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 Snapchat confuses them and that there must be something seriously wrong with it. And yet the app is immensely popular. If you're one of those people, then Snapchat is not really made for you.
You might be able to understand why Snapchat is a beloved app by reading a report about what the millennials are up to these days but I encourage anyone dealing with this confusion to make an effort to talk to people outside of your normal social circles once in a while. This kind of empathy with others will make you much more effective when you're creating for people who are not like you.
My initial confusion came from 1) not immediately understanding how the UI worked, 2) not being that interested in learning because few of my social network were one it. Once I invested a few minutes in understanding it out I loved it. I think the same would be true for many other people who "don't get it".
It's concerning that those who don't get it then act confused about why anyone else would like it. It seems like out of 2 possible responses, the ideal should be b)
a) I don't understand it or see the appeal, then why do other people like it?
b) I don't like it or see the appeal, but others do. Cool.
I completely understand the appeal of snapchat; it's basically LSD in social network form... The intimacy of shared human experience, the infinite nowness, the mindfuck UI, the altered values, the sense of sacred space, etc.
But much like acid, I feel like I wouldn't be able to engage with it everyday without weird things happening to my brain. I totally support people who use it, just personally I'm content with mostly experiencing it vicariously through other people.
Completely agree; interesting remark. I was recently traveling with someone that spent probably a good 25% of her time on Snapchat. It was kinda (read: thoroughly) offputting
Except most people's natural reaction when they don't understand other people's value systems is not empathy - it's criticism.
It happens on a much lesser level with food, music, movies, etc - the reaction from a non-fan to a 15 year-old girl's declaration that she loves One Direction is not "ok I see why someone could like this music and why this tribal affiliation is both socially useful to a teenager" but rather
Snapchat is the technology version of One Direction for a lot of adults. But also remember many adults couldn't understand why teenage girls went crazy for The Beatles in 1964 either.
For social networks in particular, the "I don't get it, here comes the criticism" reaction is a good thing. If a new social network / app is going to grow a devoted, core group of user evangelists, there needs to be a clear delineation between the in-group and out-group to help them adopt the network as part of their personal identity.
Snapchat is the most important social network right now among my friends. I'm 27 (so not core Snapchat demo but close) and very few of my friends work in tech. It's massive.
Instagram and Facebook are both close, but if something is happening there's a 5x better chance someone is going to Snap it than Insta it and 50x chance they'll Snap it than do anything with it on FB.
Being a 19 year old college student with many friends in high school, I can say snapchat is the most popular social network, followed by Instagram then Twitter, and lastly Facebook. If something is happening, people will snap and tweet about it, Instagram and Facebook are reserved for bigger events that are worth mentioning, snapchat and Twitter are for more day to day activities and therefore get used much more often.
I think I may have crossed the age barrier of target market and not very recently (also 27). A year or so ago snapchat was massive within my friend circle, to the point where normal messages would be superimposed over a selfie or just a picture of whatever the person was doing or seeing right now. A few months back however it rapidly faded and everyone moved back to Facebook Messenger.
I'll be honest I'm not even sure why I'm posting this, but it was such a sudden movement - and everyone virtually the same time too - I wonder if anything's happened in the past 3-6 months to cause that
Instagram is pretty huge in India already. It has about 6M monthly active users and is installed on almost everyone in my age group's (25-35) phones.
Snapchat on the other hand, most people won't know about it. However, I bet its drastically going to change in two years. Whatsapp is basically an SMS replacement - it lacks media rich features and as mobile internet speeds improve in India, people will gravitate towards apps such as Snapchat.
I am in same age bracket. They barely know Instagram. It used to be facebook all the time now Whatsapp has taken over it. Why do you consider whatsapps lacking in media. You can upload photos, videos. If they allowed documents it would have been better.
Maybe our social circles are different :). Snapchat has high resolution pictures & videos, filters, adding captions, adding emoji to pictures, drawing stuff on it. Whatsapp photos and videos functionality is just barely better than MMS.
> This kind of empathy with others will make you much more effective when you're creating for people who are not like you.
Empathy has nothing to do with it, most people who use computers are stupid or if they are smart have irrational traits. Our ancient primate brain is easily fooled.
Apple's ipod was not technically superior to competing MP3 players. Steve jobs was not a genius, he was just taking advantage of the fact that people are stupid and into fashion.
The same thing applies for most things, take the videogame industry. Anyone who knows how a computer works and is not irrational knows DRM and locked down games are bad for games, the enlightened rational minority is outnumbered by the irrational majority. So corruption, appearances, crap products and the superficial rule.
This comment is very unempathetic. You're taking a very strong "if you don't agree with me you are stupid" approach, which is pretty much the exact opposite of empathy.
Also, most of the things that you've said are entirely subjective. You're stating your own opinions as fact, which most of us (me) would say is something a stupid, unempathetic person would do.
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.
It's all about lowering the stakes in social interaction. It's one of the reasons why Twitter became so popular yet people continue to be baffled by it. Facebook has utterly failed on this front IMO.
Most people realize that whatever they want to say to their friends is almost always unimportant and ultimately meaningless. This is how real life conversations work 99% of the time. When you post something to Facebook you're saying that whatever you have to say is important enough to put up on everybody's news feed and stay around forever. When you use Snapchat you're saying that whatever you have to say is worth a few seconds of your friends' time and then disappears forever.
It also plays against the slow realization by Millennials as they've grown up that everything they do on the Internet is permanent and they need to be careful about it. Snapchat let's you do whatever stupid shit you want as long as you trust the recipients to not save it and share it.
Thanks for that explanation, as it makes it much clearer to me why people would use it.
I think its a different mindset that says "I want everyone to see this" for what would otherwise be mundane things. I know I never have the urge to broadcast to my friends regular everyday stuff like sitting around or working, but a significant amount of people do. Not saying if that is good or bad, I think it's just different.
Can you tell who has read or seen your posts? I guess I mean, when I talk to someone I know they are there. I don't want to feel pressured to look at the feed every day on the chance of missing something.
I feel like the people I talk to, I already talk to. Internet people are internet people - and I'd like them to approach my missives at their own pace. Not have an inspector-gadget like timer associated with the posts.
Except that you are not - if I talk with somebody for real, at least I know somebody listened to what I say (OK, or at least pretended to listen). Seems as if I could go through the effort to snap something and it would disappear before anybody sees it.
Does it also play on that basic human condition of not wanting to see options go away, so you frantically click through your friend's stories for fear of missing anything? I could imagine how that would get users hooked, but I wouldn't consider it a good thing.
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, definitely not snapchat's market.
The reason snaps disappear is to enable one of the key effects of Snapchat which is low-stakes social interaction. Users feel they can be more relaxed in their interactions when they cannot be recalled later. To quote the article:
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.
Many people do feel social pressure to be "cool", to perform to the perceived expectations of the groups they belong too. Given that, many people clamor for "lower stakes" interactions. While the same "lowering of the stakes" could happen at a social level, and I believe that is something that's happening slowly over the long term, a much faster route is to use a tool that enforces lower stakes, such as Snapchat.
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.
Compare it to Twitter limiting your communication to 140 characters. Or Instagram limiting your posts to photos (as far as I know; never used it). Or Vine limiting you even more than Instagram. Or Tinder limiting you to swipes (compared to pretty much every other 'dating' app out there).
In all cases the limitation is rather arbitrary, and yet one of the primary defining aspects of each product. I don't think it's a stretch at all that the ephemeral nature of Snapchat is its main offering. I kind of wish more of my friends would use Snapchat, because I'm not always happy with the idea that everything I ever said to a friend via Facebook is stored and can be read and searched by them. And by Facebook.
There's a certain beauty behind transient moments. It follows a separate line of thinking than that of people used to keeping digital archives of their lives.
The Japanese cherry blossoms are a bittersweet moment during the spring. People go flower-watching (花見) to admire the beauty and it is a happy time. But it is also a sad time, because it is only for a fleeting moment before the time has gone and another year must pass before you can see them bloom.
What makes them so special is that they do no last forever. If the cherry blossoms were in bloom year-round, they would not be any less beautiful - but I do not think they would see as much popularity. They would become commonplace and ignored.
Not everything needs to live on forever - and some things would "suffer" if they did.
If you have a face-to-face conversation with a friend (assuming no eavesdropping devices are around) everything you say "self destructs". You'll feel freer to say certain things knowing that they will only persist in your friend's memory.
People get sidetracked from actually enjoying their friends' virtual company when also given the role of curating/polishing an online presence. Not worrying about the impression your profile makes is freeing.
It's not really intended for things you'd want to persist forever. If you'd like to, you can easily save the image or video. The idea is sharing your current experience with others in a way that you cannot really on Facebook or Instagram.
This appeal to the morality of empathy is actually not relevant to either the discussion or your comment.
>This kind of empathy with others will make you much more effective when you're creating for people who are not like you.
What you are describing is the action of gaining knowledge of other's likes/dislikes. This can be done entirely robotically i.e. completely without emotion. Knowing about others is only a part of empathy. The other part is actually exercising this emotion in your actions, choices, and interactions with other people.
I don't think not understanding snapchat (and not wanting to understand snapchat) is a display of a lack of empathy. There are many things that each of us choose not to spend time learning about. That is just a basic facet of life.
And, I find it extremely disingenuous to start blaming people of being "bad human beings" because they do not care to entertain themselves with a currently popular social application. Like really? Is this what we have lowered our discussion standards too?
This jump to appealing to some sort of moral high-ground to establish your point is logically fallacious at best. Especially when morality/ethics plays zero part in people's personal views/choices in regards to a topic e.g. this topic.
>make an effort to talk to people outside of your normal social circles once in a while.
You do realize that the majority of Snapchat's users are most likely using it to participate in THEIR social circles, right? To each their own. It's perfectly fine to NOT be in some social circles.
I am seriously amused that the top comment is an appeal to ethical standards in regards to people's personal opinions about an app. Very amused! :D
I never called anything stupid. Nor is it the case that I don't understand the comment. You actually pointed out no problem with my comment specifically, you merely accused me of "not understanding" and needing to "reread" the comment. How very unempathetic and condescending of you.
I also never said that the comment was saying that "everyone needs to use snapchat".
Maybe you should either address specific points made in someone else's comment or avoid being outright rude in an otherwise intellectual and civil discussion? Just a thought.
EDIT: I also would expect discussions on a site like this to not devolve to false dichotomies of either total agreement or total disagreement with someone else's position (comment).
If you read my comment carefully you will easily discern that my focus is on the lack of necessity for bringing an appeal to "empathy" into the discussion.
I don't see anyone appealing to a moral high-ground. You're the only one talking about ethics.
Let me distill the OP's comment for you:
1) A lot people seem to be complaining about Snapchat being confusing and saying there's something wrong with it, etc.
2) Yet Snapchat is extremely popular with certain groups.
3) If you want to understand why it's popular, try to understand the groups that are using it.
4) In general, that type of empathy (or the ability to understand and share another person's experiences and emotions) can be useful in helping you create things for other people who are dissimilar to you.
You're the only one talking about people being bad or good in relation to their understanding of Snapchat... unless comments have been edited or something.
And mgalka isn't saying you said it was stupid. He was paraphrasing the original argument, because he thought you didn't understand it. Bleh, this type of bickering is pointless, hence my troll suspicion.
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.
This is definitely one of the reasons I enjoy it and continue to use it daily. Their are a lot of cool things that I am still learning how to do even after using the app for more than a year.
Isn't this the exact opposite of everything everyone preaches in product design? Doesn't that totally go against every best practice and case study of simple UX? For example how facebook mobile changed their notifications bar from the hamburger menu to the tab bar is held up as a great change cause it makes things easier.
> Snapchat is one of few apps that has a lot of hidden features for power users that are not explained anywhere.
AFAIK, every feature is explained on Snapchat's website. Also when new features are introduced, they've usually explained in the release notes on how to use them—like when lenses were first added.
Same is probably true of Minecraft where people (especially early on) learn of things to craft, tactics to use, the best ways to farm or mine or whatever.
I often see people over 20 complain about Snapchat's UI/UX, and yet the app has millions of daily users. I don't think it's successful in spite of its UI/UX, so there is something to be learned there if you are developing a new social app.
Thinking of how our parents or grandparents might be able to use a computer just fine but they can't find their way around a flat mobile UI -- Is the Snapchat UI just a new paradigm that we old people don't get? 10 years from now, will this kind of UI design be pervasive?
What if UIs are evolving and we're being left behind?
Yup. 38 here, and I can barely use it. My teenage daughters do it just fine (they were the ones who talked me into signing up). Although I am very technical the UI kills me. As a teen I think there are less mental barriers, assumptions and the like who picked it up just like I picked up DOS and Windows 3.1 when I was a teenager.
I doubt this. I saw Snapchat and thought "okay, this is it, this is what getting old is. There's a program I can't figure out".
Then I asked a 16-year-old niece if she finds it intuitive, and, no, she was as baffled by it as I am. So it's just bad UX. I've spent the three minutes acquainting myself with it since, so now I can use it fine, but yeah, it's definitely bad UX.
I think you're right. I'm 28 and have noticed a lot of people my age complain about the UI/UX. Obviously this is anecdotal but people 25yo and under seem to 'get it'.
I personally like the UI/UX, and think it's advanced. I'm incorporating some of its elements in my own work. I for one am pretty tired of lists, lists, and more lists. I've read somewhere that the UI/UX was built in a 'Japanese style'. I dont know if that's true but it's interesting.
I think where there's room for improvement is just introducing the features and explaining how the unconventional navigation works.
Also, I think you actually validated minimaxir's point. The app succeeded with crappy UI/UX and that sets an example to others: "hey you don't have to build good UX". It's dangerous.
"counterintuitive UI/UX decisions which make the app hard to use"
Consider that it may be intentional, a way for Snapchat to avoid the Eternal September issue where parents and older people signup as part of a second or third wave of users.
I watched my younger group of brothers and relatives move from Facebook and then Instagram as parents, uncles, aunts, teachers, grandparents etc. signed up to each service.
They're hoping they won't have to move on from Snapchat and can remain more candid there.
What I hate most are the ton of features which are supposed to be "discoverable." Or in other words, you have no idea they exist until someone else tells you about it (and how did they find out)?
For example, aside from the traditional way of adding a friend, you can point your camera, in Snapchat, at someone else's phone displaying the profile screen, and it will automatically add them as a friend. Only one other person I've met has known about it before I told them (and they're the ones that told me).
The UI also is just generally clumsy or buggy. Another example, just some of my gripes about the part of the app where you can text chat with people:
You get a push notification that "X is typing" whenever someone begins writing a message to you, even if they don't send a message. Every few days I get one of these notifications when a friend accidentally began typing to me instead of someone else.
They've replaced the "send" button on the keyboard with a button that livestreams your camera to that person. Quite a surprise the first time you're chatting and you're only in your underwear.
You have to hold one of your fingers on the screen the entire time you're video chatting. And you change between the front and back-facing camera based on where on the screen you are holding your finger.
I actually really like Snapchat, it's the only social network/app I use regularly, but damn does the app suck.
Here's one you can go tell other people about:
You don't have to hold your finger on the screen while video chatting. If you drag your finger up or down towards a corner, a lock icon will show up that allows you to remove your finger.
Not sure about OP but I find the swiping to be somewhat nonsensical as far as allowing me to have a mental map of where I am in the app. Sometimes I almost think they were having a laugh with the UI and saying "swipe up here to exit" when you swiped left or clicked to get there.
It seemed like it was done originally by somebody with bad UX skills - or else it was intentional to piss off older people and let the kids have their own thing..?!
I think the UI is great, it took me a couple of times playing around with it to map everything out but once I got that down it became incredibly easy to use.
Swiping to move between screens (there's only 4 main views) is very fluid and easy to navigate.
I was about to make a snarky comment disagreeing with Justin -- as one of those folks who can't deal with Snapchat, I think it's a weird encapsulation of a lot of my complaints of newer social apps.
The UX feels deliberately confusing and disorienting; it promotes a culture of manufactured intimacy; I have to deal with a bunch of software developers thinking they're hip by saying 'bless up' and flooding their social media presences with key emojis, as if a celebrity culture disseminated via Snapchat is different than any other celebrity culture. I also don't really understand how you can write an article saying Snapchat is unmanufactured and not a "social dick-measuring contest" while using DJ Khaled as your main example (and ending with an "add me on Snapchat!").
But this article is titled Why I love Snapchat, and not Why Snapchat is the best. And honestly -- I know a lot of people who love Snapchat. And that's totally cool! Software that creates joy is almost always a net positive thing, and even if I don't really dig Snapchat I'm glad that other people do.
It's okay to love software, even if its flawed or not the ~~ future of media ~~ or whatever. I loved Glitch, a game that hopefully Stewart Butterfield will revive at some point. I love Reddit, even though I find a substantial and growing chunk of its userbase/content to be somewhere between abysmal and appalling.
I think celeb culture's existence on Snapchat and other platforms doesn't have much to do with what I wrote about how Snapchat works.
You get feedback in the form of private snaps and messages, not public #s of comments and likes. So, it isn't a public competition. This is true for celebs and for myself and for every day users.
But it still feels nice to get positive feedback (like someone telling you offline "I like your snaps", or someone snapping you a response to your Story). Getting more friends on it increases private, positive feedback.
Wholeheartedly agree - I spent 2 weeks at a friend's place just a week ago, and my friend I was in became obsessed with recording videos purely for Snapchat every time. Instead of focusing on the moment with friends, she was more concerned with posting something on Snapchat for our circle to see.
I don't want everything I do blasted on social media - I want to enjoy the moments I spend with friends. Snapchat is the opposite of living in the moment, and that is my beef with it.
> Instead of focusing on the moment with friends, she was more concerned with posting something on Snapchat for our circle to see.
Isn't this common with every social media app, relatively? It's the same with cameras, writing down notes, and many other things. You need to use it wisely and have a good focus on the right time and place, and amount of time too.
I use Snapchat a fair bit friends, but almost always not when we're together. It's a low-friction and cheap way of just keeping in contact. Like when you're walking down a street, see something cool and point it out to a friend. Snapchat lets you do that when you're not actually together.
When I'm with friends and want to show something to other friends, I'll make a quick photo or video, and then let it be. Again, you'll have some friends who are on their phones too much, but that's not a Snapchat app problem, or a physical camera problem, it's a user problem.
> Snapchat is the opposite of living in the moment,
I used it only for a year or so, but my impression is/was that Snapchat is a way of trying to show other people how in-the-moment you are, even though you have to take the little bit of time away from that moment to broadcast it.
Draw that dividing line on the other side of the phone and Snapchat "snaps" into clarity for me: Snapchat is for "enjoying the moments you spend with friends" when those friends are somewhere else.
If you're alone at a bar, but you take some snaps and send them to your friends and they reply while you're still there, it's sorta-kinda-almost like you're hanging out there with them.
Or, for a more powerful example: sending snaps of random things over the course of your day to someone you're in a long-distance relationship with. It's the minute-at-a-time version of exactly what Justin.TV could have done: let you "hang out" with your SO while in another country by being pushed a feed from the camera on their shoulder. (While presumably also being able to text or talk on the phone with them as you like, as well.)
I'm 19. Reading Justin's post and your comment makes me squirm. The formality of actually writing paragraphs to describe how you feel contrasts with Snapchat so much. But the thing is, there's nothing wrong with being formal like that. And there's nothing wrong with Snapchat and key emojis.
The overwhelming impression I get from your post is either 1) you don't understand Snapchat, or 2) you understand Snapchat, but you're too embroiled in the "high culture" of Hacker News to be able to appreciate both forms of communication.
I appreciate Hacker News because it is a place where I can read and write paragraphs. I appreciate Snapchat for other reasons. That's where I think many people get lost:
You don't always have to be serious. At the same time, you don't always have to bless up.
I think being able to understand both worlds is key. Major key.
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.
Just to clarify, the "social dick-measuring contest" the author was referring to is being able to see how many followers or friend a user has. I can look up how many followers some celebrity has on Twitter or compare how many friends I have with another friend on Facebook, but I have no idea how many followers DJ Khaled or any of my friends have on Snapchat. You can friend celebrities or brands on Snapchat if you want, but there's no mechanism within the app to find popular users. There used to be a "score" that you could see (I think you can only see your own score now), but that was based on how you used the app rather than how many friends you have.
I'm not an incredibly social person and I'd never have more than a hundred or so Facebook friends, but I'd always feel a little uneasy whenever I saw how many friends another person had -- you can't help but compare them with yourself. On Snapchat I have no idea how many friends the average user has. It's just a window into the lives of the people you care about (as banal or entertaining as they are).
Even though I've been pretty active with and supportive of Snapchat from the beginning, I had always thought of it as a fad that would die off pretty quickly. I also was quick to judge negatively any new features or modes of using the app - such as chat, stories, filters, etc.- assuming it was diluting the brand. At least so far, I have been incredibly wrong almost every time (other than the payment feature, that never really took off to my knowledge). It's pretty impressive how they've managed to not only stay relevant, but bring people into a content sharing platform that was initially a novelty and now a pretty major method of communication, at least with some people within my social circles.
I think the DJ Khaled's use of Snapchat in particular is genius. The popularity of his Story feed really struck me when I was talking to a couple high-school aged relatives earlier this week.
Me: "So do you have any New Years resolutions?"
Kid 1: "They don't want you to have resolutions."
Me: ??
Kid 2: "Resolutions are the key to success!"
=================================
After that exchange, I think there are going to be a lot of musicians/actors/politicians making heavy use of Snapchat Stories in 2016.
DJ Khaled commonly says things like "They don't want you to (insert relatively normal thing here, like watering plants)" and then after doing that thing he'll say "(thing) is the key to success!"
Khaled makes little quips on snapchat all the time. One of them is e.g. "They don't want you to eat breakfast!", following the "They don't want you to ___" mantra he has. Then he usually finishes up with "Breakfast is the key to success.". Silly yet fun things like that. He has even started a store with these phrases: http://wethebeststore.com/products/key-to-more-success
My reason for liking Snapchat is a little bit different.
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.
I wish Snapchat wasn't actively hostile to the WP market. They have outright refused to make an app and when the third party app 6snap appeared (which was quite good), they fought and had it removed. Rudy Huyun, the developer, even offered Snapchat the source code for free. Evan Spiegel even went so far as to mock the platform.
I have no data on this, but I'm willing to bet you that Snapchat is explicitly marketed to young people, and young people don't have Windows phones. The WP is basically a pariah as far as integration with social media is concerned because it's at the bottom of every company's priority list. Beyond that, young people are generally quite image-conscious, and having a Windows phone seems both weirdly non-conforming and, by affiliation with Windows, terribly boring.
I don't know.. Releasing a Windows Phone app means maintaining a Windows Phone app. Cost of maintenance for a userbase that is like 2% globally isn't worth while for most companies.
Unfortunately it's their product and they can do as they wish with it. If this includes not building it for WP, well that's life. 6snap wasn't their app, and yes they had every right to have it removed from the WP store.
That's how the game is played, if one doesn't like it then don't use Snapchat.
I love Snapchat Stories. I always have a minute's worth of video in my story. I love it because, unlike Twitter, Facebook/Instagram and the rest, I can overpost to my hearts content, and people can totally ignore it if they want to. Most of my family does the same, and its fun to see.
I can post videos of my children doing stupid things that no one cares about or wants to see but my parents and grandparents. Oh, thats another thing: when I tell people I love Snapchat, they assume "heh, for sexting?" Well, no, my whole family, including my 60 y.o. parents and 80 year old grandparent are on Snapchat and love seeing videos of my family's activities or stupid stuff we do. The barrier for whats acceptable to post is much lower, like toddlers running through the house naked and whatnot. And it goes away. (well, probably not technically, so I wouldn't post anything that you wouldn't be generally cool with accidentally getting broadcast somehow).
But most the time, I post interesting-but-uncurated little snippets throughout the day that I think are funny or odd, and I usually get a few random comments from friends and family, and its generally fun, frictionless and competition-less way to share without all the 'like' or friend quantifiers. Occasionally a post gets upgraded to twitter for broadcast.
I also initially enjoyed the city stories, where random regular people from, say, Doha or Abu Dhabi or Kuala Lumpur post videos of their daily lives. Cool to see how people live on the other side of the world. Eventually got bored with it, but cool concept.
Out of curiosity, Im not user so this might be ignorant, but why can't people ignore your posts on Twitter, Facebook/Instagram. Are you just referring to notifications ?
I do get the point of the psychological barrier and the problem of broadcasting likes, retweets, comments etc. I think some people will say "what if no one responds" then why would I put this out there, and stop them from putting out something that might be interesting.
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 follow/unfollow people (whom i care about and want to follow!) based on the current sport season, they just had a baby, or whatever and they decide to binge post. Not just once, but for a literal season.
Now, I use them all, and they all have strengths and weaknesses, but Snapchat is the only one i really love to use. Its not a polar argument.
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.
Let's take Instagram as an example since it is a straightforward feed. If 1 person posts a picture every hour (oversharing), but everyone else posts 1/day, then I have to actively scroll past all those pics from the 1 person just to see what else I (may have) missed from everyone else.
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.
Ok thanks, that makes sense. I'm just curious when snapchat has longevity like twitter, and you have hundreds of people you're following their stories, how that User experience will be different than twitter or instagram at that point. I imagine, eventually they will need a way to curate the best user stories or active user stories out of your list of hundreds.
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.
There is a stream though, so that is the way the bulk of its users experience the product. I don't think there is a different way on Twitter to see a list of just those you follow based on whether they've tweeted in the last 24 hours.
I had a similar revelation a while back with Snapchat. Users complain that you can't create groups to send to, you have to manually select each person. I like this - it means when you receive a snapchat, you know that person intentionally selected you to share a part of their life with. It adds a subtle but meaningful quality to a message that could be considered spammy and impersonal.
I completely agree with this. Every time I get a snap from someone who I'm not super close with, I can't help but feel happy that they specifically selected me. In return, I tend to send snaps to my fringe friends more often to let them know I'm thinking of them as well.
One thing that isn't mentioned is that the "friction" in selecting your friends is actually a positive. Instead of someone just shouting out to the world, my friend actually picked my name to receive some post. Not to mention: Snapchat has this built in status for how often users snap each other back. It's a built-in mechanism to get me to respond, similar to the way Facebook wanted it's "Sling" app to work, but without forcing the issue.
I used Snapchat with a very small number of good friends fairly heavily for about a month. Things we shared:
- what we ate
- walking to work
- on the bus/train
- waiting in line
- nothing at all
- drawing on pictures of people - example: a friend is watching ESPN talk about the owner of the 49ers, Jed York, and drew a dunce cap on his head
I think we averaged 10 messages a day each.
Basically, for us, Snapchat was for sharing photos too stupid or personal for Facebook or Instagram.
The stickiness eventually faded. We got tired of seeing the same food, the same office, the same bus every day. Contrary to how we might represent ourselves on Facebook (SUPER AWESOME!!!!), Snapchat showed each other how utterly mundane our lives were. Of the original group of ~5 people, there's maybe one left.
"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."
But what is the reward of content creation?
Honest question. How do a user feel their effort in posting was worthy?
I never used Snapchat, so I don't get it much. Although I'm for sure not dismissive as some, I just never tried it.
Maybe someone replies. Maybe they don't. It's a low effort way of saying "Hey, I find this thing is worth 10 seconds of your time." My friend sent me a snap of her niece throwing a temper tantrum. It was funny. I chuckled. It disappeared. We got lunch weeks later, and I asked if her niece ever calmed down. She laughed, we moved on. She got to share a funny moment in her life with me (and presumably other people) because she thought I might be interested.
If she posted on facebook? You'd have people asking what was wrong, giving advice on how to calm a child, commenting about child abuse, and writing essays about the ethics of posting children to social media. Whatever.
What I like about Snapchat is that things disappear. If someone posted a video on Instagram or Facebook every time their kid did something, not only would followers get annoyed, but it would almost diminish the entertainment value because there are countless more easily accessible on your page. What makes this one special?
You hit the nail on the head with Snapchat. You get to see something someone wanted to share. Maybe you shoot them an "lol" over text or maybe you bring it up next time you see them. It's wholly unobtrusive and each moment has equal value.
So Spapchat achieved what Path tried limiting friends? Real connections with real friends.
Funny thing, went to Path.com now and find out two interesting things: i) they have two apps at the same website now - Path, the social network and Talk, a messaging app; and ii) they don't even mention the 150 friends limit anymore (contrasting that it was the core feature and the epicenter of their launch campaign)
I had a similar revelation a while back with Snapchat. Users complain that you can't create groups to send to, you have to manually select each person. I like this - it means when you receive a snapchat, you know that person intentionally selected you to share a part of their life with. It adds a subtle but meaningful quality to a message that could be considered spammy and impersonal
Snapchat requires you to select who you want to see your snap. There's no facility to push into everyone's feed. I'm not sending it to my "Friends" or my "Family" without consideration.
You aren't going to click 200 people, or 150, or 50. You're going to think "These five people really love hiking." Or "My cousins were talking about adopting a husky." Or "Last time I burned bacon like this was with John and Jane."
Saying "you can only have 150 friends" wasn't the key to a more personal experience. It just meant there was a hard limit on how many people could spam you. The key for me is the tiny marginal cost of sending something to N+1 people, so instead you choose more thoughtfully.
I don't think it's the people. I think it's the content.
Facebook and Twitter inundate me with reshared content from third parties that I mostly have no interest in. Snapchat in contrast is content created by people I know, and they choose to send it to me specifically.
It might be as mundane as breakfast, or a pet doing something funny, or new bedroom curtains, but it's still an update about the life of a friend. Facebook might have a rant about how awful the day at work was which is boring to read. We've all got jobs. Or a reshare of 43 things every women in her 30s hates about Thursday afternoon. Snapchat might have a picture of someone's lunch knocked onto the floor. You think "hah that sucks" and it's gone.
The reward are those random bits of validation you get from friends that say to you in real life "I loved your Snap the other day" and when your friends directly respond on snapchat
Smart! That plus striking comment: "You can see the number of, and names of, the people who view/screenshot your Story."
That ocasional and random reward that make something addictive (like what keep you checking your email all the time, at last receiving that one useful/interesting email in the middle of several useless one). Contrasting to predictable Facebook likes that are measured solely by quantity.
I end with the impression that is a more genuine connection than the commoditized "FB like" and more personal than the "Retweet" and "FB share" that are performed by people you don't even know.
You can see the number of, and names of, the people who view/screenshot your Story. Other replies to your comment are right about individual Snaps, but I think the article is mostly talking about the Story feature.
"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."
Hmm...I guess you guys are talking about somewhat different things - a public viewer count that you can compare to other people vs a private one that only you can see. It still feels a bit contradictory to me though. I would imagine that being able to see how many people view something you post and who they are still rewards the same type of attention-seeking, dick-measuring content - just to a somewhat lesser degree.
It's incredibly easy to post to your story (you can also take a snap, and send it privately to certain people, which will notify them, while also posting to your story), so there's really not much effort involved.
I agree with the other commenters, that a reply to your snap (directly through the app, or in person at a later time) is pretty nice. One of my favorite little things, though I don't know if it's common with other users, is my friends will often have a sort of open "conversation" indirectly with each other through their stories.
Last weekend, a friend of mine posted snaps of her working on some ambient music to her story. So I posted some snaps of me playing a synth. She posted snaps of her playing her synth. Another friend posted to his story him playing his piano, then another friend just playing the Mario Bros theme on a keyboard. And this continued for a few hours until my "Stories" section was just filled with friends playing music.
To contrast with some other snarky responses, for me Snapchat has very little to do with "social validation". Personally snapchat is another tool for me to connect with people. I get to see what people are up to on their shared stories, we exchange cool/funny things we see, and my musical friends and I exchange short videos of what we're working on. It's a little more humanizing than pure text chat. I only text/chat with a few people on a regular basis, but there's about 10 people I exchange snapchats with pretty frequently. It's a nice way to keep in touch, and it's a platform I tend to share on more than Facebook. The content is only there for 24 hours, and is only seen by the ~50 people I added rather than the 800 on Facebook.
This is actually one of the reasons I like it- it is deliberately counter to a lot of social media. There is no like button, no retweet count, no permanent record- just ephemeral little moments you share with friends, and occasionally they'll mention that they liked one of your snaps to you.
To me, it feels like social media in a way it can actually enhance our lives- it encourages you to share moments but once they are over, it's gone, and there are no statistics that you can use to obsess over whether you are fulfilling your social media potential.
Your comment really speaks to a larger problem that social media would appear to have created, that being a "need" for as you put it social validation. You hear stories about people becoming severely emotionally distressed because they only get a low number of "likes" an confront friends for not "liking" or commenting.
It just feels (to me at least), that this is a problem. Granted before what we consider to be the electronic age of social media, this kind of validation existed -- for example, getting a phone call from a friend would give one a similar level of validation - I have a friend! He/She likes me enough to call me!" - it wasn't something someone expected to happen every ten minutes and it wasn't something that required you to do anything.t
Now that we are all connected, we post, we expect validation that someone has read the nugget we posted. Yay! Friends!
I dunno, just strikes me as something to be leery of..
I don't believe that Snapchat offers content creation. Given that nothing actually persists, is it really content? I feel that it's content as much as small talk with a coworker is content, it's more filler than anything actually substantial.
Now if I was to have a discussion about some technical issue or whatever, that would be creating content, but Snapchat is hardly the ideal, or indeed a feasible platform for that.
The reward for me is just having fun with friends. Laughing at each other's snaps, just keeping up-to-date with what we're doing, seeing things that remind you of each other, etc.
Having no # total of followers publicly available and the usual metrics encourages this too.
Great post from somebody I respect tremendously. One thing I feel like he didn't touch on, which I feel like is most important, is that there's no public comments on Snapchat. People post without much need for validation and without fear of backlash.
I've heard his name before, but no idea who he is. I also don't have anyone added that I don't know personally. I don't care if some celebrity is watering their plants or getting coffee, but when my friends post that, it's more enjoyable than I ever thought it would be.
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.
The reactions here seem reminiscent of Svbtle—people felt off socially (with Svtle, they weren't invited, and with Snapchat, they might be feel like they're missing out on what the cool kids are doing).
Snapchat is great if you have a group of friends who care about seeing random photos of your life throughout the day. What exactly am I supposed to "snap" while I'm sitting in an office all day staring at a computer? Take photos of my food? I don't understand how to participate when my life isn't filled with visual things to show people.
They've added some interesting features like stories from your city or events near you which are a subset of videos hand-picked from different people who submitted them for that event/location. This is really handy if you want to get a sneak peak into some event near you that you were unable to attend.
In addition, you can do real time face-to-face video chat, just like face-time. They've also been pretty smart about the implementation of it. If 2 people are snap messaging (not video, just text) and they both have the chat window open, the snapchat camera icon would start glowing blue, signifying that you can initiate a face-to-face video chat with the person.
I've had a similar experience, opening the app a couple times over the years and never using it in any way. I just don't get it. Maybe it's time for another try.
Personally I find my enjoyment requires a group of friends that enjoys what I send and I enjoy what they send for the most part. So it can be a chicken and egg problem for sure. I've unfriended friends on Snapchat because I don't want to see pictures of their food. However, as I don't have a facebook, I find that Snapchat can keep me closer to my geographically remote friends in an wonderfully informal way. There's no "Heyyy! How are you?" followed by that forced how's life exchange of meaningless small talk. I get a pic of a friend on a rooftop bar and I know she's alive and having a good time.
As someone who initially thought Snapchat was stupid, and doesn't typically engage in social media, I get that someone could dislike it or not see the point. For me, Snapchat fits a niche in communication I didn't know I had.
I think I'm supposed to be too young to get that deeply irritated "stay off my lawn" feeling but Snapchat provides it in leaps and bounds. Lots of resentment here for Snapchat and the other useless "Hey, look ma, I'm worth a billion dollars!" unicorns lead by clueless collegiates that are always photographed wearing mom jeans and smirking into space.
I had just barely started to accept Twitter's presence in the world and now this.
Snapchat is the first app that makes me feel like an old man shaking my fist at the young hooligans on the lawn. The abtruse interface leaves me tremendously baffled.
I also grew to love Snapchat over the last few months. But then I got a Nexus 5X and the Snapchat app performs so poorly on this device that I rarely open it any more.
"There’s no public view count, follower count, likes count, or any other social dick-measuring contest. " He adds his account so people can follow him :/
This post makes me think I should check it out again. A lot of our (http://unikupid.com) users in India are on snapchat, thought it's just a teen fad but maybe it's fun to use
Virtually all the comments are about how Snapchat confuses them and that there must be something seriously wrong with it. And yet the app is immensely popular. If you're one of those people, then Snapchat is not really made for you.
You might be able to understand why Snapchat is a beloved app by reading a report about what the millennials are up to these days but I encourage anyone dealing with this confusion to make an effort to talk to people outside of your normal social circles once in a while. This kind of empathy with others will make you much more effective when you're creating for people who are not like you.