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Comment by vonklaus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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