man this is scary for me, I'm about to have a baby girl (she already has a Gmail account), I know I'm far from the "dad doesn't get 'it'" phase, but it is still scary. Do you have any tips to make this transition easy?
I have four kids...two in college now...the other two are on track to be in a few years...I get compliments on them all the time... The number one piece of advice I can give you is to suspend any preconceptions you have, consciously or unconsciously, about the kind of person they will be...don't force them into some mold you have in mind for them...they will be separate and distinct beings from birth...treat them as…
I think our distaste for this obvious misdirection of human attention goes beyond mere "kids these days" prejudice. SV startups,"social," "interconnectedness," this nonsense is creating an asinine, infantilized generation: easily manipulated, desperate for social acceptance, incapable of independent thought, and entirely beholden to the whims of mainstream society. This cutesy "adult finds himself going with the flow…
Obvious misdirection of human attention? Snapchat is a fantastic app.
So fantastic that the amount of time and energy this girl and her peers dedicate to its use is well directed? And here I'd thought it only enables one to send photographs to one's friends, with a scoring system to encourage the development of addictive behavior.
It's interesting to hear everyone saying 'ah, I'm too old for Snapchat'. At face value I feel that way too, but I think there's something more going on here. Snapchat strikes me as a really unique modality. It's not really a message type that we can draw some kind of lineage back to PARC or Bell Labs or whatever. Slack follows a familiar pattern of 'oh yeah, that's just like IRC and they had those running on Altos a…
"Oh, yeah, that's just like seeing someone in person and not recording anything about that conversation, and they had that on people a million years ago."
There's product placement. He namedrops "Treller" and "VSCO". The article isn't "How to upgrade your style", it "How to become a Snapchat user." Even his conclusion is "I'll try more", just like you tell yur teacher when you've failed and you know you'll fail again. I don't doubt the person is authentic, but I wonder how much he has worked with BuzzFeed to tune the article. Still, 1. Snapchat's design is remarkable f…
> 1. Snapchat's design is remarkable for its hidden features that you discover by social-networking
Yes, but you know snapchat pictures aren't really deleted right? 'Temporary pictures' is a proposition that doesn't actually exist in the digital realm, and certainly not when a VC-backed company is proposing it.
Stop pretending you know what you're talking about. Do you know how much money is saved by not keeping those pictures? Snapchat handles more pictures per day than facebook[0], which gets almost half a billion per day. I know a few snapchat engineers that concur that Snapchat really does not keep any pictures, which allows them to make interesting optimizations that Facebook (and similar) can't. [0] http://techcrunch.…
> Stop pretending you know what you're talking about.
Calm down.
> Do you know how much money is saved by not keeping those pictures?
Okay, fine. Even if the pictures aren't stored indefinitely (I'd assume they'd do batch deletions at the end of the day or something when latency isn't as important), all of the photos are encrypted with the same symmetric key which can be found in any Snapchat binary. Which means that they aren't any more private than sending unencrypted images.
I'm in Seattle, so maybe I'm biased -- but many of my friends and I from 20s to 30s all enjoy Snapchat. The moments are real, time-limited, don't require a reply, aren't faked by filters, and aren't a popularity contest. That makes it a huge improvement over every other social network we use. It's by far the easiest way to share a picture or moment with friends -- a photo is worth 1000 words and the location/time/vel…
Maybe I'm living in a bubble, but since when has SMS been a painful experience for messaging? If I'm texting whoever, whenever, I can send a snap and I have the bonus of not having to take a picture for every text I send. Plus in the days of modern texting, I use Messages from my computer which makes life even more pleasant as at work I'm able to keep in touch with friends/family without even glancing at my phone. I never have to worry if they're on a network with SMS.
I think our distaste for this obvious misdirection of human attention goes beyond mere "kids these days" prejudice. SV startups,"social," "interconnectedness," this nonsense is creating an asinine, infantilized generation: easily manipulated, desperate for social acceptance, incapable of independent thought, and entirely beholden to the whims of mainstream society. This cutesy "adult finds himself going with the flow…
I think no generation has really seen their criticism of the new generation as "kids these days" prejudice. If they did think that, they wouldn't say the words with such conviction. But, that is kinda what it looks like, right?
Perhaps this line of thinking is why many adults of today let the kids run rampage while matters of immediate importance to them go unattended. It is often difficult for a thinking person to admit to a sense of certainty, but at the risk of seeming to exclude myself from that group, I have to say that I believe this is a sheer waste of time, and almost certainly an intellectually destructive one. It is not necessarily that the kids ought to find another form of leisure, but that the amount of time and energy dedicated to this activity is unreasonable. And unlike some forms of leisure, this one bears no fruit. In the years to come, I think there will be few able to say that much of their time devoted to SnapChat and other such platforms was well spent.
> Well, no, it's not an "issue"... if you're willing to pay $375-475/month for a 60GB mobile data plan. What plans are you looking at? For a family of 4, unlimited data on T-mobile for instance costs 150 USD for the entire family or 37.5 USD per phone.
T-mobile, to be sure, I didn't look at. But with that plan, "if you are in the top 3% of users" (which 60GB/month is likely to be, especially as that's just one of those four users), your data use will be slowed to 2G speeds. "typical download speeds of 40Kbps-200Kbps and upload speeds of 20-80 Kbps" Snapchat is going to get pretty painful pretty quickly.
But nobody uses 60GB of data on data only. When you're at home you're typically connected to Wifi. Also in many ways that's besides the point. Usage on mobile devices is skyrocketing and in particular young users are the reason for it. At this point high data usage per month is not exactly an exception but the norm.