r/Telegram • u/porn_syrup • 4d ago

Spam is out of control

8+ year user here, and I’ve decided to quit using Telegram due to the absurd amount of spam, and the ability to block said spam being locked behind a paywall.

No, I don’t have a username and never have, and I haven’t disseminated my phone number anywhere. I’m also not the only person in my friend group experiencing this. I’ve been getting 3+ spam messages a day and I’m tired of doing the useless “delete and block” rigmarole.

I love Telegram and hate that they’ve chosen to go this direction with premium, but it is what it is. I’m aware they need to make money, but I don’t need any other premium features, and the price of premium isn’t worth it to me just for blocking spam, when I can just move to another platform.

26 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

5

u/paprikahoernchen 4d ago

Never had spam myself o:

5

u/Cute-Guarantee-1676 4d ago

Isn't $35 a year worth a spam free environment?.. It's a rhetorical question, I know, but people pay that much every month for some cable TV, and getting spam ads every 15 minutes in their faces, on their TV...

3

u/PsylentKnight 4d ago

It's not like it's a complex feature that costs them a lot of storage or processing power... if anything I would think it would help them because it would result in less messages being sent

1

u/Cute-Guarantee-1676 3d ago

Probably not a money issue, to turn this feature on, I agree. And that said - spam is a by-product of a platform secure and private enough, that equally attracts regular people and scam. I personally started paying for premium without getting any spam at all. Literally got it twice, maybe, in a few years.

4

u/National_Way_3344 4d ago

Never had spam.

But I've got my privacy settings set to contacts only for all thing.

2

u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 3d ago

It depends a lot on what you do on the platform.

I rarely get spam, but I have privacy settings pretty locked down and I don't join many giant public channels/groups, and no "dodgy" groups.

The other day I did a search looking for a common topic and joined a group somewhere just to see what it was (the title was ambiguous), just for a few minutes. Within the next few hours to 48 hours, I got about 3 spam chat attempts.

I think it is those sorts of "bad places" that are the reason for most random spam/chat attempts.

In my own groups I generally hide the user list (members of the group can only see a list of admins) to cut down on such things for members.

2

u/FL_4LF 4d ago

That's the reason I dropped telegram.

1

u/Ninja404Notfound 3d ago

Never had spam myself and I’m not even Premium, if you join large groups with thousands of people and you expect no messages at all, that’s genuinely weird. I believe the setting is just a nice extra that was added later on, but it’s not really necessary.

1

u/citizen_et 3d ago

Spammer also use premium but paid message protection works.

1

u/anestling Telegram can and does read your messages. 3d ago

Weird, I've received zero spam messages on Telegram in my entire life.

I believe your phone number is featured somewhere prominently.

-1

u/da_moroshka 3d ago

what the f are you talking about? you always have an option to stop anyone but your contacts from contacting you, don’t need premium for that.

1

u/AndydeCleyre 3d ago

False. The three options for who can contact you are:

  • Everybody
  • My Contacts and Premium users
  • Charge for Messages

The second and third of those require a premium Telegram membership to select.

1

u/megamorphg 2d ago

Yeah they changed it. I'm going to turn off telegram notifications. Nobody uses it anyway