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I'm turning 41, but I don't feel like celebrating
- pjmlp 1y agoReaching the end of the same decade, and sadly share the same opinion, worse seeing the population of my country voting for what we got away from 1974 and what my parents generation had to endure.
- nialse 1y agoCommon misunderstandings are that there was no control over the internet and that anonymity was for protecting freedom of expression of the individuals. The difference is that what once was covert in the West is now out in the open. Anonymity enabled the troll culture, famously exploited by any and all bad faith actors in their favor. Control in terms of surveillance on metadata level is just a manner of having enough endpoints at your disposal for a nation state actor. It was a nice illusion and the wake up is kind of harsh.
- SilverElfin 1y ago> Anonymity enabled the troll culture Anonymity enabled honesty and free expression. FTFY.
- nialse 1y agoThat is indeed the paradox. What sometimes made true community possible, sometimes made exploitation easier. The line between the two is thin, and we’ve all seen both sides of it.
- phs318u 1y agoI'm old enough to remember the internet before the WWW and yes, anonymity enabled the troll culture (among other things). Honesty and free expression didn't require anonymity because people weren't being constantly monitored or having their every pronouncement judged (by the mostly anonymous). Yes, there were lots of flame-wars, but folks by and large had the gumption to hold their name to their positions. * I may be wearing rose-tinted glasses. It's been a very long time since I'd spend 4 hours a day reading and replying on various Usenet groups.
- mlyle 1y agoYou don't need anonymity so much until certain things show up: other anonymous people, commercial bulk data aggregation, bullying subcultures, blending of real life with the online world, political intolerance. Unfortunately, I don't see a path back to the kind of internet where we don't need anonymity so much.
- anigbrowl 1y agoAnonymity was important back then to, and I was a strident defender of anon.penet.fi (look this up if you're not familiar). The problem is that what worked well as an option with a degree of persistence created its own set of problems when industrialized. We are not imho better off with fully anonymous swarms or the increasingly default situation of website ownership being hidden from the public, both of which have enabled the automation of abuse, misinformation, slop content and so on. Over the last 30-40 years internet communication/communities have gone from relatively high trust and levels of user participation/democracy toward zero trust and an extremely bimodal power distribution which has produced an excess of toxicity and adversarial behavior. I blame hacking/phreaking culture to a certain extent, because openness and information exchange valorized in that culture are also accompanies with a lot of drama and personal backbiting.
- SilverElfin 1y ago> Honesty and free expression didn't require anonymity because people weren't being constantly monitored or having their every pronouncement judged This feels revisionist. The internet was almost entirely anonymous. Whether it was “required” or not is irrelevant. People could be honest and not fear censorship.
- jrflowers 1y ago> Anonymity enabled the troll culture You will be blown away by stuff people post at eachother on facebook, the site where you use your real name
- ljf 1y agoConsider; a. Not all people using Facebook are using their real name, and b. Not all Facebook accounts are real people
- jrflowers 1y agoYou have a good point. Some people have anonymous accounts on facebook and that means that my old neighbor did not publicly surprise her husband by announcing that she was polyamorous in a status update
- nialse 1y agoReal names? I have an old novelty account (not used) which still sends me updates via email from the family of the same name as the ready made meals company I was making fun of. At the same time you are completely right! Troll culture has enabled an era of unhinged communication. Many people have lost the little decency they had. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not immune to it.
- jrflowers 1y agoYeah my point isn’t really about troll accounts. They exist but that doesn’t have anything to do with the amount of crazy stuff people post under their real names on facebook. Like I could say “imgur, the place where you post dogs” and that would be accurate even if somebody saw pictures of a cat on it
- bfg_9k 1y ago> Anonymity enabled the troll culture And so what if it did? That's the price we collectively pay for a free internet.
- SilverElfin 1y agoThis is Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram. And he’s totally correct. The Internet was much better before the 2000s and the social media era. And when the people who remember it aren’t around, those remaining won’t have any idea that they’re missing something. He’s also totally correct in calling out the obvious lunge towards authoritarianism from European democracies - this must be stopped immediately: > Once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures such as digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU). > Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet. The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets. France is criminally investigating tech leaders who defend freedom and privacy.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoWe're also running out of people who know and care that you used to be able to buy straight from a publisher, own, play offline with privacy, and resell games on an open platform without Steam as a DRM/rent-seeking middleman.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoPoint 'em to Gog and itch.io if you get a chance
- tpm 1y agoYet he is also one of the riders of apocalypse. Techbros who only applied rules that suited them and abused everything else. It's one thing if we had some mythical true freedom fighters, or guys from Signal, against The State, but if it's people like him, Zuckerberg etc. then it gets much harder to defend anything they do. It is important to understand that 'the lunge towards authoritarianism' is directly caused by this. > Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet. This is not correct as far as I know. If Germany is persecuting someone for something written on the internet, that something is much worse than criticism. Words should still have meaning.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ban4lifehn 1y ago[flagged]
- cheema33 1y ago> Hn doesn't actually believe in free expression. I once had an account banned for expressing 'generic' Austrian economic views. If that were truly the case, all of our accounts would be banned.
- Podrod 1y agoI've seen people expressing full blown communist economic views here without being banned so I suspect your ban was for something else entirely.
- fragmede 1y agoIt very is important how you state those views. If I write "you fucking moron, how could you believe X and Y and Z are true. Idiots!" is gonna get a different response than if I calmly and patiently explain how X and Y and Z are founded on shaky principals that don't stand up to scrutiny.
- doener 1y agoPavel Durov cannot be trusted. He has built his life on lies, created an opaque, highly complex network of companies, and developed a relationship with the Russian regime that is full of inconsistencies, among other things. For starters, he claimed for years that Telegram's headquarters were in Berlin, Germany, when they never were.
- bfg_9k 1y agoHe, himself? I agree. He's a snake in the grass. His message is 100% correct though.
- siva7 1y agoNo, it isn't. There are factual errors in his tweet like others pointed out.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- doener 1y agoPS: He is even lying about his own body. https://www.reddit.com/r/tjournal_refugees/comments/1k3lc02/дуров_и_фотошоп/?tl=de&share_id=cLEJjcT9OntzR27681tVv&utm_content=1&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/tjournal_refugees/comments/1k3lc02/...
- rhetocj23 1y agoLol lets not even talk about his comical toupee.
- graeme 1y agoIt should be noted that Durov does not criticize Russia, his country of citizenship and the center of much of his userbase. The Russian internet is far more controlled than the Western internet, with penalties up to and including arrest and death for expressing the wrong views. Russia also is actively invading Europe and sponsoring vast network of troll accounts which poison the discourse on the internet in Western countries. This does not make his argument incorrect but it is worth keeping the context in mind before getting too cynical about western systems. That cynicism is one the explicit goals of Russian propaganda.
- Aeolun 1y ago> That cynicism is one the explicit goals of Russian propaganda. I don’t need Russia to tell me to be cynical of the western political situation.
- ahofmann 1y agoWell, do you? Where does the cynicism against the political situation come from? I think europes reality is much better, than the poisoned discourse makes us believe.
- lnsru 1y agoI am in Germany and I don’t need troll farms to poison my worldview. It’s enough to go to the local school where swimming pool is closed, because there is no money. It’s enough to go to all hands meeting at work to get new location in best cost country presented. It’s enough to try finding specialized doctor and realizing, that my public health insurance allows me to see the doctor in April 2026. I just don’t think it’s the way it should be in a first world country. Obviously something does not work despite people actively voting in every election.
- ahofmann 1y agoYes, all of this is true. But it is also true that the poisoned discourse makes things look much worse than they really are. To reframe it: changing these bad situations is easier than it seems. It’s not easy, but many people feel as if change were impossible. I believe this feeling of hopelessness is one of the main reasons why political and financial fascists can rise. They yell that the world is falling apart and that they have the (final) solution. Russian bot farms amplify this narrative, helping massively to weaken democratic societies. This is an information war and Europe has been losing it for about 10 to 20 years.
- seydor 1y agoThe freedom interlude was a byproduct of the end of the cold war. We lived a rare period of trust between people across the world. Now we need to find a new framework beyond national trust but I don't have ideas. Durov himself lives in an unfree country
- Grazester 1y agoWhat unfree county is that? He certainly doesn't live in Russia if that is what you are alluding to.
- mcintyre1994 1y agoHe lives in the UAE.
- splix 1y agoI think for the past couple of years he lives in France. By force, so it's not very straight to recognize it as a free or not.
- runjake 1y agoHe mentions on his recent Lex Fridman podcast episode[1] that he lives in Dubai, U.A.E. He expressed fear about France's actions against him. 1. https://youtu.be/qjPH9njnaVU https://youtu.be/qjPH9njnaVU
- iamnothere 1y agoHe does have a French passport (in addition to his other passports) but does not live there. This may be the source of the confusion.
- splix 1y agoI mean the arrest. But as I just learned [1] he is being allowed to make periodic travels to Dubai since recently. So things got better for him now, but that's just since July 2025. Before that he was physically staying in France since August 2024, which I would call as "living" as it's the place where he spent most of his time. [1] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250619-france-softens-restrictions-for-telegram-founder-durov-judicial-source https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250619-france-soften...
- yatsyk 1y agoI share Durov’s disappointment about where the internet is heading. But I think it’s hypocritical to talk about freedom of speech issues in Western Europe while ignoring similar or worse restrictions in China, Russia, or Dubai, where he lives. It’s similar to Musk’s approach — when Twitter is shut down in Brazil, it’s a freedom of speech violation, but having a Tesla factory in China suddenly makes that problem disappear there.
- kgeist 1y agoWell, Russia has basically never had freedom of speech, except for a brief period in the 1990s, so it contributes nothing to his thesis in the tweet that "once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures."
- yatsyk 1y agoIf he had written that Western Europe is moving toward China’s model, I would have had no questions about his tweet and would have fully supported it. As I understand it, Durov doesn’t agree with your statement — you can check point 5 of his 2014 manifesto [1] [1] https://globalvoices.org/2014/03/13/pavel-durovs-seven-reasons-to-stay-in-russia/ https://globalvoices.org/2014/03/13/pavel-durovs-seven-reaso...
- kgeist 1y ago>2014 That was before the Kremlin fully launched its repressive measures against the Internet, and before he was forced to leave Russia for refusing to cooperate with the authorities.
- sam_lowry_ 1y agoAlready after 2012 street protests in Moscow.
- jrochkind1 1y agoMakes it weird that he's choosing to live in a never-free country maybe though (as an alternative to living in the other seldom-free country in which he is a citizen).
- jagermo 1y ago"Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet Bull. Shit. If you break the existing laws, by insulting or slandering someone, you might have to face the consequences. But I guess it is easy to point the finger at Germany and conjure the specter of the fascists if you live in Dubai, come from Russia, and created 2 of the biggest troll-mills ever. Would not want to rattle the cage too much, would we.
- ljf 1y agoSame for his suggestion the 1000s of people are in prison for tweeting - there are people who are jailed for malicious communications but that includes terrorism and a few others things that are far more serious than simply presenting an opinion on a website.
- nairboon 1y ago> anyone who dares to criticize officials > by insulting or slandering someone That's a bit of a straw man isn't it? The German government makes it very easy to point fingers at them: The German minister of economics and "vice president" (vice chancellor) had so much free time and capacity to sue more than 800 citizens! https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1493232/umfrage/strafanzeigen-durch-bundesminister-in-deutschland/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1493232/umfra... The vice president of a G7 country suing old men because they called him a numbnut on the internet is ridiculous.
- jagermo 1y agono, its not. He exercised his right to not be insulted and slandered - same as if those people would have walked up to him and talked to him directly. Especially if you see the hate that was sprewed at him at every single post, news, update or whatever, i completley understand. This has nothing to do with criticizing someone - Habeck actually has a good track record of sitting down with other people and talking with them, but stuff like death threats. More background here at politico https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-robert-habeck-files-730-hate-crime-charge/ https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-robert-habeck-files-... this were massive attacks leading up to the european election not people unhappy with "Ze Greens". Also, on the "old man calling him an idiot”: << Habeck authorized prosecutors to pursue the case for the insult against him by issuing what in German is known as a "Strafantrag." However, this is different from an individually-submitted criminal complaint to law enforcement authorities known as a "Strafanzeige," and could indicate that law enforcement had first invited or asked Habeck to press the charges. Prosecutors did not specify who had approached who first. So, not Habeck going after him, but simply saying that its ok to pursue the inquiry. << The Bavaria resident is also accused of posting Nazi-era imagery and language earlier in 2024. According to prosecutors, this post may have violated German laws against the incitement of ethnic or religious hatred. Yeah, that "old guy" seems like a real treat and not at all like an asshole right-wing dumbnut. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-over-online-insult/a-70793557 https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-... The old guy was also not convicted, something the right-wingers found super cool.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cosmicgadget 1y agoIt is weird that all he seems to do is criticize western democracies and push NFTs. Who is hawking NFTs in a year that isn't 2020?
- sam_lowry_ 1y agoTelegram and Durov have a different idea of NFT than you, I guess. For them, it's more about enabling micropayments. So far, the only successful micropayments system was advertising, and it's a real shame we couldn't build better.
- hshdhdhehd 1y agohttps://archive.is/mHEE4 https://archive.is/mHEE4
- damaru2 1y agoLet's take a second to remember that Pavel Durov is the CEO of a messaging company that doesn't end-to-end encrypt chats by default, and does not even offer a way to have end-to-end encrypted groups.
- damaru2 1y agoLet's take a second to remember that Pavel Durov is the CEO of a messaging company that doesn't end-to-end encrypt chats by default and does not provide a way to end-to-end encrypt group chats
- sam_lowry_ 1y agoHe covered it in the interview in a quite reasonable way. E2E encryption, especially if forward secrecy is a requirement is incompatible with many important features: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qjPH9njnaVU&t=9583 https://youtube.com/watch?v=qjPH9njnaVU&t=9583 You probably don't realize it, but multi-device support, group chats of tens of thousands of users, channels with millions of users and comments of said users. Attachments and history and search. And then a whole infrastructure for running bots and processing payments. And proxies to fight blocking attempts. All of these are either highly problematic or computationally intensive and practically infeasible with E2E on. Otherwise, someone would have taken the opportunity and reimplemented Telegram on top of homomorphic encryption /s.
- zahllos 1y agoEnd to end could still be default for 1-1 chats. Multi device support turns this into a small group chat but it is doable (Wire did it this way afaik; I think Signal does too). Small groups could likewise be supported. I take the point that for large groups client fan out of the double ratchet doesn't scale. We now have MLS but we didn't. There's also an argument of how can you really keep a secret in an open group of a few thousand people. But on a small, "personal" level, e2e could absolutely be done. Not doing so is a choice, one that conveniently ends with almost everyone's chats stored on servers somewhere. I would go so far as to say I bet telegram is a goldmine for TLAs.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- NiekvdMaas 1y agoRelated: Lex Fridman just dropped a 4 hour podcast with Durov https://youtu.be/qjPH9njnaVU?si=_pkEi-SDML08AASJ https://youtu.be/qjPH9njnaVU?si=_pkEi-SDML08AASJ
- _hao 1y agoTwo intelligence assets talking to each other. Both have quite similar backgrounds with dubious credentials. A history of lying and obfuscation. I wouldn't trust anything Fridman or Durov say.
- zingababba 1y agoI don't know how anyone sits through ten minutes of Lex speaking let alone multiple hours.
- sam_lowry_ 1y agoIt's a steep learning curve, I concur. Try to sit through the 5 hours of interview with Carmack if you are a coder, or the interview with Aella, if you are more into humanities. These two are his crown jewels, IMO.
- zingababba 1y agoAwwww, so cute. Here's a cookie.
- eatrocs_allday 1y agoyou don't have to listen - get google gemini to make a transcript & summarize key points.
- thedevilslawyer 1y ago> and ultimately biological. Was fully nodding along, and this confused me. What is that supposed to mean?
- dymk 1y agoThat’s the thing about dog whistles, they’re full of plausible deniability.
- pogue 1y ago"The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets." Who?? What's he talking about?
- AlexandrB 1y agoProbably referring to Lucy Connoly[1] and the general numbers of speech arrests on the UK[2]. "Imprisoning thousands" may be an exaggeration though. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yl7p4l11po https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yl7p4l11po [2] https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-struggle-30-arrests-a-day-censorship/ https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru...
- roryirvine 1y agoIt's not actually true, of course - unless by "thousands" you mean "one or two", and by "for their tweets" you mean "for actively inciting serious violence in the middle of a riot". But it's a fairly common far right talking point, and similar claims come up a lot in certain types of anti-Western propaganda. Perhaps Durov could have been influenced by that?
- ath3nd 1y ago[dead]
- mikewarot 1y agoI agree that we're doomed, but I think the key decision that doomed us was made deep in the NSA in the 1980s, when they decided to bury the idea of Capability Based Security, and just let MS-DOS and Unix take over computing after the rise of the microcomputer. They had discovered and then fixed the problem with ambient authority after it arose during the Viet Nam conflict, giving rise to Multilevel Security. When the Microcomputers came, and everyone ignored mainframes, they decided to step back, and let everyone have their foolishness. It was far easier for their jobs if the let operating systems that trusted everything take over the market. The Soviets copied our moves, and made themselves vulnerable. They figured they would retain the institutional knowledge and wisdom, keeping their own internal systems secure by design. But they didn't plan on retirements and changes of administration, and the end of the cold war. Once that shock happened, they didn't reconsider. They didn't reconsider again when the world became networked, and connectivity for almost everything became persistent. There were multiple points at which they could have changed course, quietly pushed systems that were secure by design, but they apparently haven't. So now we're in a world where you can't trust anything newer than an IBM XT with dual floppy drives. Where firmware can be updated with persistent worms, making it permanently untrustworthy. Into this world, we all carry spying devices in our pockets and purses, that can be repurposed by any intelligence agency, or sufficiently motivated person for that matter, into tools of oppression. I think that a sufficient shock might pull us back into rationality, and cause us to seek sane computing strategies we can trust, but I don't give that good odds at present, 5% or less. We don't have privacy, and you'd have to be an old fool to actually speak your mind these days. We're falling right into the thing we feared the most when I was a kid, a repressive Soviet style oligarchy where you can't trust anyone. You especially can't trust any computing devices.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rchaud 1y ago> We’ve been made to believe that the greatest fight of our generation is to destroy everything our forefathers left us: tradition, privacy, sovereignty, the free market, and free speech. By betraying the legacy of our ancestors.... Pavel Durov's ancestors include a Red Army soldier who helped pave the way for Soviet control of Eastern Europe. While the content of his message about losing privacy has merit, the appeal to "tradition" and "forefathers" seems like he's speaking to a particular kind of audience.
- tim333 1y ago>The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets. Except they are not. Googling I came across about five, mostly calling for asylum seekers accommodation to be burned down. Arson was actually disapproved of even before twitter. Durov's home country is murdering thousands in Ukraine though in the hope they they'll bend the knee to the invaders. I think that sort of stuff is more a threat to freedom.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoCan we stop conflating free internet and exchange of ideas with stupid closed platforms that steal your data? You're the billionaire owner of Telegram. If you cared about these things you'd sell and invest in open standards or making our current standards suck less or be easier to use. Cry me a river.
- willibebanned 1y agopeople refuse to acknowledge the truth and instead attack the messenger -- how is that 'elevating' the conversation? it's just pure propaganda. https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-struggle-30-arrests-a-day-censorship/ https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru... There is plenty of evidence -- anyone who saays otherwise tell me and i will provide it unless hn bans me yet again for attempting to spread the truth. for germany -- look up CJ Hopkins. free speech is a farce in europe and has been for decades.
- eatrocs_allday 1y agoi haven't celebrated a birthday in decades. i think prince or the artist formerly known as is right. you were born on a day years ago, that's not the same day as the yearly rotation around the sun even if it matches silly marks on a calender.
- vermaden 1y agoI agree with every word Pavel put there - and what is most threatening ... we are about to lose it. Why? Normies. They were 'played' in C19 time - and they will be 'played' next time ... and EVERY next time. There are just too many IGNORANT people out there that trust TV.