Typically today’s tech unicorns would employ thousands of staff across sprawling corporate campuses in order to power a global comms juggernaut, however one messaging platform stands in stark contrast. Telegram, the encrypted messaging service founded by the Durov brothers, has achieved what many consider impossible: a $30 billion valuation with just 30 employees and no human resources department. This remarkable efficiency ratio—$1 billion per employee—has made the Dubai-based company one of the most fascinating case studies in contemporary business.

Yet they decide to spend nothing on moderation. Orphaned groups still have everything from drug selling, sexual services, counterfeiting money and even CP - yet I can't change the location of my local group because someone someday told their "moderation" service the neighborhood group allegedly is not related to the neighborhood.

Telegram as a messaging service is cool, and the bots thing is great - but otherwise they seem to be really focused on money grabbing.

While there is some interesting material here it's clearly a fluff piece. I'm sure Dubai was chosen so they wouldn't need moderation. And stuff like accounting and legal can be outsourced (and I'm sure it is) which just makes the employee count a bit misleading.

> Until recently, Telegram operated without a clear monetisation strategy, funded largely by Pavel Durov’s personal fortune

Well, that is an extraordinary business model indeed

>Founded on Principles of Freedom and Privacy

If you pay, maybe. Telegram locks multiple privacy and security features behind paywalls, most notably being able to stop receiving the endless spam plaguing the platform with the message restriction to only your contacts and other "premium" users. That's without getting into the whole Fragment filth, advertisement all over, forced in channels and barely distinguishable, and so on.

>Telegram [is] first focused on building a loyal user base through an uncompromising product experience

Yeah, between statements like these and OP's submission history everything being claimed can be safely dismissed. Telegram is rushing to monetize in every aspect possible that may earn them more revenue, and it's not alone in that, Discord is on a similar trajectory (but not as bad, yet).