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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

I thought a big factor for Snapchat was that it did not have Facebook users.

Teens and 20-somethings liked the fact that Snapchat was their smaller circle of real friends. Facebook has that goofy uncle, and coworkers from 5 jobs ago, and old classmates you don't really want to stay in touch with. Facebook has too many "weak ties".

Therefore, Facebook could clone every feature of Snapchat but it can't change the fact that it is still Facebook. The new features might keep Facebook users from switching to Snapchat but would it entice Snapchat users to switch to Facebook? Sure, people can use social networks for a myriad of reasons but Snapchat the network seems to be a dominant factor.

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When Instagram launched Stories, I noticed that most of my friends moved there. I rarely open Snapchat because it is almost empty, nothing is happening there. But apparently it stayed popular among high school students, so I guess it is different among different demographics - I'm 23 and most of my friends who switched are similar age.

Facebook is probably hoping that similar will happen with the main app.

That's interesting. I'm 24 and have a different experience. Among my close friends, none use Instagram to the point that I feel the need to. Snapchat is fairly popular. In the last couple months, my girlfriend and I both realized that Facebook was giving tons of stuff about people we don't care much about, and

It's definitely popular in high school. I know a police officer who works in a high school. Snapchat is a huge pain point for them. Someone takes a screenshot of a nude their girlfriend sent and passes it along to friends 6 or 12 months later after they broke up and suddenly 45 people have child porn on their phones. One person took a picture of a friend and in the background they noticed a student upskirting a girl.

Those things happened before Snapchat, too.. unfortunately it's an expected part of high school culture in the US.

Just the US?

> The new features might keep Facebook users from switching to Snapchat but would it entice Snapchat users to switch to Facebook?

I think the former is at least as important as the latter. Facebook has an order of magnitude more users than Snapchat. FB needs to keep their platform feeling modern and interesting so existing users don't feel the need to leave for greener pastures.

The walled garden once again, I wonder how Steve Case feels about all this.

> Teens and 20-somethings liked the fact that Snapchat was their real friends. Facebook has that goofy uncle, and coworkers from 5 jobs ago, and old classmates you don't really want to stay in touch with. Facebook has too many "weak ties".

You can choose who you share your stories with on Facebook.

But Facebook doesn't need to get _all_ Snapchat users to switch. It only needs a tiny percentage of all those users and will severely damage Snapchat (by slowing down its growth). See this article for a good argument: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-copy-snapchat-2017-3

>You can choose who you share your stories with on Facebook.

Sure, I get that from a pure functional perspective. However, I'm talking about psychology of app usage.

Consider an example of an iPhone home screen.[1] The user sees the Snapchat icon and a Facebook icon next to each other. I believe that many people (millions) will mentally compartmentalize the yellow ghost as "my real friends" and the blue "f" as "every random acquaintance that ever sent me a friend request and I never said no because of etiquette."

Usage of each icon evolved to become its own "world" so to speak. Sure, one could theoretically create sub-worlds inside of Facebook but a customized "real friends of Facebook inside of Facebook" seems to be more work than just pushing the button with the yellow ghost. Staying inside the Snapchat world also minimizes accidentally sending the wrong Facebook-story to the wrong Facebook-friend.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/CV91LsE.png

Completely agree with this, and so do all the kids at school apparently. Since release, the only content I see on Messenger Stories is shitty memes from people I already hid from my feed (the same reason I don't use Facebook is shitty memes). Instagram stories has some semi interesting content, but all the good FOMO inducing content is usually on Snap and there might b research on this as well (something like the effect of FOMO on millennial social media addiction).

Haha, the only Facebook Messenger story I saw was someone's Snapchat code.

FOMO seems to be a huge aspect of the draw. You can see it in teen social media usage, online gaming, etc.

> You can choose who you share your stories with on Facebook. This is very unintuitive though. It is very easy to make a mistake, like sending a photo to multiple people create a group of them instead of sending them separately. Facebook is doing everything in its power to make your posts public. If they had some kind easy to use circles, that would be best.

right, and I'm guessing their new feature will also do everything it can to make you share your stories as widely as possible, which means that once again they are not going to be luring in the snapchat demographic

I never understood why people are so averse to unfriending people they don't talk to on Facebook. I'm down to few dozen "friends" on facebook because every couple months I go through the list and delete everyone I haven't spoken with or who is not relevant to my interests anymore. Also - no family friends, that's like rule number one.

Every place has a culture, which has rules and expectations that don't depend on your own personal opinions. I would agree with GP that the culture of Facebook says that unfriending someone means something negative towards them.

Sure, it is negative, but if you didnt want to be friends with them (not even virtually), why would you be so crushed up about their feelings?

Because I would like to be an acquaintance, but facebook doesn't have that option. Crushing feelings of friendly acquaintances who didn't do anything wrong doesn't seem like a nice thing to do.

> Because I would like to be an acquaintance, but facebook doesn't have that option

It literally does have that option - go to their profile, click the "friend" dropdown, change it from "friend" to "acquaintance", see that they stop showing up in your feed :)

http://www.bewebsmart.com/social-media/facebook/use-the-acqu...

Unfriending someone on Facebook has negative connotations (at least to me and those I know). I take the alternate approach of adding them to the default "acquaintances" list, and share accordingly. I also unfollow a large percentage of my friends so my newsfeed isn't polluted. The tools are there they just take some effort to get in the right place.

> I also unfollow a large percentage of my friends so my newsfeed isn't polluted.

How does that work out for you? I could never get Facebook to give me a usable news feed. I unfollow friends, pages, like new pages, intentionally scroll through new pages and like random things in order to get its posts on my newsfeed, adding people as my "close friends", blocking random pages that are on my newsfeed for bullshit reasons ("John Doe and 2 other friends like this post") and I could still never get anything even remotely useful, neither by adding the data, nor by reducing the number of data.

The latest pitfall I'm having is "a video that you may like". It started appearing like less than seven days ago, and in every single example, it's just some bullshit video from a page that I have never liked, but have interacted with in the past once or twice.

My Newsfeed quality is pretty good I think, but I'm not doing anything that you aren't already. I did spend a lot of time hiding specific pages that friends would share (e.g. "Occupy Democrats", other partisan political things, anything ending in "Memes") - you click the little arrow, then Hide Post, then Hide All From $PAGE. I also added people I really care about to "Show First" in News feed preferences, which is different than the Close Friends list.

A large percentage of my feed is from pages for video games and tech companies/software. It's possible my interests align better with how they select stories for my feed than yours?

I totally agree. There are enough "open" social networks like Twitter and Instagram that are public by default, the point of being mutually authenticated friends on facebook only seems useful if you interact with that person in real life (or did at one time). Otherwise why not just make Facebook public by default like the others?

Facebook is pulling Zynga here. Facebook is a cluttered mess. I gave up on them 3 years back when i was getting updates from friends of my friends.

Facebook lets you tailor messages to a subset of your friends, but Facebook's method difficult and unintuitive. Google+ did a great job at this with circles, unfortunately none of the people I know actually started using it.

How long would it take until snapchat becomes the same?

You are right, it's exactly a network effect in that Fb wants to keep existing user interested.

Exactly. Kids don't want to use Facebook. That's the end of the conversation. Facebook has a PR problem that they literally will never be able to shake.

Facebook has become the Blackboard of the internet; kids will use because it's a quick way to talk to their college friends and coordinate events and shit and that's it.

So true. I was beginning to enjoy doing Stories in the Messenger app.

that's true but it limits the growth potential and reach. Let Snapchat take a good portion of the teen market, while FB goes after everyone else.

I think Snapchat is pretty popular with people in their 20s as well. Instagram with people in their 30s. The only "young" people I see on Facebook are new mothers who want to share pictures of their kids with older relatives.

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