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Snap is laying off 100 employees mostly in advertising and sales

cnbc.com

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Re: Snap is laying off 100 employees mostly in advertising and sales

#21

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

crsv wrote: post #19

One look at the content on the "Discovery" page and you instantly understand the platform's weakness. No one is making genuine, useful, compelling content. It's almost exclusively hyper-vapid garbage.

I checked SNAP and MUSICA.LY for the first time 2 weeks ago to see what my 12 year old was seeing.

Hint if an adults first exposure in your app (before connecting to their existing social network) shows them pornography, or a random teenager cutting themselves... your business might not be sustainable.

I'm not saying you can't profit massively off of teenage angst. But if you LEAD with that like Tumblr and Myspace, people will grow out of your platform.

I think Reddit and Pinterest profit just as much from that questionable content without alienating the people who will ultimately be doing massive ad buys.

Also Snap tried to FORCE the Kardashians on you. They couldn't afford to have them go against the platform. They should have hired them as brand ambassadors to publish multiple times daily, and maybe even exclusively if Snap could afford it.

Re: Snap is laying off 100 employees mostly in advertising and sales

#22

Post by kbar13 »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #21
crsv wrote: post #19

One look at the content on the "Discovery" page and you instantly understand the platform's weakness. No one is making genuine, useful, compelling content. It's almost exclusively hyper-vapid garbage.

I checked SNAP and MUSICA.LY for the first time 2 weeks ago to see what my 12 year old was seeing. Hint if an adults first exposure in your app (before connecting to their existing social network) shows them pornography, or a random teenager cutting themselves... your business might not be sustainable. I'm not saying you can't profit massively off of teenage angst. But if you LEAD with that like Tumblr and Myspace, p…

i think the kardashians are smart enough to not tie their brand to a single platform. it wouldn't make sense for the long term, even if they were to be paid out a lot for it.

Re: Snap is laying off 100 employees mostly in advertising and sales

#23

Post by wonder_bread »

Seems like the quality of content & comments posted on HN goes down dramatically whenever the discussion is on Facebook or Snap. I understand these are hot-button companies but I think HN could do better than to have these aimless discussions on obscure things. For the vast majority of companies this news would hardly even get posted.

Re: Snap is laying off 100 employees mostly in advertising and sales

#24

Post by gxs »

My sister is in college and works at Starbucks.

She and a group of her coworkers delivered coffee to one of their offices in Santa Monica.

Their last major update really upset a lot of people, so when my younger sister ran into a Product Manager, she chatted with him and mentioned the update.

His response was, change is good, deal with it.

It really rubbed me the wrong way on multiple levels. 1) You're being a asshole, 2) you're being an asshole to your key demographic, and 3) I agree with her, the new update sucks.

There is an odd feeling I get about Snapchat, it's almost as if they are successful despite themselves.

Re: Snap is laying off 100 employees mostly in advertising and sales

#25

Post by skellera »

wonder_bread wrote: post #23

Seems like the quality of content & comments posted on HN goes down dramatically whenever the discussion is on Facebook or Snap. I understand these are hot-button companies but I think HN could do better than to have these aimless discussions on obscure things. For the vast majority of companies this news would hardly even get posted.

Sadly it seems like the comments are becoming more like reddit comments. I think more and more people are coming from there which isn’t a bad thing but they are bringing that style of comments.

Niche topics will have deeper comments because the people interested typically have a deeper understanding. Then you have Facebook and Snap which everyone has an opinion on even without understanding the situation.

Re: Snap is laying off 100 employees mostly in advertising and sales

#26

Post by maxaht »

crsv wrote: post #19

One look at the content on the "Discovery" page and you instantly understand the platform's weakness. No one is making genuine, useful, compelling content. It's almost exclusively hyper-vapid garbage.

I agree. The few times I accidentally swipe to that page and tap something that seems interesting (usually Sports Center), I haven't actually been sent to that news article. Rather, I'm subjected to the entire lineup of videos from the advertiser and lose my patience trying to find the particular story I tapped on.

Really turns me off of tapping future sponsored content.

Re: Snap is laying off 100 employees mostly in advertising and sales

#27

Post by wonder_bread »

skellera wrote: post #25
wonder_bread wrote: post #23

Seems like the quality of content & comments posted on HN goes down dramatically whenever the discussion is on Facebook or Snap. I understand these are hot-button companies but I think HN could do better than to have these aimless discussions on obscure things. For the vast majority of companies this news would hardly even get posted.

Sadly it seems like the comments are becoming more like reddit comments. I think more and more people are coming from there which isn’t a bad thing but they are bringing that style of comments. Niche topics will have deeper comments because the people interested typically have a deeper understanding. Then you have Facebook and Snap which everyone has an opinion on even without understanding the situation.

Very good postulation I had not thought of that. I think it will be important for HN to retain that level of quality as I think we have all benefitted from the higher-than-average level of thought that goes into an HN comment relative to other internet communities.

Re: Snap is laying off 100 employees mostly in advertising and sales

#28

Post by parliament32 »

rrdharan wrote: post #20
parliament32 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is stories was never Snap's core product. If you remember back when SC first came out, there were no stories at all... although they had a "select all" button for firing off snaps to your entire friends list. Refer to Snap's S-1 filing[1]: 60% of daily active users send snaps daily, but only 25% of them post to their story. As far as I'm concerned, Insta et al are welcome to "stories" clones. Stories aren't…

Right, it wasn’t their core product but it was a thing that had a clearer monetization strategy. As far as I can tell no one has figured out a way to monetize private DM/group messaging via advertising. I actually deleted Facebook messenger from my phone in disgust a while back the first time I saw an advertisement mixed in among my list of conversations; I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have ads directl…

I wouldn't be surprised if they start inserting ads the same way they do after stories now: after you finish watching a received snap (or snaps), you get a video ad immediately after (and the user builds a reflex to down-swipe within a tenth of a second).

Re: Snap is laying off 100 employees mostly in advertising and sales

#30

Post by dragonwriter »

Kilonzus wrote: post #29

Out of curiosity, how does a company lay off ~220 employees yet still have many open positions on its website? I looked at the jobs section for snap and it seems like they have a plethora of engineering jobs despite laying off 120 engineers. Why?

> Out of curiosity, how does a company lay off ~220 employees yet still have many open positions on its website?

Quite easily if they are different roles, or if they are trying to fill but with less experienced candidates at lower pay (you could do a pay cut, but the morale impacts of that make it more practical to do a layoff and hire.)

> I looked at the jobs section for snap and it seems like they have a plethora of engineering jobs despite laying off 120 engineers.

Engineers aren't completely interchangeable, and management views them as less adaptable than they are.

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