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Comment by BoredPositron

10 hours ago

I mean Durov is going down the deep end in the last few weeks. Messaging all Telegram user with an Emergency feature with a doomer manifest.

https://t.me/durov/452

This really bugged me. I led adoption of Telegram as our family-internal standard chat tool several years ago because I was more anti-Zuck than I was concerned about backdoors or overt politicization of Telegram. Since the Ukraine war began, there has been literally no positive news about Telegram and Durov has become increasingly political (especially since his arrest in France) in his all-users blasts.

With the amount of known use of Telegram by unsavory actors, combined with Durov's own leveraging of his platform for activism, I've been using Whatsapp more and more lately, and don't feel bad about that.

I respect Signal, but it's missing too many product features and it doesn't have the reach Whatsapp does, so it's not compelling as a switching option at this point, even for family use.

I was pretty ticked off about this. I don't disagree with the message content itself, but having political content pushed to me is a big no-no. If this kind of thing keeps up I'll be dropping my premium sub.

> with a doomer manifest

Can you point at anything in his message that's not factually correct?

  • One factual thing that looks off is "the UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets". I'm not in the UK and not following closely the situation there, but "thousands", really? Genuine doubt, would love to see some evidence.

    Otherwise, the "doomer manifest" is OK, but the comically inflated ego of Durov is annoying, him thinking that such banal and commonplace sentiments are worth pushing as an alert message to all users, wrapping everything into announcing his birthday (that he doesn't want to celebrate, oh no).

  • It's not about the content IMO; it's about the principle. Should not be sending content to users, unless they opted into said content being sent to them.

  • >Can you point at anything in his message that's not factually correct?

    He also got involved in Romanian and Moldovan elections, by sending a message to target users in the day of the elections( when doing campaign is illegal) with claims he presented no evidence for, basically the bastard works for Ruzzia, he might be forced to but the facts do not lie.