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Comment by dfrey | Hacker News Reader

snapchat baffles me. It's just another instant messaging platform except that they came up with the idea of messages that delete themselves after a time period. The problem is that this killer feature is easily subverted by taking a picture of your screen. So basically, they have provided an instant messaging platform with one extra useless feature.

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I use it regularly with a lot of my friends and it's one of my favorite apps. Here's my take: The ease of sending and ephemeral nature significantly lower the barrier for what you'd consider shareable. Imagine you were walking down the street with a friend and saw something that gave you a casual chuckle. Something mildly interesting. If you were in person you might point that out to your friend, promptly forget about it, and carry on with your day. If you are by yourself, it probably isn't interesting enough to save a picture to your phone and send it via text message where the default is the image is immortalized in your photo library and text history until you delete it. Snapchat makes it so quick and easy that those little moments are now almost as easy to share as pointing to your friend if you had been walking together.

I agree that the innovations are not major, but each little nuanced feature in combination makes it so that people share the little moments in life and you suddenly have a small window into the daily lives of your close circle.

EDIT: I should mention that I have no opinions on its viability as a business. Just commenting why I enjoy using it.

More to the point, this "killer feature" is easily cloned by a competitor and shows that the product creates no competitive barriers. Coupled with the fact that the cloner has a much better idea of their users and can target ads much more successfully, this creates a long road for $SNAP.

> More to the point, this "killer feature" is easily cloned by a competitor

This doesn't really agree with

> The problem is that this killer feature is easily subverted

Let's let one company implement the feature before we decide it will be easy for competitors to implement it too.

WhatsApp, Instagram and FB all have it now. TBH I only see widespread use of it on Instagram, but everyone around me seems to have stopped giving a crap about Snapchat since.

You missed my point. Do WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook Messenger have working ephemeral messages? Or do they have marketing that claims they have ephemeral messages?

The feature is fundamentally impossible in exactly the same way as DRM, because it is DRM. You're sending someone a bunch of data and saying "now, you promise not to look at this, right? Except once."

As someone who works on Instagram Direct, I can assure you we have ephemeral messaging.

How do you stop people from recording their messages?

Snapchat takes two approaches (that I know of): First, they don't stop it, but the messager is supposed to be notified when it happens. They know this doesn't work and can't work, though; avoiding screenshot detection isn't even considered a reportable bug. (see https://hackerone.com/snapchat )

Second, they have a legal barrier, in that using a third-party client to communicate over Snapchat violates their terms of service.

Notably, neither of those makes the messages any more ephemeral. This makes sense, because stopping people from recording messages that you send them is not an achievable goal. Barring some sort of supernatural influence, it's no more achievable for Instagram than it is for Snapchat.

  More to the point, this "killer feature" is easily cloned by a competitor

... which is why I was skeptical of Groupon's value from the outset.

And much has been written of that, and that's exactly the same way I feel about Uber.

(And every time I mention that about Uber on HN, people point out that they can get Uber in any city in the world, so why would anyone who never travels use anything else?)

Too be fair, a big thing with all these social apps is network effect.

Snap had first mover advantage, which is nothing to scoff at.

I think it's just a consequence of a popular idea at the right time. And 2 killer features, self deleting shares(no percieved history) and it being super easy to select who you do/don't want to share with. Sort of an anti Facebook/public history/complicated privacy settings backlash spurred by a younger generation who grew up with Facebook always existing.

Quicken Loans came out with a service called "Rocket Mortgage" several years ago and I thought, "who wants to enter the likely largest financial commitment of their lives at the click of a button?" Turns out, lots of people... simplicity sells.

Anyways I think eventially once one of these big data hording companies goes under to the point of simply selling all their user data to the public in form of a paid search engine, and public/private key encryption is super simple and mainstream, things will change. I'd bet it might just be when Snapchat goes under;-)

If you're messaging someone to be fun or flirty, or just as causal friends, do you really want to see the random dumb things you said 6 months ago or 3 years ago on Facebook Messenger?

Every messaging app is essentially like one long email thread, whereas Snapchat provides real freedom to be spurious and in the moment without future embarrassment.

And anyone can secretly record anyone at any time in any interaction. That doesn't stop people from communicating freely.

Snapchat is like Instagram in the sense that it helps keep you updated on what's going on in your social circle, except it's on a daily basis with an extra dose of "comical" photo filters. It's more of a photo sharing platform than instant messaging.

The other, probably more important, innovation was that you have to take the picture at the same time as you send it - no loading from the camera roll.

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