Hacker News Reader

Comment by ROARosen | Hacker News Reader

DISCLAIMER: To all chat-app haters, my point is that the user experience of these newfangled services is just much better, o course I'm not taking into acct all the very real concerns stemming rom these apps.

Since your talking about user experience, (not mentioning privacy, security, etc.). How is email better in terms of usability than say Telegram or any other app.

Which keep every chat you've ever had.

You can "Save" chats for yourself for later.

You can have usenet-style conversations in huge mega-groups.

You can follow the latest news from channels just like RSS.

All without needing to keep the data downloaded on your device, and backed up in the cloud.

Basically all those separate services you mention (with separate software required to be downloaded to view them) are rolled into in any one-stop-shop chat app. Oh, and it also has phone and video calls too.

View on HN

I like Telegram a lot. Has merit in the ways you mention, and it is pretty lean, not too much going on, not pushy either.

None of this replaces email.

A big one is I am not sure I will have every Telegram chat I received a decade or two from now, and I will have all my email.

Another is everyone uses email. Not everyone uses other apps. So far Telegram is entertainment only. That is fine.

Email can act like chat, chat is not email.

I very strongly disagree with better. Different? Yup. More experiences possible? Yup.

But not better. Email is killer. And it is not hard, is time tested, production proven, near ubiquitous.

UX is bang on simple, and I hardly ever think about it.

"Better" needs some reevaluation to be frank. I see a general failure to understand why email is great. That means a claim of better UX may make very little sense.

I agree about email. And the main thing, and what distinguishes it from Telegram, etc., is that it is a protocol, not an app. You can use any client you want, or write your own.

Telegram is one of the few messengers that actually enables you to use any Telegram client available, or write your own[1].

The protocol that is de facto Telegram is called MProto[2], and is publicly available.

[1]: https://telegram.org/apps

[2]: https://core.telegram.org/mtproto

edit: The main difference between email and Telegram, is that anyone can host email servers, while Telegram manages theirs.

edit2: MProto being widely available to study, one could perhaps reverse-engineer their own server - but that hasn't been a desire to accomplish this from what I can see. Much of the value-proposal of Telegram is their Service as a whole.

Telegram is centralised and siloed, where email isn't. You just can't compare the two.

> You just can't compare the two.

You just did.

I was responding to the claim that Telegram wasn't providing a protocol or ability for developers to author their own clients.

And point taken—I didn’t know about this, so Telegram was not an ideal example. But, as you point out, it still is not quite a decentralized as email, and, as a protocol, does not have email’s universal character. But thanks for the interesting information.

You can back up all Telegram chats including Media, of course this doesn't replace email, but the difference is just a client to parse the data and log it in a message style front end.

Overall, email is killer, I would love to move everything toward emails that I can filter, or as the OP posted, a Unified inbox.

I wonder if there is a patent on it.

> You can back up all Telegram chats including Media, of course this doesn't replace email, but the difference is just a client to parse the data and log it in a message style front end.

While this is true, there's no automatic process and it's limited to the desktop client. Email is much more convenient because of this. I can't "forget" to backup my emails for the past month or year. I know they'll be on my email server until I delete them.

I am not a chat app hater.

I am a workware app hater, unless I use it for specifics, like a meeting. For that case, I love "continue in browser" because I want to do it, and then when I am done, maybe never think about it again.

No states, other features. Just launch, have the meeting, next.

I like Skype still. I use it like I used to use IRC.

None of that is email though. If I want to send complex thoughts, I send an email. Async, robust, easy.

I really like my data in an open format, stored where I want, usable on what I want, when and how I want, and with whatever app I want.

You made it sound good except for the cloud bits. If you toss those out, it sounds like IRC, which I agree is great. However, the local logs I can dig through with `grep` and `less` very quickly are a huge part of what make IRC great for me, and why I've never felt quite as comfortable in newer stuff like XMPP and Matrix (although I do use all three regularly still).

If I have to search from within the program, I find that it's basically never as fast and as powerful as what I want. If the local logs use some sort of database instead of a plain text file, I feel my hands are tied behind my back.

This is more of a client problem than protocol problem, I think, but IRC just still has the best clients by far. I really hope some other things can come closer to matching irssi one of these days. Logging, keyboard shortcuts, scriptability and configuration, not automatically re-ordering my precious channels. So many things are worse than irssi.

Also, before someone says it, I know irssi has XMPP support, but lack of OMEMO made me not bother. Similarly, weechat has a Matrix plugin or two, which was the best Matrix experience I've had in a lot of ways, but it was super buggy and would break or constantly log me out, so I couldn't seem to stick with it.

> All without needing to keep the data downloaded on your device, and backed up in the cloud.

I'd call this a feature of email – I _can_ easily have all the stuff I need downloaded on my device. I can move email around without using a specific provider, back it up to an offline storage just like any other data, and use multiple clients without re-syncing all the emails.

Also it's perfectly possible to have email available over the Internet, only downloading things to your device when needed. Most modern email services work this way – either through webmail and/or using email protocols like IMAP.

(That's not to say that email is perfect. Far from. The content of email is a hot mess – broken HTML implementations, HTML email trying to do ungodly things, plaintext with hard line breaks, plaintext displayed with no line breaks whatsoever, RTF...)

>You can "Save" chats for yourself for later.

Can you, though? With Telegram, perhaps. But "chat" in general does not have this. Depends heavily on the service, in my experience.

Indeed. This varies widely, and the save does too.

Does not compare to email and all the options one has.

> How is email better in terms of usability than say Telegram or any other app.

> Which keep every chat you've ever had.

Telegram only promises to keep your messages for 6 months of inactivity. If you switch to something else, you're going to have to archive the messages yourself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com