Lex Fridman Podcast

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#482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature

Explore episode Oct 1, 2025
Technology
The Thanos Snap: How Telegram Designed Its Message Deletion Animation

#482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, P… · Oct 1, 2025 Technology

When you delete a Telegram message, it breaks into tens of thousands of particles that dissolve like dust in the wind. Getting this Thanos-snap effect to work while simultaneously redrawing surrounding messages to fill the gap — across every device, OS, and screen size — was brutally hard. And Durov thinks it matters: tens of millions of people delete messages daily, and 0.001% more joy is worth fighting for.

4m 53s

Where this was said

Telegram engineering & design

At 2:40:07 · chapter starts 2:34:01

This chapter is a love letter to design craft. Durov describes features that most users never consciously notice but subconsciously experience: the four-color gradient background that slowly shifts, overlaid with a vector-based pattern that adds depth without distraction; the message reply snippet with its vertical line (now universally copied by WhatsApp, Instagram, and others); the way a typed message morphs into a chat bubble after hitting send. The most technically demanding example is the message deletion animation: messages dissolve into tens of thousands of particles in a Thanos-snap effect, while the surrounding messages simultaneously close the gap left behind — all on the oldest cheapest Android devices, without any drop in frame rate. Getting this to work correctly across every device, OS version, screen size, and chat content type required solving enormous technical challenges. Durov's argument for why it matters: tens of millions of people delete messages every day. If each of them gets 0.001% more joy from the experience, multiplied across a billion users, that is an enormous aggregate contribution to human happiness. The vector stickers — launched nearly four years ahead of WhatsApp, running at 60 frames per second even on weak devices — are another example of the intersection of art and engineering that Durov sees as Telegram's true differentiator.

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