Snap's share price sinks, trades just above IPO price

Instagram is not a "serious" photo app. It's strictly for fun. if you want to shoot serious pictures, you use a purpose built app, or heck, even the built-in app on your phone. Making the UI a hide-and-seek game, or at least abandoning traditional UI design for something that puts form over function makes sense in that context.

There's an actual game on Steam called "Please, don't touch anything" where this kind of random discovery is the whole point.

Not sure I'd prejudicially dismiss it as "millennial smugness" though.

Mix one part neglect and abuse with one part intense pleasure from finally getting what you were looking for. Enjoy your Stockholm Syndrome cocktail, rinse and repeat.

Old people wonder 'WTF is this Snapchat?', they download the app, dick around with it for a few minutes and dismiss it as incomprehensible. It's a feature, not a bug.

When I say badly built I refer to how slow it runs, how much battery it consumes (hint, a lot), the fact that until recently when Google literally forced them to do it properly, the app took pictures by saving a screenshot of the viewfinder.

Making Snapchat easy to use by parents would be a disaster for them, people are not engaging with content and posting to Facebook because their grandmother uses it and would see it.

I think that a lot of the weird design choices in Snapchat are intentional and very well thought out.

I have no problem at all with Snapchat's UI and can't understand why "old" people complain about it so much. did I know how to do everything at first? no, but it was easy, just swipe left/right/up/down and tap a few places. just because it doesn't follow the conventional ui/ux paradigm doesn't make it confusing or hard, just different (and these days, not that different, since a lot of other apps are copying snap's gestures)

the issue I do have with snapchat is that I'd like to see more interesting snaps and people to follow (who are not my friends) and the app doesn't help me with that. I'm basically limited to a few people who don't snap that much and I hardly use the chat function. I think this is where instagram one ups snapchat (the fact that ig's main content isn't ephemeral kinda helps).

I'm waiting to see what Snap comes up with (they have to come up with something, otherwise they'll be doomed).

Adults right before they start earning and kids who it's illegal to advertise to in many jurisdictions.

I think the UX barrier is a post-hoc generalization. Of all places, people on HN would agree that we tolerate (and often even embrace) much worse UXs if we are sold on the functionality. The git CLI is a mess, but it's far too powerful and functional a VCS to just ignore, for example.

Sure, if the UX were nice, everyone would want to try Snapchat on their own, but there's a good chance you are not on the app because your friend group is not active on it, OR you don't care as much about the stuff they post on it. After all, it's social app.

But realistically... you know non-wealthy stockholders(ie employees) want to cash in, so you buy into the retail sell-off on lockup day, bid it up 3 points, then close when you see the other retail buyers chasing the rally. Closing several thousand long shares should be sufficient to run their stops, depress the price, and present you with another buying opportunity at or near your original entry price.

All that said.. guessing what will happen with the market is how you lose your money, and fail at day trading before you ever got started.

That is illegal and most certainly not happening. Those shares aren't even available to short in fact. Yes, naked shorting does take place and shouldn't but that's nothing to do with this.

This is fake news.

this isn't me saying "Now's the time everybody! Pour your entire retirement fund into SNAP before it's too late!" it's an admonishment for the short-sellers sucking in the inevitable negative media headlines around any hot IPO as fact.

Selling something vs nothing is a good metric to think about, but "advertising" is certainly not nothing. In fact, it's a multi-billion $ industry. It just so happens to be dominated by Google and FB currently, who are both "fundamentally" selling something real.

I think one could've argued at the time that Apple wasn't worth something because they were the struggling vertically integrated supplier of consumer based computers in a sea of horizontally integrated providers. It wasn't until they got more of a foothold everybody started seeing the benefits of software made to run on a single type of device.

Intermediaries have increasingly become devalued over time as digitization has meant there's less and less of a need for middle-men. Hence why Amazon's surge has come on the heels of providing Entertainment and Cloud services, something intermediaries in their space never did before.

Facebook yeah I suppose, the fact that they have margins almost no other company could dream of kind of rationalizes it to a strong degree though. All in all, I see where you're coming from.

Nike yes I see where you're coming from.

Disclaimer me posting that comment wasn't suppose to be a riot act that Snap's going to be the next $400+ billion dollar company, I'm as skeptical as most about the future prospects. However, I'd argue against saying they produce nothing. The fact that they are anti to the leading social media provider (of sorts) gives them a production point. As demonstrated in their reports, their user's incessant check in's on the app despite any Facebook-esque notification stream to keep them coming back is pretty envious (in my opinion).

Whoever that "someone" is, probably isn't as experienced in the markets as you think.

So lets say you're Fidelity, and you've got a billion dollar fund, you take 10 million out of that, commit it to the IPO and sell it when the stock goes up 20%. You now have 12 million to put back into your fund and you've added 2 basis points to the "return" for your fund (shares are now worth 1.002 B$.)

The trick though is that you are not really "investing in SNAP" so much as you're taking advantage of a pricing advantage of a highly anticipated offering.

[1] https://www.last10k.com/sec-filings/snap/0001564590-17-01035...

They made it very easy to order online, and I thought the initial rollout with the vending machines was a good way to build hype.

I'm honestly surprised SnapChat doesn't let you purchase Spectacles in-app, so there must be more to the story.

That's the beauty of their roll out. Keeping it out of the hand of SF techies during launch helped create a cool brand for these in a mainstream audience. Google Glass' association w geeks helped cement their failure in the broader market.

Snap is a volatile play: there's a high chance, maybe bigger than 50%, that it never becomes profitable, as they warn, and there's some small chance it becomes extremely profitable. The real question is, what's the net present expected value?

They don't. But every amateur with zero experience does.