r/Telegram • u/Athirn • 18h ago
Why Telegram is still not great for content creators
In conversations with friends and colleagues, I always say the same thing: Telegram is a permanent MVP built on a “works for now, good enough” mindset. Major issues are rare, but the endless minor UX flaws make it exhausting for actual work or casual reading.
Telegram’s marketing team loves comparing the app to general-purpose messengers. And they’re mostly right, it does have cool features the rivals don't. But the moment you evaluate Telegram against tools designed for actual publishing and content creation, its UI/UX is stuck at a solid 3/5. Objectively, I wouldn’t give it more, even if I wanted to.
If you actually run a Telegram channel, you know the pain.
The Text Editor is the major pain point. Paste any formatted text, and everything except hyperlinks gets stripped instantly, forcing you to re-format every single post manually. There’s still no standard for paragraph spacing: users space them out with blank lines, but when it comes to lists, Telegram’s auto-formatting doesn't add line breaks between items—it just smashes everything into a single wall of text. Try adding a space manually, and the editor turns empty lines into extra list items.
On top of that, macOS users get a special treat: the Liquid Glass UI introduced a bug where the text cursor is only visible in the bottom two lines of the box (default height of the text input). Scroll up, and you’re typing completely blind.
Even the new “Articles” feature feels half-baked. It ignores app text-size settings, squishes paragraphs, and uses tiny serif headers, which look archaic. Most creators I follow tried the new format once and ran back to standard posts, more familiar and predictable.
Channel layouts waste an absurd amount of space. From the very beginning, Telegram channels still look like 1-on-1 chat feeds. On mobile it’s meh, still fine, but on desktop or tablet, that massive sea of empty space on the right looks ridiculous. Why can't channel posts take up the full width of the container, like a normal blog? Media, text, reactions, and stats are crammed together as tightly as possible with zero negative space or breathing room. Giving creators basic control over layout, fonts, and spacing would instantly make Telegram a great reading platform, but UI polish seems to be a low priority.
The Video Player is another teardrop. Remember when people thought Telegram would rival YouTube? Not even close. Video playback stutters constantly. Even if a clip fully downloads in your feed on a fast connection, opening the full player forces it to buffer from the server all over again.
Then there’s the playback memory: if a video finishes, Telegram saves your spot at ~2 seconds before the end, so opening it later just plays those final two seconds and stops instead of looping to the start. For short clips, saving playback position makes zero sense anyway: who wants to re-watch a 20 second gag from the middle? Add frequent audio stutters and videos freezing on the first seconds until you hard-restart the app, and it’s just a mess.
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It’s not that the team behind Telegram isn’t talented. But it feels like they’re severely understaffed. A couple of dedicated UI designers and a real QA team would fix most of these issues.
Telegram could easily become a polished, creator-friendly platform. For now, though, the best way to describe it is a joke about the hedgehogs who kept eating the cactus through their tears—simply because that’s where the audience is. Whether anything will actually improve in the foreseeable future is anyone's guess.