly owned by Durov.

I've also seen him run monetization at VK. Basically: there was one developer responsible for ads, and he sat in another office together with financial staff because of the different values.

Now he doesn't.

Now who doesn't what?

It's a trap. "Enough to cover our expenses" means the ad rates have to be high enough and for them to be high enough the advertisers have to get good performance. We'll see how well this comment ages.

> I'd say that it's very unlikely that the UX will be ruined by ads [...]. If there's one thing he does well it's respecting his users.

If there's one thing Telegram isn't good at, it's having a UX that respect its users. If that was the case, it would be possible to opt out of notifications from group chats and still receive notifications for private chats, but it's not. This forces one to juggle with multiple accounts if they want to both join public groups and also use it for regular chats.

They already put engagement over respect for their users, I don't have much confidence they won't ruin it even more with ads.

> If that was the case, it would be possible to opt out of notifications from group chats and still receive notifications for private chats, but it's not.

Uh, it's possible, and has always been? In the Android client at least, there's a group of big honking toggles under "notifications and sounds" that do just that.

Huh? I can mute groups very easily, and it has been possible for almost as long as they existed AFAIK.

TG has in my opinion the best UI and functionality of all chat-apps available too.

On Android, each chat creates a different notification group that you can customize through the system settings.

On iOS's half baked implementation of notifications, not sure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com