Live data from Hacker News

Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled

wsj.com

1–10 of 79 posts

Re: Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled

#4

Snapchat is really bad at doing the one thing I want it to do well: take pictures. It takes awful pictures most of the time. Applies some kind of super-harsh filter that I don't get with my camera?

They deliberately give you a bad quality photo and I don't know why. Snapchat takes a screenshot. It doesn't use the camera API on your phone as it should. So it doesn't get any of the processing which is integral to taking good photos on phones. Apple should reject it from the App Store for doing this, but for some reason they let them do it, as well as Instagram and Facebook.

Re: Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled

#5
Really wonder if articles like these are produced by people shorting the stock.

I think the guy is a genius but he made a very bad mistake with the redesign and is clearly paying for it. There were some very interesting people producing content for entrepreneurs on there but they're all gone for now.

I've gone from daily to monthly use. But I keep checking in because I'm really convinced that they can still pull a rabbit out of the hat.

Re: Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled

#7

Snapchat is really bad at doing the one thing I want it to do well: take pictures. It takes awful pictures most of the time. Applies some kind of super-harsh filter that I don't get with my camera?

They deliberately give you a bad quality photo and I don't know why. Snapchat takes a screenshot. It doesn't use the camera API on your phone as it should. So it doesn't get any of the processing which is integral to taking good photos on phones. Apple should reject it from the App Store for doing this, but for some reason they let them do it, as well as Instagram and Facebook.

Well it's almost certainly going to be faster (thumb to save latency) to run the camera in video mode and then snatch a frame when the user hits the button than the normal preview-stillshot way the phone takes pics natively.

Cell phone OEMs differentiate with camera quality and so some run some pretty heavy post processing to make images come out okay.

Snap probably cares more about quickly taking picture and the filters.

Re: Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled

#9

This feels like what happened to digg. Reddit did their redesign right. Many people hated it and they gave the option to go to the old reddit immediately after the new version was released.

And they made it so smooth, too - just replace www with old! Considering, too, their incredible API, I have a lot of respect for the Reddit developers.

Re: Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled

#10

Snapchat is really bad at doing the one thing I want it to do well: take pictures. It takes awful pictures most of the time. Applies some kind of super-harsh filter that I don't get with my camera?

They deliberately give you a bad quality photo and I don't know why. Snapchat takes a screenshot. It doesn't use the camera API on your phone as it should. So it doesn't get any of the processing which is integral to taking good photos on phones. Apple should reject it from the App Store for doing this, but for some reason they let them do it, as well as Instagram and Facebook.

OT, but how did you figure out how Snapchat takes pictures?
Post reply on HN