Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Big pros of telegram compared to wa:

1. So easy to migrate. Wa restore can take up to an hour from gdrive, telegram is ready as soon as it is installed

2. It's always on everywhere, i.e. when i open web.telegram.org or desktop qpp it just connects instantly, web.whatsapp otoh requires my phone to be connected, takes forever to start and fails half the time.

3. I can restore year old file on tg while wa fails unless i have it in a backup.

4. The api. So easy to implement and such amazing bots. Just search skeddy for an example.

5. Huge groups. Our housing group has 1100 members, don't think its possible on wa

Biggest con compared to wa:

1. An amazingly bonehead feature that fills up my inbox: it has tell me x or y has joined telegram with a red badge. Seriously and i would care why? I add hundreds of people to my contact list. I can't even turn off this feature.



You can turn off notifications for your contacts joining Telegram in settings, but what’s annoying is that it will still create a new empty chat for the both of you and that cannot be disabled. It’s annoying to have to delete that chat manually for contacts I’d never even chat with (but are there for non-Telegram purposes).

The other solution for this is more of a nuclear approach where you disable contact sync and manage contacts in Telegram manually.


Maybe I can write a bot that crawls web.telegram.org ever 5 minutes and delete all such chats.


Why do that when you can write a bot that just connects to the Telegram API with MTProto?


Oh that's even better. I thought their API was only about replying to users. Didn't know you could delete chats etc. Thanks for the suggestion!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: