Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 309 posts

Re: Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage

#241

Post by TeMPOraL »

themagician wrote: post #145
sharkweek wrote: post #15

30something here - It took me a while to "get" Snapchat, but in my opinion there is no better way to keep up with friends and family digitally than via Snapchat Stories. You can post pretty shamelessly the little things you're up to all day to your story, knowing it will be gone in 24 hours, keeping your feed really clean. Posting more than once or twice a day to Instagram/Facebook seems excessive, Twitter is a bit m…

There is nothing to "get". It's all the same. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat. People want a free way to broadcast to their friends. Someone invents a service that does that. Slowly ads take over. Now the stream needs to be "curated". It's no longer a timeline. It's no longer sensible. Now you can no longer reliably broadcast to your friends. People search for a new service that did what the old service used t…

I agree. I just deleted Instagram from my phone (for unrelated reasons), but one thing I've noticed recently in my somewhat irregular usage of that service is that it started to inject ads and "promoted content" in between the posts of people I follow. Frankly, it's fucking annoying. But the point is, Instagram seems to be entering the "ad phase" you're describing.

Re: Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage

#242

Post by k-mcgrady »

plaidturtle wrote: post #123
sharkweek wrote: post #15

30something here - It took me a while to "get" Snapchat, but in my opinion there is no better way to keep up with friends and family digitally than via Snapchat Stories. You can post pretty shamelessly the little things you're up to all day to your story, knowing it will be gone in 24 hours, keeping your feed really clean. Posting more than once or twice a day to Instagram/Facebook seems excessive, Twitter is a bit m…

early 20 something here. My friends and I went "offline" and we are much closer and happier. Social media is overrated. I think we will look back at this time in the future like how we look back at cigarette smoking in the 50s. It has its place but its usefulness is limited. I don't question Snapchat's business potential, though. edit: also I find it funny (and pathetic) how industry analyst struggle to understand so…

>> "My friends and I went "offline" and we are much closer and happier."

I'm guessing all your friends live nearby? If not, how do you keep in touch with them 'offline'?

Re: Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage

#243

Post by kristiandupont »

themagician wrote: post #145
sharkweek wrote: post #15

30something here - It took me a while to "get" Snapchat, but in my opinion there is no better way to keep up with friends and family digitally than via Snapchat Stories. You can post pretty shamelessly the little things you're up to all day to your story, knowing it will be gone in 24 hours, keeping your feed really clean. Posting more than once or twice a day to Instagram/Facebook seems excessive, Twitter is a bit m…

There is nothing to "get". It's all the same. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat. People want a free way to broadcast to their friends. Someone invents a service that does that. Slowly ads take over. Now the stream needs to be "curated". It's no longer a timeline. It's no longer sensible. Now you can no longer reliably broadcast to your friends. People search for a new service that did what the old service used t…

I think you are taking the abstraction too far. True, there are some very significant similarities but there are also differences and although they may be subtle, such differences can lead to vastly different uses. Facebook and Twitter were never "officially" about posting short-lived, single-view posts the way Snapchat is and I for one never used them like that (and I've been on both for many years).

You might be right about ads eventually ruining it, but that doesn't mean that it's otherwise identical.

Re: Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage

#244

Post by leonroy »

themagician wrote: post #145
sharkweek wrote: post #15

30something here - It took me a while to "get" Snapchat, but in my opinion there is no better way to keep up with friends and family digitally than via Snapchat Stories. You can post pretty shamelessly the little things you're up to all day to your story, knowing it will be gone in 24 hours, keeping your feed really clean. Posting more than once or twice a day to Instagram/Facebook seems excessive, Twitter is a bit m…

There is nothing to "get". It's all the same. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat. People want a free way to broadcast to their friends. Someone invents a service that does that. Slowly ads take over. Now the stream needs to be "curated". It's no longer a timeline. It's no longer sensible. Now you can no longer reliably broadcast to your friends. People search for a new service that did what the old service used t…

>...it works for a while until you get too big. Then you can't pay for it and you have to start inject ads...

In a rather serendipitious stroke Snapchat don't have to maintain armies of servers to hold years of user data (unlike Facebook or Twitter). I think this will help them a lot in the long run in keeping their costs low and advertising to a minimum.

This topic actually reminds me of that great Gavin Belson rant in Silicon Valley:

Gavin Belson: "Data creation is exploding. With all the selfies and useless files people refuse to delete on the Cloud - 92% of the world's data was created in the last two years alone. At the current rate, the world's data storage capacity will be overtaken by next Spring. It will be nothing short of a catastrophe: data shortages, data rationing, data black markets... Datageddon!"

Re: Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage

#245

Post by TeMPOraL »

lovemenot wrote: post #237
wepple wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for me living ~30 hours flight from my nearest family, getting short snapchats of whatever things they're up-to, however trivial, makes them seem so much closer. And given that they're less likely to be 'staged' instagram/fb photos, it seems more real to me.

>> for me living ~30 hours flight from my nearest family, Where in the world do you and your family live? I imagine you must be in Antarctica?

GP is probably including the time it takes to get to the airport, get through the baggage drop, security and boarding procedures, as well as get from the airport to their destination. It can easily add up if both they and their family live in places far from their respective airports, and we're talking intercontinental flight.

Re: Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage

#246

Post by 946789987649 »

sasvari wrote: post #173
trevor-e wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good god why would I care? If you're not interested in what your friends are up to, why are you friends with them in the first place? Maybe they're really just acquaintances? Like you said, maybe it's a difference in attitude. Still, I recommend you giving it a shot to get a better idea of what it is. I also thought it was dumb at first.

> > > When you have more than a handful of friends that you're trying to keep in touch with, are you really going to ask every single one of them what they're up to each day? > > Good god why would I care? > If you're not interested in what your friends are up to, why are you friends with them in the first place? Maybe they're really just acquaintances? if I would care about what every single friend of mine is doing…

Sometimes it's just a nice past time as well. Oh i'm sat waiting for the train, might as well see what everyone is up to today/last night.

Re: Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage

#247

Post by enraged_camel »

J-dawg wrote: post #192
themagician wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you got into Facebook so late. People who are 20 are doing on Snapchat today what I did on Facebook when I was 20: multicasting. I either want to send a message to everyone or to a group. Sometimes in a personal message. I see almost no real difference in content. Snapchat might be a little racier in personal messages, but that happened on FB and Twitter as well. The ephemeral nature was built into Facebook a…

Great post. > There is nothing to "get" other than to understand that as you become older the thing that's changing is you For proof of this, look no further than when Facebook introduced the timeline, making it easier to view old wall posts. People went crazy, claiming their private messages had been made public [0]. In truth, they just couldn't remember how unconcerned with privacy they used to be. [0] http://www.b…

It's not about privacy directly, but about the expectation for their old posts to be "forgotten." This is why the so-called "right to be forgotten" is/was a big deal in Europe.

Re: Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage

#248

Post by lloeki »

whyoh wrote: post #220
rrggrr wrote: post #28

My 77 year old father forced himself to learn Twitter. Why? Financial news. My journalist friends live on Twitter. Why? Breaking political news. People I follow in national security circles... on twitter. After a certain number (age or users) its not about quantity but quality.

>its not about quantity but quality. This sounds weird to me, because Twitter seems the epitome of quantity over quality. Even with my carefully selected RSS feeds I feel overwhelmed by all the news I get in a day. I can't imagine following news on Twitter where people think it's perfectly OK to post a new tweet every 10 minutes.

My carefully curated list of followees has a stringent eviction rule on overposters.

Unfortunately, in an effort to satisfy undisciplined people that routinely follow people in the order of thousands, each one of Twitter's tentative change to incrementally bring a mimicry of automated smartness to everyone's timeline has terminally ruined it for me as my feed turned into a non-deduplicated, unordered mess appended with nonsensical suggestions (and ads).

Re: Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage

#249

Post by theseatoms »

weavie wrote: post #233
mrweasel wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Someone invents a service that does that. Slowly ads take over. The problem really is that no one wants to pay for services, or no one is willing to try charging for their services. Ads are the "safe" option, but it will also make your users leave in the long run. I was pretty baffled when a publisher wrote that they would rather make money from ads on their site, than make money from people buying a subscription. S…

So what is the alternative? We don't want to pay, we don't want ads.. how else can these things make money?

Maybe the alternative is to structure social media platforms as non-profits?

Re: Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage

#250

Post by toyg »

leonroy wrote: post #244
themagician wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing to "get". It's all the same. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat. People want a free way to broadcast to their friends. Someone invents a service that does that. Slowly ads take over. Now the stream needs to be "curated". It's no longer a timeline. It's no longer sensible. Now you can no longer reliably broadcast to your friends. People search for a new service that did what the old service used t…

>...it works for a while until you get too big. Then you can't pay for it and you have to start inject ads... In a rather serendipitious stroke Snapchat don't have to maintain armies of servers to hold years of user data (unlike Facebook or Twitter). I think this will help them a lot in the long run in keeping their costs low and advertising to a minimum. This topic actually reminds me of that great Gavin Belson rant…

I don't think so. I'm sure anything older than a year on FB goes on some sort of extra-slow storage, which is likely why their search is crap and will forever be crap.

The real expense for FB is likely to be in guaranteeing realtime sync between dozens of platforms and gazillions of clients. All that JS and PHP has to be coded up and served somehow...

Same for Twitter -- everyone remembers the "whale" when they were struggling with infrastructure pains, then they massively invested to sort that out... and ended up chasing profits to pay for it all, of course.

Snapchat will soon get there as well.

Post reply on HN