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Comment by stormbeta | Hacker News Reader

>You can post pretty shamelessly the little things you're up to all day to your story, knowing it will be gone in 24 hours, keeping your feed really clean.

This is the part I still don't get. Why would I want to constantly spam my friends with trivial photos of my daily life? Disappearing spam is still spam.

I'm 28, nobody I know uses snapchat/instagram/whatever so I haven't actually used it. If it's something I actually want to share, I don't care if it's gone in 24 hours and it's dead simple to just message them directly.

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Thirty something here. The stories aren't spam since they don't trigger notifications and you have to intentionally click on them to watch. When i'm not feeling social I ignore snapchat, when i am, i know i can check in and see what my friends are doing.

Why don't you ask them if you want to know what they are doing?

I still don't get it.

One word: friction.

pictures and videos are more expressive than words

I didn't understand that statement, could you perhaps draw an explanatory diagram for me?

Thank you, Gilfoyle.

I'm with you though.

I am amazed this sentiment keeps popping up over and over in this thread. Asking them is exactly the kind of synchronous, flow-breaking communication that programmers should be keenly aware of. People are naturally discovering that polling is worse than event driven notifications, and it's great to watch.

There are plenty of arguments to make in favor of synchronous, face-to-face etc communication, about the loss of privacy when you broadcast everything you do, about the lack of personal engagement in this kind of communication, and so on. I can see making a judgement call whether to participate in this kind of communication, because there are plenty of drawbacks and negatives.

However, it's obvious to me why people are willingly switching some(most?) of their communication to it. Just as we learned to use asynchronous I/O in place of synchronous, we started using multicast messages and event-driven notifications instead of polling over all your friend-handles "hey what did you do today". It seems like a natural progression to me.

Great way to put it so that a technologist can understand. A lot of my best friends came from passive serendipitous interactions on FB that built into the kind strong and familiar enough to turn into "synchronous" interactions.

I think this may be largely an introvert vs. extrovert type distinction. I'm with you - I don't see the point. Twitter is the social network I've come closest to enjoy using, because of the loose expectations around it. I share stuff I find interesting on occasion, but very rarely anything about myself.

In terms of "social" I see it as a mostly-write type environment - I don't sweat that I ignore 90% of what the people I follow write, and I mostly follow people for updates/news/commentary rather than social contact.

But then I'm very aware that I'm very introverted. I like social contact in moderation, but it exhausts me, and every now and again I just get "social burnout" and turns into a total recluse for months on end.

What doesn't work for me about Snapchat is primarily that it is video. Video to me is "high touch" - it takes much more energy than writing a tweet, and similarly watching a video requires magnitudes more attention than rapidly scanning past a bunch of tweets.

I'm still lost. Maybe I just have radically different friends than everyone else here, but if I really have some pressing need to know what they're doing on a given day, I just ask them. Nobody cares about the day-to-day minutia, and if it was interesting, stuff like FB or regular messages work just fine.

Like most social media apps, this just feels like a solution in search of a problem (except for sexting).

I think "solution in search of a problem" is a fine description, and not really a bad thing. Nobody says "I want a photo sharing app" and downloads Snapchat after doing some research. You get it because your friends have it, and you keep using it because you enjoy it. If your friends aren't using it, then you won't like it because there won't be anything to do.

Not trying to be mean here, but I'm having quite the time watching you try to grok Snapchat. To me your argument reads like "why would I send someone a text message when I can call them?" when text messaging was first becoming popular.

When you have more than a handful of friends that you're trying to keep in touch with, are you really going to ask every single one of them what they're up to each day? Snapchat solves this in a fun way.

> When you have more than a handful of friends that you're trying to keep in touch with, are you really going to ask every single one of them what they're up to each day?

Good god why would I care?

I imagine this difference in attitude accounts for some of the confusion over snapchat's purpose.

> Good god why would I care?

If you're not interested in what your friends are up to, why are you friends with them in the first place? Maybe they're really just acquaintances?

Like you said, maybe it's a difference in attitude. Still, I recommend you giving it a shot to get a better idea of what it is. I also thought it was dumb at first.

> > > When you have more than a handful of friends that you're trying to keep in touch with, are you really going to ask every single one of them what they're up to each day?

> > Good god why would I care?

> If you're not interested in what your friends are up to, why are you friends with them in the first place? Maybe they're really just acquaintances?

if I would care about what every single friend of mine is doing each day, it would be difficult to live a life for myself.

But how can you validate your own existence, if you don't have other lives to compare it against?! ;)

I think the whole phenomenon is fascinating - people these days can't experience anything without photographing it, or updating their status about it. It's as if they need to prove that it really happened.

Humble brag/narcissism. One of the main ingredients to fuel social networks.

It's not that it doesn't exist in physical gatherings, it's just way more concentrated online because of convenience.

Compare sitting at the bus stop alone or with a friend. Which one is more enjoyable? If you prefer to be alone, then maybe you already have too much social interaction and need more alone time. If you prefer to have some kind of personal connection with another human even when there's no obvious practical value in the content of what you're communicating, then I think that's what snapchat provides.

Most people crave this human interaction every day.

> Compare sitting at the bus stop alone or with a friend. Which one is more enjoyable?

The latter. But there's a big gap between "If you prefer to have some kind of personal connection with another human" and "are you really going to ask every single one of [your 20 friends] what they're up to each day?".

You don't have to care about what every single friend of yours is doing every single day.

I'm sure I don't have the typical use case, but as an expat, I have friends spread out all over the world. Usually I don't see anything from them on Snapchat, but when they're going on a hike somewhere beautiful, attending an event, or having fun otherwise, I get to see it and thereby "keep in touch". I get to see what my little cousins are doing at home as they grow up (which is quite annoyingly "snap back for a rate" or some nonsense I won't pretend to understand), and even see what their mother is cooking for dinner when she shares that.

If you don't like it, don't use it. But don't be fooled into thinking it's just pictures of lunch from people at their 9-5 office jobs. Even many of us with 9-5 jobs have something interesting to share, at least on an afternoon or weekend.

Sometimes it's just a nice past time as well. Oh i'm sat waiting for the train, might as well see what everyone is up to today/last night.

Quite an interesting concept of friends you have there.

I have friends I care about, but I don't need to know what they are up to every day any more than they need to know about me, let alone every hour of every day.

> this just feels like a solution in search of a problem (except for sexting)

ahhh the old-millenial-stuck-in-2013 version of snapchat

Follow @ArsenicTV, while your finance buddies snap you insider merger and acquisition tips on stocks, and then tell me you "don't get Snapchat"

get w/ it

You are right to be confused. "Social sharing" came out of Snapchat marketing department when it became obvious you couldn't build a long-term business on a product that was synonymous with sexting.

Snapchat's core is still revolving around soft erotic eye candy that's developed into a cottage industry at this point http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-arsenictv-snapchat-in... Now that they've got your attention there, they are bringing in media partners like BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly and celebrities http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-snapchat-built-a-... to fill up your feed with a stream of bite-size updates.

Peer-to-peer ephemeral messaging is no longer emphasized in the app, they are building a media destination to divert eyeballs away from TV, YouTube, Vine, Facebook or Twitter, in that rough order. Referring to ephemeral social messaging at this point as akin to bringing up Yahoo! as a directory of web links.

That's probably not true. When you're just socializing in real life, you're probably sharing all kinds of meaningless "updates" about yourself. Statements, jokes, expressions, etc that aren't important individually, nobody wants to keep records of and you don't care if they get missed. You wouldn't ask your friends to tell you those things because they're so trivial, but they're still how people enjoy each other's company. That's a lot of what friends do when they're together - share minutia. To me, Snapchat is kind of like that but on the internet.

Snapchat is just another fad in the undying trend of reinventing email "in new and exciting ways."

don't you mean reinventing speech - the original form of communication?

Ahh, so maybe the appeal is its non-spamness? In that it doesn't clog up any kind of inbox?

They are spam if I have to deal with them at all. Even skipping over things I'm not interested in is spam to me. It got so bad on FB I installed FB Purity. I have about 15 filters in there. Two to filter out one of my friend's posts who posts a pictures of every single meal every single day. I don't want to unfriend him nor unfollow him but his meal posts are spam to me.

How would this be any different in Snapchat? I'd still have all these meal spam pics to skip over.

Exactly. The "Fear Of Missing Something Important" explained in https://medium.com/swlh/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds...

But...why?

Why do you want people to see what you ate?

Is everyone here living more interesting lives than me? I mean, my stories will be just the same old lunch and dinner pics, working before a computer, commuting to and from work...

Some people are.

Or not everybody shares their everyday activities, just when something worth sharing actually occurs

> Why do you want people to see what you ate?

Oh man. So at the after party of a recent wedding, the Bride had to post a picture of her nachos.

If you make something interesting, I might want to get the recipe off you and try it myself, or ask if you'd like to make it for the next social thing I host.

If you go somewhere I haven't been to (or it's a place I go to often but never tried what you got) and it looks like something I'd be interested in trying, I'll ask about your experience and maybe go sometime (or set up a dinner event there).

There's been a few times that this has been the case, for me.

> Why would I want to constantly spam my friends with trivial photos of my daily life? Disappearing spam is still spam.

I think the difference here is that because the photos disappear after 24 hours, the expectation for quality is lowered. Also the fact that the photos are trivial is part of the attraction. There aren't as many expectations on Snapchat as on Twitter. Sometimes it's just nice to see your friends' face, and Snapchat is good for that.

I don't use SnapChat, but once you have children, your parents and siblings are interested in seeing the funny little day to day things your kids do. 5 seconds here and there of eating breakfast, getting dressed for the day, running around, etc. Twitter and Instagram don't really cover that use case well at all.

I use private photos/videos on Instagram to share those things with my family, but it's very clunky and would feel like spamming to send more than 2-3 curated photos per day. I gather that with SnapChat there is far less curation.

> I don't use SnapChat, but once you have children, your parents and siblings are interested in seeing the funny little day to day things your kids do.

No they aren't interested. They are just too nice to tell you to stop spamming them.

Not sure why you've responded in such a presumptive and negative way. I find it rude. Maybe your family isn't close and it's not something you can identify with?

My immediate family are always interested. I don't bombard extended family or friends though many still voluntarily follow feeds dedicated to the children.

We use groupchat in WhatsApp. Two separate groups, one for each side of the family. Works ok but I can kinda begin to see the benefit of snapchat's ephemeral attitude even though I haven't tried it myself. However I don't se my wife's mother wanting to switch. She's retired and finds a great deal of joy of revisiting old movies of the kids. She would want to save the snaps anyways but I guess you can do that?

for me living ~30 hours flight from my nearest family, getting short snapchats of whatever things they're up-to, however trivial, makes them seem so much closer. And given that they're less likely to be 'staged' instagram/fb photos, it seems more real to me.

>> for me living ~30 hours flight from my nearest family,

Where in the world do you and your family live? I imagine you must be in Antarctica?

GP is probably including the time it takes to get to the airport, get through the baggage drop, security and boarding procedures, as well as get from the airport to their destination. It can easily add up if both they and their family live in places far from their respective airports, and we're talking intercontinental flight.

Probably, it takes me almost 30 hours to get from the UK to Australia if you could airport transfers and stopovers.

Yep, and add +4 to get to NZ and +2 being in "not London" in the UK for me.

Sometimes you just want to share a photo from your daily routine with your family to just let them know you are ok. So not so trivial. In this context why should I have to think about how relevant this stuff is hanging around 5 years from now.

Why would you think about whether it was relevant in 5 years? I've literally never cared or thought about that when sending those kinds of messages. It's just a basic picture, not sexting or something else potentially sensitive.

I don't understand why I should force everyone I know to install yet another random social media app when a regular message works just fine.

Ok, we understand that you don't get it but what's with the tone where you're basically disputing Snapchat's success? This is a popular way of communicating these days. Deal with it. Snapchat is the only social media I've ever shared anything on. For me it's revolutionary.

Where do you live?

Colorado.

Crazy. I'm two years younger than you and everybody I know uses Snapchat.

> This is the part I still don't get. Why would I want to constantly spam my friends with trivial photos of my daily life?

That is the decease of our age. People really can't see the narcissism needed to keep all of these social networks going.

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