Why I’m leaving Snapchat and so are all your friends | Hacker News Reader

Why I’m leaving Snapchat and so are all your friends

medium.com

29 pointstaigeair9 comments

> Snapchat is the darling of technology: for years, we’ve fawned over the company for being innovative, using daring interfaces and out of the ordinary tactics to get people to pay it.

We have? I've always thought it was a pretty basic photo messaging app that initially rose to popularity due to disappearing nudes and has since rode that wave with vapid filters.

I use it to keep friends and family updated on interesting things I'm doing. It fills the niche of sharing interesting stuff in my life that Facebook used to fill.

But you can put moustaches on your pets!

Is this a personal opinion or a analysis of the business? As personal opinion, fine, whatever, it isn't really for me either.

But as an analysis of the business, this seems very weak. It doesn't matter whether you think their filters are vapid or what you think of the disappearing nudes angle. What matters is that they have released a number of new things that people (who are more social than me) have found entertaining. That's what it takes to be successful in entertainment: keep releasing things that your target audience finds entertaining. Their best innovation was to realize that they're in the entertainment industry and that they should behave accordingly.

My own experience tallies with this quite closely. I think we passed peak Snapchat last year, and that Snap knows it, hence the IPO.

Which is depressing if you think about it, because it means Facebook's strategy of "buy them, and if they won't sell, clone them and crush them" is working really well. That's not how I want the world to work, but that's the truth.

Just wondering, how would you prefer the world to work? I imagine the alternative is Snapchat gets some sort of patent and nobody can make an app with expiring photos?

So a badly engineered app that is a UX nightmare and has a general discoverability problem seems to be losing to a high quality app that has huge network effects backing it and that took the only USP Snapchat had (disappearing pics) and implemented it in a much better manner.

And somehow this is a bad thing because hating on FB is fashionable in these parts.

I recently introduced two friends to Signal (because they couldn't get me on Snapchat). Later I caught one party sending a "snap" to the other and asked why not use Signal instead, and the reply was something about ease of use.

It turns out, sending a one-off picture with Signal is one click less than Snapchat. Also, normal people don't care about privacy.

so... What's next?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com