Hacker News Reader

Comment by argonaut | Hacker News Reader

People need to stop focusing their criticism on how stupid the app is or how they're going to lose all their users. It's almost a meme by now of how people say this every time Snapchat is brought up. By now it's a foregone conclusion, and requires active ignorance and not really caring to keep an open mind, to continue to hold onto that belief in the face of tremendous evidence that 1) Snapchat is very popular, 2) Snapchat has been around for 5 years now and hasn't gone anywhere, and 3) Users of Snapchat use it very actively.

Personally, I think one good way to see why people use the product is to 1) be in a relationship, and 2) regularly send pictures of what you're doing / funny things you've encountered / your face, back and forth with your partner.

Where I feel like there is legitimate criticism of Snapchat is their ability to monetize. Unlike Google, there is no purchasing intent. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, there is little ability to target users beyond age/gender/location (and no amount of computer vision in the short term will change that). Their Discover / Live products (which allow you to see snippets from brands / news channels / publishers) are promising but unlike the core product, I think there is legitimate reason to be doubtful about the appeal of these products because they have nothing to do with chatting with friends.

View on HN

I don't think anyone is debating the popularity of Snapchat.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you said "I think there is legitimate reason to be doubtful about the appeal of these products because they have nothing to do with chatting with friends".

In my opinion, when Snapchat is truly forced to monetize (such as twitter/fb after ipo) it will dillute the core product to the point that people will search for alternatives.

At that point a competitor will get some VC funding after grabbing some users and start the cycle again.

I view this behavior by SV to be just as damaging to the state of the tech industry as housing derivatives were to the housing industry.

I don't buy this scenario. The failure scenario I have in mind is their monetized products fail to catch on, and they are basically like Twitter - no other products that directly compete in that niche, but not a cash cow either. Or WhatsApp - very popular, not a cash cow.

Just as plausible, if not more so.

I just view the constantly aging 18-24 year old demographic as the main driver of viral growth these days. As that demographic ages out a new flavor of the week will emerge.

That would make sense if most high school students didn't currently use Snapchat

Common misconception: Twitter has actually pretty steadily increased its revenue per user. Their issue is that their user growth has basically plateaued far short of the ubiquitous level they need.

I am aware of that difference. As a company Twitter is not a cash cow.

As a few dozen people managing a webapp on AWS from home while eating udon noodles, it'd be a cash cow.

Exactly. Twitter earned nearly $600M last quarter. Claiming that it has not successfully monetized is simply false.

I know people who have worked at Twitter. Twitter's systems cannot be run, even in maintenance mode, by only a few people on AWS. Not only would Twitter crash / crawl to a halt on AWS, but that's not even enough people.

Sure, but the statement that they were unable to monetize the product is incorrect. They have successfully monetized the product. They (so far) have been unable to keep the user base growing at a rate that a public company generally requires.

I didn't say they would be exactly the same company. They would just be in the same position.

I think it's more probable that their value will come down from bubbling heights and someone will buy them. To me chat models aren't sustainable without it working in line with your other verticals. It's too hard to monetize. IMO no chat platform can survive without being attached to another product or service; or just a vertical that is similar. Not in the mobile age it's not. There are too many chat apps as it is. FB Messenger, SnapChat, WeChat, Slack, Skype, iMessenger, WhatsApp, Viber, Hangouts, GChat and that's not even all of them. There's no way there is enough market room for all of those. The sector will consolidate and imo will come back to the mean of there being maybe 4 big companies behind them. Really, if I'm Twitter and want to stop my stock from tanking, I get a line of credit and buy SnapChat. It actually makes sense with their model more than any other.

Though I have heard the SnapChat CEO is a bit of an egotistical assclown, so he might ride it out alone until the bitter end. He also despises Microsoft, so that rules out one buyer.

"Really, if I'm Twitter and want to stop my stock from tanking, I get a line of credit and buy SnapChat"

Twitter's valued at only $10 Billion. Snapchat just raised at rumored $18 Billion valuation.

It's equity value is not all that relevant during a buyout, there are different swap methods, etc. It's not unusual for a company with a smaller market cap to buy a larger one. A lot is to be considered, ebitda, debt, liabilities, cash flow, book value etc. I also said that their valuation will eventually fall. We are in a private equity bubble, but credit is still easy to come by.

> IMO no chat platform can survive without being attached to another product or service;

I sincerely believe WhatsApp could have survived independently with a $1/yr subscription. They hit a sweet spot of having a 9-digit user base, a small team and not raising crazy amounts of venture capital.

I think paid providers can survive, but not ad backed ones. Skype has a paid offering for example and has a business platform, Hangouts has a business platform integration. Hard to do that with something like SnapChat, if you ask me. Eventually if everyone is collecting data, that data is going to become less valuable per user, so using that for valuation becomes nonsensical.

Perhaps it doesn't scale well, but their sponsored face filters seem to be getting a good reception. It's rare for people to find ads fun.

This. The sponsored filters show up in my friends stories all the time. I also see sponsored filters based on events and location. I actually find myself watching the sponsored stories pretty regularly too. It's a great way to fit news into small bitesized chunks, and I can't imagine the buy in for those is cheap.

It's also the most widely used AR implementation - if somewhat trivial and non-complicated.

It might seem silly from the outside, but that's actually meaningful because it gets people used to the idea of modifying the "real world" with a contextual addition.

Fucking pissed me off to the max, actually. This week, they did X-Men lenses and REMOVED the face swap and picture swap features for the entire day. If I wanted to use lenses, it had to be X-Men for the whole day. What PM green-lit that shitty decision?

I closed Snapchat and didn't use it for the entire day. I'm boycotting the X-Men movie out of protest.

Going a whole day without face/picture swap "pissed you off to the max"?

Seems you have a pretty good life.

Pedantry is alive and well on hacker news

And this insult doesn't reflect very well on yours.

Yeah but I seriously doubt that will drive them to $1B in revenue. They need one big cash cow rather than a collection of trinkets.

They may learn to use those trinkets. Just imagine a button that says `Buy for $0.20 the X-Men Wolverine Mask filter` or just detecting user patterns: They detect an user mostly uses cat-faces filters, so they try to sell her cat-faces filters. Or that her snap-chats are mostly on restaurants, so they show her some restaurant ads with the same color filters she likes.

They already tried to sell filters. I think selling filters didn't go well because filters are free now.

Works only for a couple of verticals

I'll be darned if an insurance provider can make a filter fun

It's also something most small businesses can't really make good use of, unless they are in the entertainment/lifestyle businesses

I'm sure the GEICO lizard could be fun for someone, and an insurer could probably do a "fake accident filter to get out of work" or something.

I'm a heavy Snapchat user and just sending stuff to a partner doesn't seem to be the main use case nowadays - it's stories (basically a video equivalent of Twitter and Instagram mushed together) or throwaway group sending.

Agreed, but most people won't understand stories until/unless they have a bunch of friends on Snapchat, so it's not the best aspect to start with.

Hey Peter. What's the point of stories? Seems like a more limited version of Twitter - you can post photos and videos on twitter too... and there you have 21k followers. Surely a better place to post stuff if you want to reach an audience?

It's mostly about the user experience of the follower, I think (more than the fact that the stories go away after 24 hours).

Snapchat allows a follower to consume all of the stories that they follow in a single stream. You only have to tap quickly to go to the next media item. One can also skip one story and move on to the next with a single swipe.

The fact that everything has to be a direct photo or video from a phone also makes every story feel less manufactured and more genuine. For example, I can go to an NBA player's Twitter account and find that personal tweets and messages from their sponsors are completely mixed in a single feed, while their Snapchat feed is all about their day-to-day personal life (which some find much more interesting).

Interesting. So the key point is that you're encouraged to talk about yourself and not other people or things?

It's the opposite of a link blog, which is what I mostly do; I don't consider my own life to be nearly as interesting to the audience (presumed to be mostly people I don't know) as interesting stuff I can find on the Internet.

More people use Snapchat actively. They also persist, in that they aren't in a stream that requires the follower to currently be in the app to see.

It has a different use. If I'm posting links or stuff, it'll go on Twitter. If it's random insights, it might go on both. If it's real life, usually on Snapchat since a lot of people who follow me on Twitter don't care about my day to day activities, moving house, etc. Snapchat is for a closer, more personally involved audience. I unfollow people on Twitter who constantly post personal crap there but expect and enjoy it on Snapchat.

The monetization piece is interesting, because unlike FB, Snapchat has been all about privacy and anonymity from day one. Their recent ToS change makes it clear that this might not always be the case, and I'm really curious to see how their users react as they get more and more aggressive on monetization.

The core functionality doesn't necessarily require the network effect to be useful, unlike Facebook, so there is theoretically less reason to stick around if the monetization ramp-up negatively impacts the user experience.

http://gibsonsec.org/snapchat/ http://gibsonsec.org/snapchat/fulldisclosure/

Really?

They store all the photos internally. This was confirmed to me by several snapchat employees while interviewing.

Do you mean indefinitely? Are they not deleted after a certain period of time?

Effectively they are deleted just not how you might imagine -- I can't reveal more as I'm not supposed to know this ;)

They probably just batch delete them from time to time but until then do a soft delete by setting "status 0" in the DB.

I imagine that's what they do.

>not how you might imagine

Then I imagine they're "deleted" off of their servers, but not before being copied to another database that they use internally which isn't attached to the original servers directly.

And nobody cares? Sexting is an extremely minor use of Snapchat nowadays, and everyone knows you can just screenshot.

I think you either misinterpreted the employees's comments, or they were mistaken. Our deletion policies are clearly outlined in our privacy policy (Snapchat.com/privacy).

"...we automatically delete the content of your Snaps (the photo and video messages that you send your friends) from our servers after we detect that a Snap has been opened or has expired."

Note that the deletion model is different for non-Snap media:

"Outside of Snaps, the rest of our services may use content for longer periods of time, which means those services may follow different deletion protocols. So, for example, we retain your Story content a bit longer than Snaps so that your friends have more time to view your Story."

Disclaimer: I'm an employee of Snapchat.

Privacy? They don't allow you to opt-out of Friend Emojis...

Don't forget that lots of people said Facebook wasn't monetizable either, just a few years ago.

Is Facebook or Twitter the better analogue to Snapchat? Twitter has revenues of around 600M per quarter but lost 80M as its growth stalls.

I don't remember that. People thought that Facebook couldn't match Google-level ad revenue, but the monetization model was abundantly clear for Facebook as soon as it became obvious how much personal data they were tracking. Facebook IPO'd in 2012, at which point it already had over $4B in revenue, and had been generating revenue for years before that.

The much better example is Twitter, which people did indeed say wasn't monetizable, still isn't profitable, and has absolutely tanked since its IPO.

There were lots of question on whether they could monetize on mobile when they IPO'd. I think their stock went down 33-50% from their IPO price until they showed they could make the transition.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/07/27/fac...

Exactly.

All the data showed that Twitter wasn't monetizable, yet people still threw huge valuations at it.

There is nothing wrong with building apps and platforms that don't have clear paths to monetization, I just don't see why any sane VC would ever invest in one.

Because good VCs make money on the ones that successfully monetize, not on consistent 10% ROI. That kind of return is great, but just be a PE firm if that's your goal.

If you have the money to play the odds like that then more power to you.

I just don't like the acknowledgement that most of their investments will fail.

Naw man, that's just how it goes in VC world. You have to play it like that. It's like a roulette table -- hard to hit a number but pays out 33x. Well, similarly, a very successful start-up can pay out 100-1000x and easily carry the other losers.

The difference is that Facebook was within reach of cashflow positive at all times in it's growth, ie if they fired non-core staff could be cash flow positive within months (source: Mark Zuckerburg talk I went to). It had ad's from within the first few months of existence, that was Saverin's role before he left/was fired but they always built that part of the business and revenues always scaled with expenses.

I actually see Discover as their only redeeming feature. The interface is fantastic for mobile. They should just publish a set of Discover tags that sites can use to format their content for it, and let people use Snapchat as a browser. As a messenger, it's...just another messenger.

Snapchat is not similar to any messenger I know of. There have been numerous failed attempts to clone Snapchat, however.

The interns in our marketing department use it. I asked them to explain it to me, and they did. I still don't see the point in it. But everyone under the age of 25 does seems to see the point. And the advertising on it brings us business.

look, I am all for giving snapchat the benefit of the doubt (or I did a long time ago) it was actully the classic zuckerberg boardroom story peter theil tells all the time, except zuckerberg was yahoo to snapchat(i think yahoo was the aquirer but IDRP). Mark Zuckerberg was a the full package, a super talented developer and shrewd business man. Maybe he was cocky, maybe he was super clever, but he doubled down on himself because he knew his business, he knew his customers, he knew the product, and he mapped out the next 2-5 years in his head already.

Snapchat turning him down was an echo of that enthusiasm and market knowledge. Quiet determinsim & with only that to go on, the market assumed it was a zuckerberg story: knowing much more than everyone else and being able to see the companies future.

That was bold, and that took guts to do what snapchat did, and turn down money. However, facebook grew up in a totally different time. After 7 years facebook raised slightly less than this capital raise and it was just fundamentally a better/different company. But chiefly, Facebook's value materialized after this as Mark expected it to. By value, I mean on many levels. Snapchat's has not. The product hasn't evolved (again I don't use it, but apparently) very much. Facebook, adn the team stormed pictures, mobile, developer centric apis (becoming a core authentication cornerestone and identity tool), streamlining feed data, and matching algorithims. Snapchat, to a non-user, appears to fall flat in positive significant improvements. There seems to be one feature I have read about that is relatively new, that is universally hated. It is the only thing I have read about that seems like a departure from text messages I can never see again.

First off, advertising revenue was super important and a semi-reasonable monetization strategy back then. Facebook had officially won the network effect social game. It was the beneficiary of the largest social network to exist, ever. Also, their content was aggregated and stored and has been for a decade. They have massive amounts of user data and a distribution network. You really can't replicate 5 years of content in a single place and a network that is ~1/10th the size of earth. Facebook is google for people, it is a search engine.

Snapchat does not have a clear monetization strategy and the content they have is ephemeral. If a snapchat clone came out tomorrow, snapchat wouldn't be as sticky. Snapchat looks like twitter, the poster child for massive high engagement with disposable content and horrible biz fundamentals. In fact, twitter or facebook could clone snapchat probably super easy and enjoy crazy leverage and synergy. The only reason a 3rd unknown party can't is network penetration.

The thing about twitter, is that it is a realtime sentiment protocol that allows data-mining by forcing humans to condense thoughts into a single data object called a tweet. Creating your own data transmission protocol and having end-to-end control of it has huge potential. They can distribute their api & data objects to news, politicians, entertainers, hedgefunds and also allow advertising and purchase execution.

Uniting this data object with something like a hashtag allows them to track global trends. Where as Snapchat allows you to send dickpicks to horny girls you want to sleep with. So I am all for people trying to procreate and I have even had sex once or twice myself, but snapchat has a worse monetization strategy than twitter, and they really would need a facebook size IPO to pay back investors.

FB raised 16B in a horribly botched IPO. That would 10x the last money in, which has probably horrifying ratchets and clawback clauses. So, an admittedly super popular app that has existed for 5 years doesn't justify a 16B ipo at 100+B in 2 years like facebook did unless they think they can charge like $1 like whatsapp did, but that proved to be shitty for them. Was that acq. worth it? IDK, but certainly no PE firm would do it, only a huge company based 100% on realtie social connectedness.

I don't want to hate too hard, snapchat is cool (i don't use it myself) and many people find it a staple of their day. Especially trnedy demographics like postlennials. However, if my generation (millenials) is any indication, these kids are going to have way less money, be much less willing to pay, and came out of the womb with adblock, ublock and a propensity to jump around numerous social networks.

edit: fossuser pointed out, which I had forgotten/totally missed, that post facebook/snapchat deal facebook did clone snapchat with poke in a 2 week sprint and spent the next 1.5 years hacking on it. It did fail, and they shunted the project. Here is the IBM advert fossuser was speaking about and the Evan Spiegal quote[0]

[0]http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/snapchat-co-founder-evan-sp...

"If a snapchat clone came out tomorrow, snapchat wouldn't be as sticky"

there have been plenty. facebook even launched one

I outlined my thoughts, a large social network would have to do it. linkedin, google, twitter, microsoft or facebook. LinkedIn, twitter, facebook being the most profitable. Maybe apple, for the security, weird FBI hacking thing although their software has gone down hill. I digress,

what was the Facebook snapchat clone? I haven't heard of a large scale effort to clone snapchat yet. If I were to build a comparable universe of companies for snapchat, I would say it is a lot like tinder, twitter and foursquare.

It was called FB Poke and was built in 12 days after Zuckerberg flew out to talk to Evan and Evan turned his offer down. When it launched it was basically better than snapchat in every category, but people didn't switch to it.

Then Evan responded by copying Apple and saying 'Welcome Facebook, Seriously'. On an unrelated meta note I found this annoying because it originally came from people building personal computers and not dumb ephemeral messaging apps.

Maybe Snapchat can do what Facebook and Google have done and become a real technology company, but so far feels more like twitter (lots of users, but unclear vision).

Its launch: http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/facebook-poke-app/

A comparison with snapchat: http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/facebook-poke-vs-snapchat-w...

Its death: http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/9/5700732/facebook-poke-is-de...

interesting. going to dig up the advert. maybe they have a long play here. thanks.

> I haven't heard of a large scale effort to clone snapchat yet

That's how absurdly sticky Snapchat is.

It's been emulated many times over (incl. as mentioned above, by Facebook) – yet you haven't even heard of a single one.

All those grafs and you still can't figure it out.

Say you have a Snapchat account and follow 25 of your friends. Each of them are active and contribute 30 second snap stories maybe 4 times a day.

That means it's 50 minutes of footage. A day.

Say it's not just friends anymore but you're also following brands or brands pay your friends to act out something as well.

Snapchat is the new MTV.

With instant ability to chat with whoever, whenever, in augmented reality.

After 20 years on the internet this shit is so future.

look i have crazy theories which I think are sane and correct(they are) so I am willing to give this a shot. Can you please walk me through the next 5 years of how you see this progressing. As I said a lot, I am not a user but I don't find it compelling personally but i honestly would love to be proved wrong. If you could even do it high level, I would be really interested in core growth and monetization strategies. Even far out ones. 5 years I believe is the farthest out you can map a startup and be even pointed in the correct direction still. I just want to know what you think could be pushing their sails that I am missing.

In a world at the cusp of robots driving cars and trucks, robots cooking your food, where eggs can be made from plants, the internet coverage will reach 100% saturation, where basic income is being trialed, and that saudi arabia is investing two trillion dollars of their assets...

Does it really matter to you that someone got billions of dollars so that 100 million people every single day gets an hour at least of entertainment intermixed with native advertising that snapchat charges $100k a day for?

Does the world really need you, personally, to worry and save them from this?

Does the world really need you, personally, to wander around a museum and remarking on how much a Picasso or Hirst is really worth?

Your ego makes you blind. Your cynicism makes you jaded. Go build something and don't stop until your work is being considered as such.

idk what about my comment seems disingenuous, i was actually really interested in this in case i missed some huge cool trend. i am interested in products and technology for their own sake. i would love to help the world pisitively, but i am sure it is not depending on me. i was just curious for a different perspective as i am contrarian to some extent, so i was asking for an unhoulds boundless guess at what snapchat could be to add more information to my appraisal of the situation.

> go build something.

i mean, i am. but again, i was just legit curious what i was missing. no need to be a dick about it.

edited out some info

> Brilliant and great insights building on what’s happening now and been happening in the tech industry. Interacting with someone/something that doesn’t judge me opens up a new dimension of conversations. It might normalize honesty in society.

Quote I found interesting.

Not parent, but here's how I learned to understand snapchat.

Think like a younger Millennial (18-25 right now). Their whole social lives have been in public on FB/etc. They're going through a horribly awkward time in their lives, but it's all public. When they act like an immature kid, or aren't sexy, or whatever, that is recorded for all time.

So they feel incredible pressure to be sexy/fit/cool/smart/doing interesting things. People take hundreds of selfies to find the one that meets (what they think) their peers expect.

The pressure to be cool and attractive is intense. With FB, there is no escape.

Now Snapchat offers the opposite. People can "let their hair down", not have to look sexy or be cool, because the message is just temporary.

Most of the time I want candids, not portraits. FB made everything a portrait (intended for consumption by future selves/others).

SnapChat brought it back to the present by making it temporary.

"The pressure to be cool and attractive is intense. With FB, there is no escape."

Can't they just change how the stuff they posted on FB is shared?

It's not just what they share. Other people share things about them.

"If a snapchat clone came out tomorrow, snapchat wouldn't be as sticky."

What makes you say that? Do you know how hard it is to get your social network to move to a new thing? The clone would have to have an amazing benefit, which Snapchat would be in a decent position to clone themselves.

Many have tried to clone Snapchat (including Facebook, twice) but nobody has similar user traction

"Snapchat does not have a clear monetization strategy and the content they have is ephemeral. If a snapchat clone came out tomorrow, snapchat wouldn't be as sticky. Snapchat looks like twitter, the poster child for massive high engagement with disposable content and horrible biz fundamentals. In fact, twitter or facebook could clone snapchat probably super easy and enjoy crazy leverage and synergy. The only reason a 3rd unknown party can't is network penetration."

This is fundamentally wrong. I'm an advertiser and I have seen so many Snapchat campaigns work tremendously well for brand advertisers. All for large established brands who are spending solid amounts with the platform.

Much of the hard work is ahead for the platform in terms of measurement and clear steps to defining and achieving ROI metrics such as awareness, brand uplift all the way through to DR elements such as traffic, leads, mobile installs and conversions.

The company makes huge strides very often updating media packs, incorporating measurement (Nielsen) etc. I expect very smart acquisitions in terms of continuing to drive user growth on the consumer side and build out of measurement / ads API to cater to the agency world in the next 12-18 months.

An IPO for snapchat is some time away but it is building a very real commercial organisation amongst brands, advertisers, agencies, the TV community (look at the viacom deal recently).

Also to your point here:

"FB raised 16B in a horribly botched IPO."

You can't say a company raised $16bn and had a horrible IPO. This really doesn't make any sense irrespective of all the ratchets and clawback clauses (none of which will keep any FB exec up at night let alone the CEO). Look at FB today, you should be kicking yourself if you had the chance or even thought about buying the stock at $17 when it was being shorted like crazy by Wall Street.

i agree, you make some compelling points. i would be interested to know more about how big a market the adv/data piece is and how yoh use it. i was wrong when i said they don't have a clear moneyization strategy. I should restate what i think now: it is still not clear to me what strategy would support the growth required from an investment of this magnitude demands

however, like pg said about whatsapp acq, it was like taking the atomic mass of company. who are you going yo believe, mark zuckerberg, the guy who is betting hos company amd his own money and furure on it after extensive talks, internal fb ops kniwl, and access to WA books, or TC pundits. (clearly my summary, not direct wuote. was video interview, tough to find source)

i do believe still, to disagree somewhat, that fb ipo was botched. point i was making is that facebook was a very strong company (at least rel to SC) and the IPO was indervalued because of scandal and technical errors. even undervalued, a comparative IPO for snapchat would still require a huge increase in real revenue and numbers.

it is a steep climb, if we say FB was $100B and dont adjust for the interference of several problems (glitch, scandal, info leak) snapchat would have to justify real profitability and massive rev growth. maybe they have that, but (advanced apologies for no citation) facebooks revenue indicated by their s-1 filing was 3.7 billion with 0.845B users.

This is a real question not rhetoric: Do you think snapchat can achieve these numbers given 3 years?

I believe Snapchat will not grow in three years to be a one billion user company (I'm happy to be proven wrong here though). I do believe that once the ad product matures in terms of ad formats, measurement, ROI across both brand and DR metrics there will be some strong revenue figures all at the typical 70-80% gross margin you would expect from a software business. So from a revenue POV I expect it to ramp significantly and faster than we would expect. They have raised enough money to build or buy the tech needed for a biddable solution, measurement capabilities and a platform of true scale. I would not surprised if they add a third party solution a la Video on Demand for Snapchat ads to be served onto to increase scale of the platform off the core Snapchat platform to drive more revenue via advertising. Lets also not discount things like stickers etc which have been extremely profitable for companies in the Far East like WeChat.

I do expect the revenue to ramp significantly for FB, TWTR, IG, Snapchat etc over the next 3-5 years based on client demand. In five years time, all the strongest aspects and best practices will really be established by brands and agencies and the ad dollars will subsequently follow. Much of the overall digital budget is moving quickly downstream to social platforms. This pace will quicken over time as all brands will need to spend on these platforms to fulfill reach capabilities. All big brands need to be able to reach millions of users at scale which comes with significant media investment or revenue for these social platforms. We're only four years in and it will be an area I am betting the next 5-7 years of my career on.

I don't understand why use cases 1 and 2 wouldn't just send a text message picture. Why would you bother with a 3rd party app that erases them?

With that said, that is probably the least percentage reason as to why people use it. The greatest being for sending half naked photos to strangers.

Snapchat removes the hesitation about what you are sending. People don't worry about picture quality, etc. It's a temporary message. It really is about the content.

Or lack thereof.

Yes. By definition most people's day to day lives are average and not particularly special.

I find conversations on snapchat annoy me in the same way as conversations with a needy attention seeking girlfriend.

All the person wants is confirmation of existence, and most of the time they are not actually interested in a real conversation.

One wonders why you're even bothering to complain. You realize that fashion, entertainment, movies, video gaming, female modeling, male modeling, and so on probably collectively make up more than $1 trillion of the world economy?

I think on the contrary, it is a more honest conversation. Because it is temporary, people share what is currently happening in their life. It may be boring or of little importance, but they share anyway. Sometimes it is because they want attention, but for others they are just staying connected. I would bet that most of them consume other peoples' content just as much as creating content themselves.

This is a refrain on Hacker News since I started coming here for insights since 2008.

That because you, personally, don't understand why you would do such a thing therefore said thing is invalidated.

It's lazy.

Additionally taking that point of view outs you.

Much like how when I was 16-23 and creating things on the internet when there was only 100MM users and people were wondering why anyone would want to spend all that time on the computer.

Or ever make a webpage.

Or put their information online.

Or meet people you've only emailed.

Or use a credit card to buy things.

All in all, the answer is always: there are 7 billion of us out here, the world doesn't revolve around you, grow up.

It's clear from your comment history that you're very confrontational, and cocksure. So I'll keep this brief, and end it here. This is a discussion, and questions were asked. Take your own "advice".

Questions were not asked. Glenn Beck style "condemning statement that happens to have a ? at the end of it" were made.

> I don't understand why use cases 1 and 2 wouldn't just send a text message picture. Why would you bother with a 3rd party app that erases them?

Snapchat has more features than sending a simple text. I still use text message pictures when I just want to send a picture. Snapchat lets you caption and draw on photos, which is a big draw. The erasing part of it is a feature too, and not just for nude pics. For example, sometimes I send off color humor to my friends and knowing that the joke's going to go away in 5 seconds makes me less hesitant to send. I don't think my friends themselves are going to screenshot the pics and try to disparage me, but I would feel uncomfortable if I were to email something to them that may accidentally be seen by an SO or parent.

If you're that concerned/uncomfortable about what you're sending then don't send it in the first place. Once it's on the internet, it's there forever. Does Snapchat not have the feature now to save incoming messages for a price?

I'll grant you the feature of drawing on pictures though.

Here's a question. Why do we need to record everything we do digitally? It's not like we record our conversations when people hang out in person.

I'd argue it's stupid that we archive and collect every meaningless conversation we have.

Well, if I take the example from above regarding two people in a relationship. It IS nice, in my experience, to have a running dialogue with pictures available from our relationship. There are plenty of great moments I've received that I would prefer not to just disappear.

> There are plenty of great moments I've received that I would prefer not to just disappear.

Between my SO and I, for stuff that's more memorable and may want to be saved, we'll use email, but for stuff like "look at this weird sign I saw downtown", we'll use Snapchat. An app is all about its use cases.

That's fair, we just use text message, and keep it in one place. Bouncing between different apps for essentially the same thing isn't something I feel like spending time doing.

I also agree with the sibling post on this one, but another line of reasoning is that when texting pictures or other forms of sending, the default option is that the photo is saved. When using snapchat it's the opposite. Screenshotting allows you to keep it if you want, you can replay it if you missed it, but if it's not anything exceedingly special or worth keeping, it is discarded. In todays world I find myself with far more data that I can keep organized, and a lot of it is not of any particular value.

Another way of phrasing that argument is that if you look through my snapchat screenshot folder vs the received images from my SO, the snapchat screenshot has a higher density of content worth keeping.

I guess I just hold photos I want to keep at a higher value than a screenshot of an already poorly compressed / altered photo. Whatever works for you!

> If you're that concerned/uncomfortable about what you're sending then don't send it in the first place

I'm not concerned or uncomfortable with the message itself; my concern is that the message goes exclusively to its intended audience. An email or text message can sit around and eventually be viewed on accident or by someone nosy. At least with Snapchat, I have a level of assurance that this possibility is minimized.

That's an unnecessarily black and white perspective. In reality it's "once it's on the internet, it's possibly there forever" and snapchat is a step in the "it wont be" direction. It's entirely possible for someone to be willing to to take that risk.

Hell, most of us do it in real life. I say plenty of things I wouldn't necessarily want provided to my mother or employer, and small audio recording devices are cheap. I trust my friends and partners to not save and share unflattering snaps the exact same way I trust them to not record our real life conversations.

If you're planning to run for President some time in the future, maybe it's worth it to always act as if the public is watching. I think the rest of us are fine.

Text message pictures are IME incredibly unreliable and you may be charged for them. And god help you if you accidentally send one internationally; who knows what it might cost?

So like international data costs over Snapchat?

What? I mean, if YOU are overseas and send a Snapchat, sure. But it's no different from any other data. Sending a MMS picture or video to someone else who is overseas, could be expensive. Snapchat won't incur any fees that all other data wouldn't, such as uploading the picture to Facebook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com