And, honestly, these things are connected. It takes more needless work from the developer to maintain the user-visible pleasantness while adding new features. The code is much more fragile than it could've been which means bugs are much easier to introduce and much harder to diagnose and fix.
And I'm not asking for a complete rewrite. Just losslessly restructure the existing code, extract all those custom FrameLayouts and ViewGroups into separate classes, split those 2000-line if statements into separate methods, make some things (like ChatMessageCell) into sensible class hierarchies, introduce constants or enums to replace magic numbers, all that sort of stuff. This will not affect the UX, but it would make bugs harder to introduce and easier to deal with.
I'm generally not a fan of the developer-experience-focused approach to software development (Electron, React, and the web dev "trust me bro" attitude should not exist), but sensible code structure is where I draw the line.
TBF Telegram doesn't exactly have a direct connection to Toncoin. It's primarily a community project which they heavily promote, since the SEC got on their case about Gram's direct integration.
Did he complain about safety and freedom, or did he complain about censorship? Is it possible that corporate censorship in the west today is already worse than state censorship was in the USSR, due to the unavoidable encroachment of technology into everyday life and the surveillance/centralisation path that we've taken with the internet, without the impact on safety and freedom (yet)?
Once you have the surveillance in place, it only takes a regime change and a suitable excuse (e.g. a terrorist attack) before you live in a dystopia worse than the USSR.
Oh, it absolutely is. Censorship in USSR was manual labor. The scale at which its is operating today is incomparable, as is the amount of false positives which it captures, as well as the variety of censored topics across different institutions.
Manual vs automatic is irrelevant here. There was much less content to moderate if we talk about media. They could censor every single publication, movie or song manually. In oppressive regimes like USSR the censorship is total - the only escape is your kitchen (if you can really trust the people you talk to), in the West you are free to choose the platform and live peacefully in your bubble if you want.
In oppressive regimes like USSR (as if there are or were any regimes "like USSR") (where censorship was manual) there always were loopholes to avoid censorship and convey messages you wanted to. In the West (as well as in the East) today the platforms don't allow for any loopholes, or even when such loopholes are found, they're being censored out very quickly.
Both of you broke the HN guidelines badly in this thread. We have to ban accounts that do that, so please don't do that. We've had to warn you about this before.
I know that such evidence does not exist, but if it were, a detailed comparison based on it would deserve a scientific degree. Neither a single corporation nor entire big tech considered together as a single actor can really compare with the scale and diversity of censorship of a totalitarian state.
> Once you have the surveillance in place, it only takes a regime change and a suitable excuse
Or just a pandemic. We've seen first hand how divergent speech was treated in "democratic" countries and how quickly algorithmic censorship was implemented on web products, especially those owned by Google.
You can buy "anonymous number" on fragment without using any client and without providing any personal information and use it as much as you can
When signal becomes at least remotely as popular as telegram it will implement same protection to fight against spammers because you can't have free unrestricted registrations and don't drown in spam
Telegram currently makes it as accessible as possible: either use it freely but register using phone number and official app or pay and use anonymously as you want
I just looked at the fragment.com site to see how much such a number costs.
The lowest possible bid you can currently make, and that is for an auction that has six days to go, so probably not even the final price, is over 100$.
That is an unacceptable price for basic privacy.
Signal is already extremely popular, their anti-spam by default is that you need to get matched to the user's local contact list or the spam becomes an allow/deny prompt. They also require a confirmed phone number and handle registration throttling.
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