Comment by FirmwareBurner
2 years ago
I think the Signal devs hadn't thought this through at all and just blindly copied what Telegram was already doing thinking it must be cool and trendy with the masses, without understanding their core user base at all.
Same with prioritizing stories, stickers and crypto payments as core features of Signal when that's not what most of their users care for. Meanwhile there's still no official way to port your existing chat history on PC and iOS to your new device, or support for Android tablets. Obviously, stickers are more important.
Signal (and Signal's phone number model) predates Telegram. It was designed as an SMS and WhatsApp replacement; that is, it was originally designed to replace insecure phone-number-addressed systems.
Obviously, the cryptographic guarantees of the two systems aren't even close to comparable.
May be. But that feature wasn't there since 2014. Signal has adopted a lot of "social media" feature from WhatsApp and Telegram over the years.
They're messengers. They have messenger features. The details of how those features are implemented is what matter. Last I checked, Telegram doesn't even have encrypted group messaging, and it has a serverside database of who's talking to who.
I don't know what "feature" you're talking about not existing until 2014, but before Open Whisper Systems, the thing we call Signal was "TextSecure", a literal SMS replacement.
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TextSecure and Redphone did not upload your contacts to the cloud. No need to be a security expert to know that it's unwise to leak user state to contacts. In fact textsecure (now Silence) is the first SMS app to have a different colors for each contact to help the user avoid mistakingly messaging the wrong person.
Nothing about Signal is haphazardly borrowed from Telegram. The feature we're discussing was chosen to help Signal to grow from a few thousand users to 50M+ without needing to build a social graph on Signal servers.
This mechanism may not be ideal for all users, and it's possible that Signal has now outgrown it, but without it, there would be no Signal as we know it today.
>The feature we're discussing was chosen to help Signal to grow from a few thousand users to 50M+ without needing to build a social graph on Signal servers.
How did THAT feature help Signal grow?
You only receive that spammy message if you already have Signal installed and your contact already has it too.
Signal grew a lot in 2021 (in Europe) because of the pandemonium created by Meta when they announced a change in WhatsApp Privacy Policy so everyone rushed to install Signal but the initial surge, was short lived.
Moving the clocks forward to today, looking at my extended network of family, friends and acquaintances, almost everyone has Signal installed, but most don't use it anymore as it's too frustrating and feels dead, so everything is still on WhatsApp, especially groups. All the Signal groups I have, originally meant to replace the WhatsApp groups, slowly died out and people stopped posting on them or following them, defaulting instead back to the WhatsApp groups.
You don't fix this lack of retention with stickers and spammy messenges.
Let's see if and how Signal will become interoperable with WhatsApp later this year...
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Stickers are more important because just like every other tech company, growth is the only way to stay in business. You can just run a business on delivering a good product to your customers anymore. You have to grow constantly, which means bringing in new customers which, by definition, aren't part of the core user base. It's gross and depressing and it enshitifies everything
>You can just run a business on delivering a good product to your customers anymore.
Who said Signal was a good product to begin with? And who though adding sticker would improve market share?
Casual users value UX and porting their chat history and VoIP calling vastly more than they value E-2-E encryption. You can't talk about growth when you fail to deliver on these fronts first. That's how Telegram and WhatsApps rule the market.
Adding stickers won't move the userbase needle when you already lost your potential users at the lack of chat history and UX.
> And who though adding sticker would improve market share?
My daughter loves stickers.
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What fantasy land are you posting from? Signal has 40 million users as of 2022 (this was the first stat I found on a quick DDG search, which is all the effort your post deserves).
Also: "Who said Signal was a good product to begin with?" LOL. Just read the comments on this link bro.
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