The Usernamageddon β An open letter for Telegram
π tl;dr: I will sometimes use this channel as my blog. Telegram stripped off inactive usernames from its users, and is planning to sell them after damaging its own communities. I am personally against this.
After the
latest decision made by Pavel Durov, many developers decided to shut their bots down to protest against the bold assumption of Telegram, that it can strip the usernames off the users and sell them back. I decided
not to shut Markinim down, because many people would miss it. I am however writing this post as an open letter for Telegram.
For those who don't know what I am talking about, here's a context:
Some days ago, Telegram started
ripping off usernames from the channels that were inactive since a year or so. The planned outcome was to stop the black market sale of valuable short usernames. Said usernames have been subsequently banned for an undetermined amount of time, and no one can claim them as of now. The problem about this is that the chosen criteria for a channel to be selected for this, was flawed: some big channels with a lot of subscribers and daily traffic, such as
@botlist,
@nekogram, million subscribers channels like
@zh_cn, and even official channels like
@HiddenSender have suffered this harsh fate. Another reason for this was to destroy inactive, public channels, where the owner was a deleted account, or spam channels. Those channels are now private and only available to their previous subscribers, unless their owner decides to set a new username. The community started referring to this event as the "Usernamageddon".
This led to a lot of issues for community managers:
- Many link aggregators channels are now gone
- We can't edit the old hyperlinks, and they will remain broken indefinitely unless we get the old usernames back
- We must spend effort changing the respective usernames in every relevant message (e.g. chat descriptions, group rules, etc...)
- We shall hope that our brand username will not get stolen (or bought π) by someone else in the future
Telegram could have handled this in better ways, yet it chose the worst option among all of them:
1. Appending a "_inactive" tag to the username, to preserve the legacy of its channels. Just like what happens with "_mv" if a username gets claimed via
@username_bot.
2. Using a better selection criteria, e.g. taking into account channel subscribers count, traffic from users, whether the owner account is deleted or not
3. Leaving everything as is
4. A better ranking system for global search, since a lot of channels are spam/scam or empty channels with few subscribers
This majorly impacts community managers, and damaging communities is not something we, content creators, expect from a platform such as Telegram.
And then it turns out that all of this happened because Telegram
planned to sell those username back, as NFTs or other Web3 related crap.
I am personally extremely disappointed by the direction Telegram is going towards to. I would have been okay if they just decided to sell 4-letter usernames to big companies, but creating a whole marketplace after
stealing those usernames from the users is unacceptable, and the platform is going downhill. I still have hope for Telegram to revert this decision, but for now I will be fighting against it.
I kindly ask everyone who agrees, to share this message and let everyone know about this β€οΈ
