Telegram passes 10M paid subscribers and removes People Nearby, saying the feature was used by less than 0.1% of users and had “issues with bots and scammers”
Until yesterday, the first line of that FAQ said: “All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants. We do not process any requests related to them.” … X: Thomas Brewster / @iblametom : huh, new moderation plans at Telegram. Pavel Durov / @durov : 🎉 Telegram has reached 10 million paid subscribers. 10 million people are now enjoying Telegram Premium! 🆕 Today, we're introducing new features while phasing out a few outdated ones. ⛔️ We've removed the People Nearby feature, which was used by less than 0.1% of Telegram
Context & Ripple Effects
Telegram Premium was introduced as Telegram reached 700M monthly active users, with paid features positioned as an expansion of the service's power-user offering. The product later crossed one million subscribers in 2022, making the current milestone evidence of sustained paid-plan adoption rather than a launch spike.
The removal also fits Telegram's history of iterating on communications and broadcast tools, including lifting the viewer cap on live streams. This time, the product decision is explicitly tied to low usage and abuse risk in a location-based discovery surface.
First-order effects
- People Nearby is no longer available, eliminating a feature Telegram says was used by fewer than 0.1% of users and had attracted bots and scammers.
- Telegram Premium now has 10 million paid subscribers, materially enlarging the paying user base established when Premium launched in 2022.
Second-order effects
- Removing the nearby-discovery surface cuts off one route for bot and scam activity, while requiring users who relied on local discovery to use other ways to find contacts or communities.
- A larger Premium base gives Telegram a clearer incentive to concentrate product development on features that retain paying users rather than maintaining low-use tools with disproportionate abuse-management costs.
Third-order effects
- If similar retirements continue, messaging platforms may treat open-ended local discovery as a higher-cost product category, narrowing features that expose users to unsolicited contact.
- Telegram's combination of a growing paid tier and selective feature pruning points toward product roadmaps shaped more by sustainable monetization and safety operations than by maximizing the number of social surfaces.
The trend: Messaging services are increasingly pairing subscription growth with tighter control of low-use, abuse-prone discovery features.