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Comment by AaronLasseigne | Hacker News Reader

It's a video game for her. She doesn't look at the photos in the morning, she just responds to keep the chain going. It's like grinding. She has a score, tries to improve it, get trophies, new equipment (I mean filters), etc.

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Yet Another Skinner Box.

EDIT: At least SpaceX and Tesla won the Crunchies instead of junk like Snapchat.

yasb.com

I'll stick with Neko Atsume.

Mm. Such a fun game. Gotta get all the cats...

But a particularly powerful one, it's not attaching to feelings of escape or enjoyment but friendship and social status. So even if you dislike you can't not participate without serious consequences. Especially when you are at an age when social status is of extreme importance, that gives the operators of the network and app a hell of a lot of power and a new flavor of power at that.

Life is a Skinner Box. That was the whole point of Skinner's experiments.

Indeed, sounds like Snapchat is using gaming techniques[1] for a social app.

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[1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/6/8544303/casino-slot-machine...

That's true, but the trophies and points are barely any value in the day-to-day. For example, in deciding to reply to a snap, the thought "My score's gonna increase if I do this" barely crosses the mind.

It's always just about keeping the conversation. And since a lot of the conversation is filler that need not be saved forever, snaps have a unique position.

The bit of game theory they actively present is Seinfeld's "Don't Break the Chain" technique. Snapchat marks and elevates contacts you individually snap at at least once a day, moving those contacts into more-and-more personally named categories ("close friend", "best friends", etc).

That bit is right in your face and rewards you for increased use.

I had no idea that was the case, but that's some next level psychological shit to be pulling on a predominantly teenage customer base. Does no one see the proposal to do something like this and think to step back for a second and consider the effect its going to have on people's lives?

In general the only people doing that are in marketing, and they only do so in the frame of trying to monetize that relationship/power/leverage.

Political wonks talk about it a lot and have various daydreams of having that type of power.

It's not talked about much, and when it is you can counter it by labeling it as a "kids these days" type argument.

I'm very skeptical. No doubt Snapchat is game-ified somewhat, but I have people aged 12 to 53 (and all ages in between) snapping with me and not a single one of them has ever mentioned their snap score. I'd bet most don't even know their score.

Trophies aren't really all that unlockable. Within the app, any trophy you haven't unlocked is a lock icon with ??? underneath it, so you don't even know what you need to do to achieve it. You can go online to find out, but neither my 12-year-old daughter nor my 17-year-old sister have bothered to do it. They just don't care. That's not what it's about for them.

It's her Cookie Clicker. Completely addicting and most of us can't figure out why. Maybe it's the number going up on her account info.

That's what I got out of the article. Oh, I get it now, they gamified chatting.

I didn't know snapchat had scores and that the experience around it was so... gamefied. It was a fun article to read.

This was my thought exactly. It's the new FarmVille.

How long will it last?

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