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Comment by tajen | Hacker News Reader

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 for its hidden features that you discover by social-networking, and 2. it's a much more interesting, funny, interactive press release presenting the features of a product than any other start-up I've seen. Next product video I make, I'll make it this way.

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> 1. Snapchat's design is remarkable for its hidden features that you discover by social-networking

Honest question: isn't this just bad UI design?

I don't think so. It's simple for a firs time user, but has near limitless depth for hardcore users.

Non-snapchat user here. I find this hard to believe.

Occasional Snapchat user here. "Near limitless depth" is definitely overselling the thing.

No. If you look at snapchat as one of the most addicting games on the market right now, hidden features make complete sense. They increase the 'skill ceiling' of sorts, and dramatically increase user longevity.

Actually I think the article isn't about "How to become a Snapchat user." but rather "how teens use snapchat (or social media in general) that is really different than how adults use it" .

Going from that to "what social media teens use that you don't even know about" isn't much of a stretch.

I'm not sure if I'll call mentioning these apps as "product placement". Could be someone trying to up these app's SEO ranking. Could be just an interesting tidbit he used (he also mentioned instagram, and I doubt that was by request).

VSCO is definitely a phenomenon amongst teenagers, regardless of the product placement possibilities in the article. I'd actually have rather seen an article on that, because I find it fascinating that a service without any of the Skinner-box gratification buttons ("like" "retweet" "share" "comment") has taken off in such a big way.

Scores and Chains, as mentioned in the article, sound pretty skinner-boxy. Plus, every time someone sends you a response to a message is a skinner box reward, in a sense.

Those are Snapchat, not VSCO. VSCO is pretty much devoid of social features beyond Follow, as far as I can tell.

I've been looking for something just like VSCO anyway, so I'm glad to learn about it.

VSCO has a rather large following among the prosumer crowd, most of the Apple "Shot on the iPhone 6" ads mention VSCO and a photographer friend of mine uses it on his iPad with his 5D on the go. While I haven't used it myself, its certainly been name checked quite a bit and its success is largely due to it being a more empowered Instagram on the photography side.

I know pro photographers who use VSCO to edit their iPhone shots to upload to Instagram, as the tools are so much more powerful than IG's own. It's a great app.

VSCO is one of the few apps where I've bought something in app (filters). Most professional photographers I know use VSCO for mobile editing.

i'm just fascinated that i spend ages on facebook, twitter, reddit, hn and lobsters, and have never heard of VSCO before this. is there that little overlap between the demographics?

Also, I just googled Treller. It doesn't exist. Either that or I'm not even cool enough to know about it. What is Treller??????

Triller

What kind of hidden features?

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