FWIW I easily moved from ActionScript game development for Facebook to Objective-C game development for iPhone, riding both hype waves as a result. So, it was a decent tech pick in 2007-2009.
It did not work even before AI. The rise of "indie hacking" in the late 2010s brought in thousands of hustlers creating similar lists, and many of them were simply selling shovels to other indie hackers (including the lists themselves). By the time of the pandemic, the "submit to every directory & community" strategy was already useless.
There strategy did not make any sense: only a few pre-approved broad-and-shallow forums about everything instead of trying to attract niche communities from Reddit or even FB Groups.
They introduced user-created communities a few months ago. They had problems with squatting and splintering, which might have played a role in their annoucement.
Because there's no real discussion in such broad communities. Only jokes, generic replies, and silly fights. They're equivalent to comment sections on news sites.
Yes, I have the same app on iOS and Android, and for a long time it brought in half the revenue on Android for twice the effort (really messy SDK combined with too many OS versions and devices). Lately the gap has been closing, but it's still roughly 40% Android and 60% iOS, though I have slightly more installs on iOS.
Tea, especially green tea, doesn’t have the same caffeine bioavailability as coffee – otherwise people would abuse it just as much as coffee.
I’m quite sensitive to caffeine, yet I can drink green tea all day without noticing much effect, while even a light coffee or a caffeine pill is clearly noticeable. I can also drink tea before going to sleep without any problems.
> Tea, especially green tea, doesn’t have the same caffeine bioavailability as coffee – otherwise people would abuse it just as much as coffee
You can absolutely get high doses of caffeine from tea if you really want to. It comes down to the type of tea, how much is used, and how strong it’s brewed.
There is nothing special about tea that breaks the rules of caffeine. It comes down to the content of the leaves, quantity, and extraction into water.
> while even a light coffee or a caffeine pill is clearly noticeable
Caffeine pills generally have really high dosages, FYI. Even light coffee drinkers can be caught off guard by how much caffeine is in a typical off the shelf caffeine pill.
> There is nothing special about tea that breaks the rules of caffeine.
There's definitely something special, just poorly studied: typical "how much caffeine is in X?" tables show tea having caffeine levels similar to coffee, but I never feel the same effects.
> Caffeine pills generally have really high dosages, FYI.
I use 200 mg tablets split into quarters for doses of 50–100 mg. Yet, they produce a much milder curve than coffee (which I no longer drink) and, as a side effect, cause no gastrointestinal side effects!
Quick search shows various infographics: green tea at 20–35 mg, black tea at 45–50 mg, espresso at 45–75 mg, and instant at 60-80 mg on average. The day I feel anything close from a cup of black tea to what I get from an instant coffee or a quarter of a pure caffeine pill, I might start trusting those numbers, but for now I see them as nonsense that tries to present as science.
There are also other ingredients in coffee and tea that may affect caffeine's effect (L-theanine in many teas for example). Same with energy drinks, these will have a different effect even when the same caffeine intake is the same due to presence of taurine.
i thought that the mechanism in green tea is that it has l-theanine that helps with caffeine jitters/spikes. a bunch of people drink coffee + theanine which gives a much calmer high.
Signal's UX is years behind even modern WhatsApp, let alone Telegram, which is closer to a blogging or social platform. We can't expect mass adoption of such a clunky app simply because it's more private – it has never worked that way.
Various group features like communities and group voice chats, public channels, voice message transcription, only three sticker packs and no obvious way to add my own, backup is still marked as beta in 2026, no business features while all business here use WhatsApp in one way or another…
Signal offers a chat app that works fine and is not owned by Meta. That's enough for a significant amount of people to switch already. I'd love some quality of life updates to some of the niche features, like the desktop app, but the mobile app does everything it needs to do.
Community chats aren't what keep people on WhatsApp, the network effect does.
Yeah, and to overcome the network effect, you need something compelling enough to justify the effort in the first place. I have hundreds of local contacts on WhatsApp, many of whom have joined Telegram on their own because of its benefits (for example, a local firefighter feed is shared through a channel there). But I only have about 20 contacts on Signal, even IT guys aren’t there. It simply doesn’t offer anything appealing to at least 95% of the people around me.
Yup, yet for some reason we see Telegram always pushed on secure messaging app chats, up until the point when someone points out it's not secure at all like it tries to advertise it self. Then it's always about the fun features it has, even if it's acting against the user's best interest, which is the definition of Trojan horse malware .
Also, there's a LOT of people who have joined Telegram because of its perceived security. The company has been extremely vocal about WhatsApp being horrible despite it having always-on E2EE, when in TG it's practically always off.
For most people quality of life stuff will probably rank higher than "not owned by Meta". I wouldn't be surprised if a large percentage of WhatsApp users don't even know (or care) it's owned by Meta.
I'm a power user who's past configuring things, instead I want them to just work on their own. I also hate to memorize commands but like using the mouse and click buttons.
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