4 ms·

Zawinski's law 2.0: every chat application attempts to expand until it can process payments.

• gaudat 5y ago
  Imagine if Durov put up a donation link on his channel. I wonder what happens if I use a real credit card in the demo shop.
• maratc 5y ago
  Don't forget this part (for completeness): "Those apps which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
• Fogest 5y ago
  Honestly I really like using Telegram since I switched from WhatsApp and I actually would find it pretty neat if I could use Telegram to interact with some local merchants. Unfortunately I am in Canada and I've yet to see any merchants doing this. My pharmacist is on WhatsApp and it's nice to just shoot a message saying "Hey I'll be needing a refill on xyz, thanks". He is pretty into technology and trying new things out so not too surprising he had incorporated WhatsApp. However here we already has support at pretty much every merchant for tapping to pay with phones or tapping with our credit/debit cards so I don't see a huge amount of benefits to this. For example the ordering of pizzas almost seems like it would just be easier on a website. Often when ordering pizza for the family we do things like getting half the pizza with 3 toppings and the other half with 3 different ones. This would start to get annoying to order from a bot. So I am having a hard time finding use cases for the payment side of things in North America. I just can't think of many text based interactions I'd have with merchants that would be more ideal than using a website.
• pcthrowaway 5y ago
  Still waiting on the Hacker News Karmacoin