For example, now you can’t restrict who can send you a message unless you have a premium. Also they added a “feature” that premium users can bypass non-premium users privacy setting “last seen and online” and TG will tell that info regardless of your choice unless you are premium too.
You're significantly misunderstanding the changes.
> now you can’t restrict who can send you a message unless you have a premium.
And before that you just weren't able to restrict that at all, there was no such feature. They didn't remove this feature for free users - it never existed. They just added it right now only for paid users.
> premium users can bypass non-premium users privacy setting “last seen and online”
That is absolutely not what the feature is. If you hide YOUR OWN last seen time, you won't be able to see last seen time of other users, even when they have it public. Now, premium users will be able to see public last seen times of other people if they hide their own. But they obviously still can't see last seen time of people who set it to private, that would've been very dumb.
Thanks for the clarification on last seen, I certainly misread it. About messages: hm, I was sure it existed before but maybe again my brain just lags.
As someone who for some time created and moderated fairly popular chat (200+ people) for anti-war Russians, I have very long and complicated history of relationship with this service and have a lot of different grey-zone stories where it is hard to understand whether it is a mistake from users and whether it is a leak from the service.
Hence I have a little low expectation and overreact on their recent changes
If you consider Telegram as a product to be a logical continuation of the VK message system, then all of these "features" existed.
Restricting of incoming messages existed (cloned from Facebook as usual).
Restricting of "last seen and online" existed in third-party clients. Later on VK started to actively destroy this functionality, by moving manual "is online" management from designated API into all data-fetching APIs.
Not to mention that VK and Telegram are now actively fighting with third-party clients. In which world they would not fight Ninjagram/AyuGram/Plus Messenger/other forks, which allow to add multiple accounts, hide online/reading (to some extent), show message editing history and so on?
> And before that you just weren't able to restrict that at all
This is a really basic security feature though that every single platform should support. If Telegram didn't support messaging restrictions before, that doesn't mean they're not currently gating a basic privacy/safety feature behind a paywall. It just means they should be embarrassed that they used to be doing something even worse, ie not even offering a basic privacy/safety feature at all.
Correct that this would not technically count as removing a feature, but I feel like that's possibly a distinction without a difference. I'm not coming out of reading this explanation feeling more charitable about Telegram's security or willingness to gate off security features. It's a bad look for a company to put basic blocklists behind a paywall, that is not a company I trust not to start degrading security for free users.
For example, now you can’t restrict who can send you a message unless you have a premium. Also they added a “feature” that premium users can bypass non-premium users privacy setting “last seen and online” and TG will tell that info regardless of your choice unless you are premium too.
You're significantly misunderstanding the changes.
> now you can’t restrict who can send you a message unless you have a premium.
And before that you just weren't able to restrict that at all, there was no such feature. They didn't remove this feature for free users - it never existed. They just added it right now only for paid users.
> premium users can bypass non-premium users privacy setting “last seen and online”
That is absolutely not what the feature is. If you hide YOUR OWN last seen time, you won't be able to see last seen time of other users, even when they have it public. Now, premium users will be able to see public last seen times of other people if they hide their own. But they obviously still can't see last seen time of people who set it to private, that would've been very dumb.
Thanks for the clarification on last seen, I certainly misread it. About messages: hm, I was sure it existed before but maybe again my brain just lags.
As someone who for some time created and moderated fairly popular chat (200+ people) for anti-war Russians, I have very long and complicated history of relationship with this service and have a lot of different grey-zone stories where it is hard to understand whether it is a mistake from users and whether it is a leak from the service.
Hence I have a little low expectation and overreact on their recent changes
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If you consider Telegram as a product to be a logical continuation of the VK message system, then all of these "features" existed.
Restricting of incoming messages existed (cloned from Facebook as usual).
Restricting of "last seen and online" existed in third-party clients. Later on VK started to actively destroy this functionality, by moving manual "is online" management from designated API into all data-fetching APIs.
Not to mention that VK and Telegram are now actively fighting with third-party clients. In which world they would not fight Ninjagram/AyuGram/Plus Messenger/other forks, which allow to add multiple accounts, hide online/reading (to some extent), show message editing history and so on?
1 reply →
> And before that you just weren't able to restrict that at all
This is a really basic security feature though that every single platform should support. If Telegram didn't support messaging restrictions before, that doesn't mean they're not currently gating a basic privacy/safety feature behind a paywall. It just means they should be embarrassed that they used to be doing something even worse, ie not even offering a basic privacy/safety feature at all.
Correct that this would not technically count as removing a feature, but I feel like that's possibly a distinction without a difference. I'm not coming out of reading this explanation feeling more charitable about Telegram's security or willingness to gate off security features. It's a bad look for a company to put basic blocklists behind a paywall, that is not a company I trust not to start degrading security for free users.
2 replies →
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