121–130 of 176 posts
I'm surprised that there's so much "I don't get it" sentiment here. You would think that everyone on HN would be clamoring to figure out how Snapchat is able to get as many users as it has.
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Referring to core product, 'the feed.' I've had a terrible experience with Facebook. The more i curate, the more it seems to send me cruft from people i do not know. I started using Facebook back in 2004 when they opened up to all college students, and it was cool to friend everyone I've ever met, so that legacy certainly impacts my experience on FB. With Twitter and Instagram's linear feed, I have to seasonally foll…
sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but i still don't understand how its different from going to a users profile directly on instagram or twitter, to see only what they posted.
In snapchat, I can quickly tap thru or totally ignore (never see, never spend a second messing with it) if I so choose.
I want to see posts from everyone, but one person (or a handful of people) can seriously damage the experience on Instagram type feed based platforms.
I suggest playing around with snapchat to understand why it's a fundamentally different approach to interacting. Follow some active users like DJ Khaled.
Regarding how Snapchat handles a large number of followers, I don't really know how to address. I follow 50 people, maybe 10 post daily.
OT: That's... an interesting take.
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The difference with snapchat is (as Justin notes) there's no central "stream" to worry about cluttering. If you have friend a that is prolific and friend b that only occasionally updates a's activity doesn't trample over b's.
Understandable but you could do that on twitter, just go directly to that users profile and see everything they've posted.
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Every real interaction you have in your life immediately disappears. Snapchat is like actually talking with somebody.
But why should interaction disappear if it doesn't have to? Snapchat is no more like talking with someone than Facebook Messenger is, with the exception that you get to keep your interaction with Facebook Messenger. While I "get" your point, I think it's a stretch in terms of what Snapchat offers that I can't get elsewhere with a better experience. But then, I'm well over 20 and from the comments on this post, defini…
There’s no public view count, follower count, likes count, or any other social
dick-measuring contest. You can just put whatever you’re doing on Snapchat; if
people don’t like it, who gives a fuck, you’ll never know. There’s no
expectation of balling out 24/7.
Consequently, on Snapchat I’ll post to my daily Story almost twice as much as
I’ll post to Twitter and Facebook combined to reach only a fraction of the
number of people. The cost of content creation is extremely low, and Snapchat
makes it fun to think about what aspects of what I’m doing every day might be
cool for other people to see.
If you are someone who does not find the appeal in low-stakes interactions, then it's quite understandable that Snapchat may not appeal to you.
I don't know what to say. I think OP did a good job of explaining what makes Snapchat so great, but their initial confusion and the confusion from the commenters within this thread boggles me. Recently I was in a room with a well-known VC who wouldn't believe a college student who said that they enjoy using Snapchat, as if they couldn't comprehend how anyone would like it. Virtually all the comments are about how Sna…
At a base level, I'm not sure why you'd do something to have it disappear. Why would I write anything or record a short video that would self destruct?! It seems like it's for meaningless stuff. If you follow that logic far enough that means the whole thing is meaningless.
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Your response is a prime example of how hypersensitive your generation is to criticism. A healthy dose of criticism is not only a contribution, but a form of flattery in a way. (Because your detractor thought your comment was worthy of critique, or else they would have ignored it) At any rate, the way I read Justin's comment was that he was agreeing with you, but I could be wrong.
It's true that I immediately thought Justin was criticizing my writing. But if you're right—that Justin was agreeing with me—his comment doesn't counter mine or add to it. It just reiterates something I already said.
The problem I have with Snapchat is that there are many deliberate, counterintuitive UI/UX decisions which make the app hard to use. This causes a lot of bad post-hoc rationalization from many startups that "Snapchat is a multibillion dollar startup, and they have these bad UX features, therefore if we have these X features we will be successful too!" And thus the startup ecosystem as a whole gets dragged down.
The bad UI generates a sort of viral effect. I know a lot of young kids who use snapchat and often the conversation starts with 'How did you do that effect on that video?' or 'How do you send a text message without a picture?'. Snapchat is one of few apps that has a lot of hidden features for power users that are not explained anywhere. I am not saying that it is a good thing, but it makes people talk about it.
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The difference with snapchat is (as Justin notes) there's no central "stream" to worry about cluttering. If you have friend a that is prolific and friend b that only occasionally updates a's activity doesn't trample over b's.
Understandable but you could do that on twitter, just go directly to that users profile and see everything they've posted.
I'm a user of Facebook, but I really don't like Facebook's newsfeed. I find it to be a time sink that has a lot of advertisements and some amount of cultivation is required if you don't want to be bogged down with every little thing your friends do. So basically I only use Facebook for messaging people whose phone number I don't have, and for event tracking, as a lot of people in my social group use Facebook to make events, which I think is great.
But that leaves a small hole in my social media. I enjoy cyber stalking my friends because I like being aware of what people are doing with their lives. Snapchat (but specifically Snapchat stories) fills that need fairly perfectly. Just once or twice a day I can skim through my stories for a few minutes just to see what people have been up to that day.
I like it better than Twitter because there is too much promotion and general posting of stuff I'm not interested in (like the Facebook newsfeed) and I like it better than Instagram (for this purpose) because most users of Instagram seem to want to only put their best / most interesting / etc. photos on there, which isn't exactly what I'm looking for.