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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>But it’s par for the course for newly popular services.

It is, but most consumers don't care, they just what their stuff to work 100% of the time as frictionless as possible, and, on top of all things, for free. Otherwise they just run back to the usual free surveilanceware.

I've tried and failed to convince some young, highly educated zoomer friends with good incomes to move away from WhatsApp and Facebook and even when I told them "Look, they're basically spying on you" they just brush it off and say "I don't care, it's fun, easy to use and all my friends are already there".

Ironically, it was easier to convince my boomer parents to move to Signal and they also understand and agree with the tradeoffs and extra friction for the sake of free privacy but younger people just want to be where their friends are and not feel left out (remember the blue vs green bubble stigma on iMessage).

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Using Telegram is a rational decision if you want a service that's good at fun conversations. Signal's value proposition is _secure conversations_ and it does that much better than other services. "Fun" is not part of Signal's value proposition. More people want/need fun conversations than need secure ones. Regardless of what people "should" want, Telegram serves people's mundane everyday needs materially better than Signal does. "It's fun and the people I care about talking to already use it" is a compelling value proposition, not a frivolous one, given people's everyday needs.

The more someone cares about security and is willing to trade away other good things for security, the better a platform Signal is — but remember, this also flows the other way.

Why are there so many Telegram fanboys astroturfing in this thread? This thread has nothing to do with Telegram.

I'm a little confused because you brought up Telegram specifically.

WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger offer the same level of security as Telegram. In fact, I think WhastApp is more secure since it does E2E encryption by default.

It's true that Telegram is about "fun" and not security. I just wasn't sure if you tried to imply Telegram is like Signal with a focus on fun as well, or you just meant most people don't care about security and would rather have fun chats?

Telegram has optional E2E encryption (as does WhatsApp) which puts it ahead of Facebook Messenger. Unlike FB Messenger and WhatsApp, the company behind Telegram so far doesn't have a history of selling your personal data. I'd say it's fairly competitive, though obviously not ahead of Signal

> Telegram has optional E2E encryption (as does WhatsApp)

WhatsApp, for all its faults is E2E-encrypted by default and all the time.

Not that it helps much unless you avoid activating backups and convince all your contacts to avoid backups.

I don't like WhatsApp (anymore), but we should stick to the facts.

Thanks for setting the record straight. I actually thought you needed to opt in (was that maybe how it worked when they first added it?) but I'm glad to hear it's always on

Facebook Messenger also has optional E2E encryption in a feature called Secret Conversations which is very similar to Telegram's Secret Chats. A big difference though is that Facebook uses the Signal protocol while Telegram rolled their own.

> WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger offer the same level of security as Telegram.

If you look only at encryption, WhatsApp is even better.

Once you factor in the fact that all your metadata is vacuumed into Facebooks data lake and that it might very well end up in Google Cloud if either you or someone you chat with activate cloud backups.

Now that you mention it, I _did_ fail to explain why I brought up Telegram. My bad, thank you for calling me on that. I mentioned Telegram particularly because in my social circles, Telegram is number one by a long shot in terms of "people just want to be where their friends are and not feel left out." I should have actually said that, rather than jumping to the next part of the idea.

(I am not here to defend Telegram's portrayal of itself as a secure messaging service — Telegram is grotesquely bad on that axis)

That’s interesting. Do you live in a country where Telegram is particularly popular? Here in the US I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of someone using it. I don’t even know what the app icon looks like. My social circles are on some mix of Messenger, iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, and if you count coworkers as social contacts, Slack.

not op and aware this may not be representive, but i share the preference for telegram as a just-works, "fun" and high-penetration messenger with whatsapp as a first and sms as second compatability fallback. this beeing in germany.

tg is light on resources like phone storage and bandwidth (and hence money) and has excellent multidevice support.

apart from that i don't belive one can have a seriously private conversation involving a device running popular versions of android/ios.

I don’t believe fun conversations are mutually exclusive with secure communications. You can have fun conversations with them being secure from prying eyes.

Strongly agree with this. However, I also believe that there is no existing service that does both well.

Loved ones. Especially seniors. Are the easiest to convince

You carrot them with a unique way to ping you, over tech no one else has, and they see it like an intimate connection with you

I had my elder parents and SO use it for years before friends i consider privacy aware and tech savvy... For years

Added benefit: its a lot harder to share memes over a young network with no traffic.

I guess that may change now....

Never looked at it this way but 100% true in my case. Got my parents on Signal three years ago and they have been perfectly happy.

Actually all the non switchers now see that there are really a lot of switchers. It's even on mainstream news websites here. I see this as a win.

Did you try to tell them "Ten years from now, your future you might care", as this is really what privacy is about.

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