> When people refer to VK being a clone of Facebook

The 'clone' label comes mainly from the fact that the site was originally a copy of FB right down to the colour scheme. The two sites have diverged significantly since then, of course, but if you'd removed the logos and presented the two sites to someone in the first couple of years, they would have been hard pressed to pick them apart.

VK is also remarkably popular in Russia, etc, because of the massive amounts of copyrighted music and film material stored on the site that Durov steadfastly refused to remove. It helps with your popularity when one of those 'many features which FB does not have' is an unlimited stock of pirated content accessible for free....

VK was a total clone of FB UI of that time. And it still is in many ways, but the irony is that UI is so much better than what FB did afterwards, just night and day.

Pavel is widely seen by the Russian developer community as a sort of a douchebag who flaunts his wealth in ways that would seem crass to someone from Silicon Valley. Just look at the guy throwing paper planes made from money at a crowd of onlookers: http://youtu.be/2pxTpFqX6rI?t=25s

I believe this was after a VK executive received a bonus from the company and someone had made a joke along the lines of "look you've made it".

The employee responded to say that money wasn't his motivation. Instead, it was the idea of creating and building stuff.

To prove his point, he threw the bonus money out of the window in paper planes.

This could imply that money really wasn't/isn't the motivation.

Maybe, this was slightly foolish given the media's/public interpretation. I don't think this act had a "douchebag" intention.

I view money planes as a joke. In any case, which is better, openly giving money away, or secretly colluding to keep employee wages down? Personally, I prefer his "crassness" to the crassness of the SV elite.

No one objected to his "openly giving money away"; it was that he made a public display of basically pissing it away, and watching the commoners scramble for it. And what starts with sophomore-level crassness the sort Durov made himself famous for tends to morph into the more genteel, but systematically more pernicious (that is to say: white-collar) crassness you're referring to, later on.

Unfortunately, to a great many people in the Valley, that kind of behavior wouldn't seem all that crass at all. Many would find it quite "cool", in fact.

Perhaps I am looking at the wrong part of the said developer community, but I haven't noticed that. In the mainstream news he was indeed painted as a nouveau riche, but then you have to wonder if that was (not) related to the hostile vKontakte takeover by the state.

Any other douche incidents aside from these money paper planes?

To be fair, that's bush league in the realm of Russian wealth douchbaggery.

Do you have any other examples of him flaunting his wealth? The money planes was a dumb thing to do, but that's the only example I've ever heard anyone bring up.

Flaunting your wealth in ways that other Russians think crass now that is impressive :-)

Will Telegram finally have end-to-end encryption by default for all users, just like TextSecure, and now even Whatsapp? I fail to see how an app can claim to be "the most secure in the world", when 99 percent of its users don't even use end-to-end encryption.

From the link, this paragraph was cringe-worthy:

> We use SHA1 for integrity check The SHA1 in question is for raw unencrypted data. The message key is SHA1-dependent. Note that the AES key and iv depend on that SHA1.

Glad to see they're using this super-secure "SHA1" hash function for integrity checking and that everything else is dependent on it. In a few years they could even brag about how they're using SHA1 for longer than Microsoft!

Telegram? Ain't that the team that proposed this shitty crypto challenge when people started to poke holes in their crypto schemes?

I agree with the first part of your comment, but I really don't see the link with the future of some garbage crypto app.

IIRC they did pay out to people who found holes.

Are you insane? VK has horrendous UX (best and simplest example: Browsing through image galleries resizes the image viewer so that the next and previous buttons constantly move)

And they call it a Facebook clone because it was a direct copy of the Facebook UI, and while Facebook has innovated and polished, VK has been stuck in the same decade-old look and feel.

It may be faster to use in Russia because of geographical proxmity, but I assure you it is nowhere near as Facebook is from North America.

>best and simplest example: Browsing through image galleries resizes the image viewer so that the next and previous buttons constantly move

Click on the image.

Playing with encryption is like playing with fire. Much worse actually. There are no partially broken encryption products, only 'not yet broken' and 'broken'. Time and time again, here on HN and elsewhere, people with cryptographic capital have staked their reputations on calling out Telegram as 'broken'. So why would anyone even want to touch it with a barge pole? It may turn into a 'not yet broken' product someday. But that day is not today. By pushing Telegram as 'secure' i.e. 'not yet broken', you and others are doing a disservice to the users at large and the crypto community in general. So stop calling the bloody shovel a spade.

> Images load 3 times as fast

What are your HTTPS settings?

Facebook defaults to HTTPS, VK does not.

> It is by far a superior experience to Facebook, given how intuitive, fast and sleek it is.

It's riddled with childporn and sick/illegal stuff like that.

Is that's your definition of "superior experience"?

It's a crappy Facebook clone,always has been and always will.

If VK is riddled with "childporn and sick/illegal stuff", I have never come across it.

One could say the same about the internet in general, but that hasn't stopped you or I from using it.

Grammatical sidenote: It should be "you or me." An easy way to know whether to use "I" or "me" is to remove the other subject and see if it's correct. Like so:

"... but that hasn't stopped I from using it."

"... but that hasn't stopped me from using it."

This way it's easy to see which one is right.