Pavel Durov: evaluation

Transcript context

…Because of that, you’re extremely selective and slow in hiring. People really have to earn their spot and then as a result, I got a chance to sit in one of the team meetings where people discuss the different features that are being developed, the different ideas, some of which are at the very cutting edge and so you get to see behind the scenes how it’s possible to have such a fast rate of idea generation. You generate the idea, you implement the prototype and then eventually it becomes an actual feature in the product. That’s why you have this kind of half hilarious, half incredible fact that for many, as compared to WhatsApp and Signal, you’ve led the way on many other features. Many of the features we take for granted now, many of which we know and love, like the auto-delete timer. That was seven years ahead of any other messenger. Message editing, replies. These are all obvious things I’ve even forgotten for some of them that they were never part. I think auto-delete timer is a really brilliant idea. We implemented in 2013 in the Secret Chats. Funny thing about it is then when other apps started to copy it, WhatsApp seven years after and then Signal and some other of these apps, they initially even copied the exact timestamps. For example, if we had one, three and five seconds, they would also have one, three and five seconds. They tried not to change it because they were not sure what was the magic sauce behind the feature. Ironically, it happens with many of these things. For example, when we design how you reply to a message and you have a small snippet showing that you’re replying to this message and now you’re typing your response, then there is a small snippet into the message itself that if you tap on it highlights the original message you’re replying to. Seems pretty obvious, but there are certain design decisions that we were implementing at the time and we got this vertical line on the left and all these other small things that are completely arbitrary, you can do it in a different way, but somehow the entire industry ended up copying exactly that solution. Now whenever you go to WhatsApp, Instagram direct, Facebook Messenger, Signal, it doesn’t matter, you would see exactly the same or pretty much similar experience because nobody really wants to take the risk and innovate. If something works, why not just copy it? We should say that it’s done extremely well. The vertical line and the highlighting, I mean all of these are tiny little strokes of genius. By highlighting the text in a certain way that from a design perspective makes it very clear that this part was written before and thing under it is your reply. The distinction between the different formatting, the text. Listen, I know how much typography is an art form. There’s a lot of interacting, graphic artistic elements inside Telegram that all have to play together extremely well. Like you pointed out to me, this thing that just blew my mind, which is the background gradient of Telegram, shifts. It changes and it adjusts really nicely to the bubbles, the chat bubbles and then there’s graphic elements on top of the gradient that all interplay together. All of that has to work really nicely without sacrificing clarity. Everything’s just intuitive. That’s very difficult to create. That is art. On top of that, super fast.…

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