Most of the people I know use Telegram to buy drugs.
The main use of Telegram in France is supporting illegal activities. The page allowing you to discover channels in your neighbourhood was clearly designed to facilitate that. Telegram has basically no market share as a chat application here outside of that.
You don’t see “the West” whatever that means go after WhatsApp, Signal or Matrix. That should tell you something.
> Most of the people I know use Telegram to buy drugs
I'm in France. I use Telegram extensively for chatting with friends (1:1 or group chats) because its UX was vastly better than any of the alternatives when we started a few years ago (stuff like polls to decide when to meet, location sharing to find one another in a crowded place), custom bots, being able to edit messages to fix typos, etc. Nowadays WhatsApp does those too, but UX is still worse, especially on non-mobile.
Meanwhile I know people buying drugs off WhatsApp.
That's weird because it's really a convenient chat app and unlike WhatsApp, works equally well on both phones and desktops (Whatsapp works great on phones but desktop client sucks, Skype in it's old days, worked fine on desktops but totally sucked on phones, Telegram was the first app that did both well).
In our company all of the work chats are on Telegram although it's 100% legal, audited, and does nothing wrong. It's just the most convenient way to communicate. We use Slack only when some client heavily insists on it.
It's also really easy to integrate with as a developer, the bot API is genuinely one of the best and easiest-to-use APIs I've ever had the pleasure of interacting with.
From what I'm hearing through the grapevine (from people who actually use Telegram for this), some of the dealers on there actually use bots to take your order / address. You can't really do this on any other messaging app, at least not easily.
As a lightweight user, I had literally no idea what you’re talking about.
Not saying you’re wrong, just that it’s not something in your face and you need to actively search for this (now that I know this exists, it took me a minute to find it).
Or "find me a hook up close by", "find me the notification channel of a nearby protest" (mind you, this actually happened in Hong Kong in 2019). But yeah, what you said also makes sense.
I don't use this feature as I don't really want to send my precise location to Telegram but I can imagine it being in someone else's usability complain against Signal, too.
“find me a hook up close by” literally means “find me a prostitute nearby” which is also illegal here and is indeed present on Telegram.
Considering how everyone reporting their actual experience with Telegram here is downvoted to death, it seems to really hurt some users to actually consider that maybe the reason Durov got arrested is because Telegram welcomes criminals with open arms and does absolutely nothing to moderate the platform.
Apart from the fact that, in my years of using Telegram as my messaging app, I have never seen any of the "easy access to drugs" screens people here seem to find: an easy way to find drug sellers is a boon to law enforcement. This cannot be a reason for going against Telegram.
Like two weeks ago the WSJ reported a big expose on how Instagram permits users to sell drugs using paid advertisements. I guess Zuck will be arrested shortly after Durov? I can't believe these comments are in good faith but dang says assume so. Smh
> You don’t see “the West” whatever that means go after WhatsApp, Signal or Matrix. That should tell you something.
WhatsApp is a good corporate puppy of the West; Signal is a crazy nothingburger that recently burned its reputation by going into cryptocurrencies; Matrix, like with all FLOSS, has approximately zero users and is way under the radar of authorities. Still, you do occasionally see talk and moves against the first two.
> Do you have an actual argument against my main point - Telegram UX is literally designed to facilitate drug trafficking inside the application
Shmaybe, idk. It never occurred to me until you wrote it that this feature would be used for drug trade. Then again, the one time I turned it on out of curiosity, I figured it's mostly used for prostitution. I guess the use may differ across the world :).
FWIW, I'm somewhat with you on this - I'm not assuming that governments and law enforcement frowning on E2EE chats are just fascists revealing themselves. USA is good at signalling the zeitgeist, but all the issues with police power abuse are IMHO a USA problem, not a whole world problem; over here, people seem to have a little more trust in governments and law enforcement.
TeMPOral is indeed not responsible for most of the vapid idiocies written here about the EU which annoyed me. Thank you for pointing that I’m commenting in anger.
You don’t see “the West” whatever that means go after WhatsApp, Signal or Matrix. That should tell you something.