I think hackernews has a lot of hate for Telegram.

But it does feel a little silly and betrays the point that they target Durov; a person who has had nearly all his assets seized by the Russian government and has lost his company (VK) to government control.

Telegram was his “fuck you” to the Russian authorities and they tried to ban it a bunch of times (which caused chaos for a lot of people using the cloud during those times).

I don’t think he’s some kind of Russian asset, bowing to your government does not make him complicit, Zuck is not responsible for Iraq because Facebook complies with court orders for example, and it’s hard for me not to think he’s against Russia; especially not when he’s in exile.

I think it's the lack of transparency, claims that Telegram is the most secure messenger despite the fact that e2e encryption is off by default and therefore hardly used, unclear source of funds used to run the whole operation.

There are few scandals from his past that draw at least a controversial picture of Durov's morals (throwing paper money from the top of the building in the center of the city, working quietly with the FSB during the protest, deleting messages from the Telegram account of his opponent who accused his brother in firing him over a girl, and so on). He persistently keeps throwing out loosely supported accusations towards the rival messengers like Signal, Whatsapp and so on.

There was a great article in The Wired lately and following discussion on Hacker News [0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30267787