When Telegram started to emerge as a bit of a powerhouse for various political voices I was kind of excited about it. While I was never really interested in what some of these people had to say I do find their voices interesting because they are likely to be banned almost anywhere else because of the bias that exists in big tech.
It wasn't long after they started to gain a few million of subscribers that their posts started to become self-serving.
Isn't Don Jr a billionaire? Even if he isn't we know that he is very very rich and I dunno, I find it a bit insulting that his users would be solicited to buy whatever it is that he is selling over there. I don't know what it is but I presume it is anti-left-wing shirts, hats and ties that are almost certainly wildly overpriced.
Mike Lindell got a raw deal by cancel culture and I guess I can relate to him trying to do direct marketing a bit more than some of the other people on here
I subbed to this only to pump his numbers to try to stick it to the man. I rarely even look at it and when I do, every other post is an advertisement for pillows and dog beds. I don't know if this guy is a political quack or not - I don't really pay attention to him. Other voices of note that have turned into advertisement bots of sorts include Bill Maher, Ben Shapiro, Tim Poole (i think i may have spelled that wrong), and Alyssa Milano. I only subbed to the last one to see what sort of insane shit she comes up with as she scrapes for relevancy.
I think the thing that irritates me the most about these influencers is the fact that all of these people are already very wealthy and the people who subscribe to them probably aren't. They also send more messages in a day than most of my real life friends on Telegram do. I have muted all of them. Lately some of these people have been linking to articles that are behind a paywall. When has that ever worked out?
I guess this was always going to happen since at the end of the day most of these people are probably in the game for self-serving reasons. There always has to be a money angle. To me this constant advertising hurts their credibility though. I tend to stop listening to people when they have a redirect catch of sorts.
At the end of the day Telegram is likely still better than Twitter because there are less arguments and very little censorship. I suppose it was always going to turn into this though.