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Snapchat’s product is booming

bigtechnology.substack.com

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Re: Snapchat’s product is booming

#63

Post by KSPAtlas »

instagary wrote: post #53

Snapchat was novel because of the ephemeral nature of the messages (and introducing stories). However in the late twenty teens they began focusing of face filters and introducing cringe ads & news networks which made it unusable for me. Good to see they are still thriving though. Compared to Instagram they have maintained to be an app solely to communicate with friends vs. Instagram's philosophy of a feed of edited p…

Irc

Re: Snapchat’s product is booming

#64

Post by cft »

thesuitonym wrote: post #57

> Messaging is infamously sticky: once you start messaging in one place it’s rare to go elsewhere to reach the same people. IRC, ICQ/AIM, Y!M, MSN, Skype would all beg to differ.

Arguably those ones disappeared together with desktop messaging: main use of messaging migrated from desktop to mobile, but they either never developed compelling mobile apps or developed them too late (Skype)

Re: Snapchat’s product is booming

#66

Post by 52358 »

I wonder how many people here are aware of Snapchat's thriving underground OnlyFans-like ecosystem. I also wonder how much of that is driving Snap's user metrics.

As far back as 2014, I remember there being a huge ecosystem of "premium" snaps (sometimes known as "prem(ium) girls"), whereby you would pay the account owner a one time or recurring fee for access to a "premium" snapchat account where the owner posts nudes/etc, essentially OnlyFans-like content. Owner would typically accept payment through any number of ways (paypal/cashapp being most common), and "customer" would provide proof of payment by sending screenshot of receipt that the owner then confirms.

The premium account owner would also typically have a free/open account where they would post free content / teasers/etc, essentially marketing/advertising for their premium account. They would sometimes also market their account on Twitter and Reddit and especially Tinder (and one less popular app by the name of Whisper), much like OnlyFans content creators do today.

As far as I know, this preceded the popularity of OnlyFans and remains a popular use case for Snapchat. I don't use Snapchat much myself nowadays, but I used to be a customer of many of these premium snaps years ago. When I do log in once in a while, many of these accounts are still active, though some are also advertising their OnlyFans.

I think Snap officially bans this practice, but by nature these accounts are private and the owner adds users on a one by one basis, so I don't imagine they get reported a whole lot.

The fact that the content is ephemeral surely helps and is probably one of the main reasons the content creators choose Snap as their platform. Snap also tells you when users screenshot your content, which would often result in getting banned from the premium Snap. Unlike OnlyFans, which cannot get in the AppStore and is relegated to being web-only, Snapchat is mobile-only, making it harder for users to download the content, which is another appeal for these "premium" content creators.

Re: Snapchat’s product is booming

#67

Post by Ancalagon »

I really don't buy this. Almost all of my friends, who were prolific snap users in college, have converted away to instagram. Stories are so dead, and despite adding people most of my stories get the same ~15-20 views per 24 hours period.

That's all very anecdotal, and so is my next point: I get a new bot or porn spam account adding me once or twice a week, some of which have large karma counts indicating they've been around for a while.

So yes all of that is anecdotal but I suspect the bots I'm seeing are just the tip of the iceberg of what is actually making up the growing userbase of the app. Most of the young'ns appear to be on tiktok these days anyways.

Re: Snapchat’s product is booming

#68

Post by KSPAtlas »

metadat wrote: post #58

I haven't thought of Snapchat in many many months. Last time I logged in was only sync my bitmoji avatar. Their chat "experience" really sucks, this article is not even remotely plausible. This is a laughably poor attempt at astroturfed buzz generation.

I was going to use it to chat with some friends but the app is so annoying I decided to leave.
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