The man who helped Facebook beat Snapchat | Hacker News Reader

The man who helped Facebook beat Snapchat

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88 pointsdanso80 comments

The interesting flipside to the copycat issue is that Snapchat intentionally did not copy Instagram. And that was probably a mistake.

Spiegel was explicitly against the concept of "accumulative" profiles.[1] The accumulative feature they rolled out last year was Memories, a private gallery that only the user could see and show to people in person. And he was explicitly against making it easy to add tons of friends on Snapchat. He wanted it to be about your "seven most important people."[2]

Well, turns out people do in fact like their Instagram accumulative profiles to store and share highlights with their followers. And it turns out people like getting engagement and adulation from a broader network of followers.

So, as much as I dislike the crass copying that Instagram/Weil did and his attempt to pass it off as just a "format" -- that's bullshit, they copied vast aspects of Snapchat stories and messaging.. calling it a "format" is naked intellectual dishonesty. I noticed Weil back in the Twitter days and this intellectual dishonesty makes me respect him less.

But Snapchat also did not make the right strategic product decisions here. Spiegel, to his credit, went with a bold vision and strategic analysis about what people want. Turns out it was just wrong with respect to how people want to engage with and present their experiences to a broader set of friends.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykGXIQAHLnA

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/technology/snapchat-ipo-v...

I sometimes use snapchat, I never use instagram. There's nothing wrong with occupying a niche.

Except for when you go public and that "niche" isn't big enough to drive the returns public investors want. There seems to be many social media companies that should take the non-profit and open source route that Mozilla took. Twitter feels like a prime candidate, they provide an extraordinary useful service that might be impossible to monetize without losing some of the utiliy.

Here is the thing. It doesn't matter. Snap shares have no voting rights, he can completely ignore wall street except for how the stock price affects talent acquisition/retention. Going non profit would have an even worse effect on talent acquisition / retention so that argument is moot.

I think Snap is in deep trouble but I have no problem with how they handled their IPO. They got a huge influx of cash and had to give up basically nothing for it. That cash is why they have a shot the next 4 years. The market dynamics were never in their favor but they really did make the most of it.

I use both here and have some friends using both. Different purposes, though. We post an occasional staged "trophy" pic on Instagram and get polite, complementary comments and likes and follows from places like restaurants we visited. It's not intimate or close at all, it's more like bragging.

Snapchat is very different, however. Every day has dozens of conversations with people or groups full of silliness and poking fun. It's like being with your friends in person. I would never post a Snap of myself dancing with a hotdog, or a love portrait with one on my House of Curry shots on Instagram, or have a competition with someone posting our grocery receipts trying for a certain number, or send a cute good night sticker, but it's all normal in Snapchat.

If it gets a laugh and some happy communication out of your friends it feels worth it in a way Instagram doesn't.

Disclaimer: I work for Snap, but the views and opinions offered here do not necessarily represent those of any past, current, or future institution and/or employer :)

Yup, i'm 24 and my experience is exactly the same. All the jokes or whatever embarrassing pictures or politically incorrect jokes my group of friends have are on snapchat or group chat in messenger. Instagram is mainly for decent pictures.

Unless you want to IPO and get huge market share. Niches are fine but when you raise major VC and go public, generally speaking they are not.

I'd rewrite the title: "Man who helped Facebook shamelessly copy Snapchat's best features without giving any credit"

Its a game -- everyone is aware of the rules, so lets not get too emotional.

Mind, the title is pretty emotionally charged. I suppose a title like "Large company uses size to crowd out smaller company" isn't as catchy.

How should credit be paid for copying such features? Through patents and licensing fees?

Patent those features or be left crying into your beer.

There is nothing inherently righteous or honorable about allowing another company to lay exclusive claim to features. That "shameless copying" is an example of competition, and it's what turns the wheels of capitalism.

What would you have Facebook do? "Well, darn. I guess we can't implement those features, Snapchat beat us to it! Time to just lay over and let them churn our users." This is not how any rational company works, and every major tech company has copied others many times.

>an example of competition

Not when you are leveraging monopoly power to gain market share somewhere else. This kind of capitalism tends to degenerate.

They gave a massive buyout offer before copying. There was only one thing left to do after that.

If you're arguing that Facebook behaved rationally, then we aren't in disagreement. If you're arguing that Facebook acted in the public interest, then you're going to need a different argument.

how is the public interest harmed by letting facebook users send snaps?

The public interest is harmed by Facebook eliminating all competitors.

So you seem to be implying that ONE company having a feature is somehow better for public interest than TWO companies having that feature?

Or that it is better for public interest that people prop up companies with multi billion dollar valuations on the basis of trivially copy-able features?

If that were a complete accounting of the variables then yes, that is what I would be saying. That is not a complete accounting of the variables though.

It is harmful to the public interest to allow a company to use its monopoly status as leverage to monopolize other markets. Facebook is competing for image messaging in the same sense that Lance Armstrong was competing in the tour de france.

Monopoly is the degenerate case of capitalism, and this kind of behavior by monopolies is how the degeneracy reproduces.

Who in their right mind would argue that facebook is acting in the public interest?

Right. How about a story that says, "Person who failed to make Snapchat's features uncopyable?" Just as interesting!

The US does not have moral rights in IP, so you better conduct your business in a way that doesn't rely on their mere existence.

Would a nice thank you note be appropriate?

There is copying and then there is copying well.

Almost every companies copies in some form or fashion - you'd be hard pressed to find one that doesn't - but few really do it well. I would argue that Instagram did it very well and you can see it in the success. The product is well designed, extremely polished, is far more stable, is more engaging (for me), and more complete in my opinion.

I don't think your intended criticism has any value in the real world. It's a tired argument and deeply flawed.

I think the reverse argument is a stronger one. That is to say that SnapChat's core innovations that got them this far were closer to a commodity than is ideal for a business like theirs. This is something that SnapChat acknowledges in their own S1.

What I think investors didn't see or expect is: * The extent to which the SnapChat feature-set was a commodity in a world where several other similar friendship and interest graphs exist. * The speed and potency with which competitors like Facebook would attempt to compete. I think Facebook's strategy was far more successful than people were prepared for and that's reflected somewhat in the SnapChat stock price swings and analyst sentiment swings.

I agree; success was not inevitable. After FB failed to buy Snapchat, they attempted to copy it with their Pokes App, back in 2012: https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/faceb...

I don't believe copying was inevitable either. Snap's main appeal at that time -- disappearing content -- was seen as completely anathema to FB's practice data hoarding. And adding features of any sort risks alienating the current user base. I confess that as a casual Instagram user, and a non-Snapchat user, I'm completely lost with all the new features and end points to what was a straightforward photo app.

Actually, credit was given. FB's head of product publicly admitted to copying Snapchat's features.

Nail salon opens with same services as the million nail salons before it.

Big deal.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Did Snapchat credit those they copied their ideas from? Or is every part of Snapchat entirely novel??

I really dislike the feature of Instagram that imitates Snapchat. When a software tries to make more than one thing, it loses it's identity. I am surprised that people are still using it, but about the long run, nobody knows.

I saw a funny tweet that someone just wrote "A fear" than an image of Twitter print, of the mobile version, with small spheres on the top (like the ones suddenly appeared on Instagram), so I realized that it's not just me that think Instagram got worse with this feature. And the design solution they found, really annoys me. Now we have this on all Facebook products (WhatsApp and Facebook itself).

Talking about the software identity, I don't remember successful products that tries to do more than one thing. I think it's wrong, but it's apparently working, so I am observing and learning.

I'm on the flipside of this, I think my Instagram use is better as a result.

I shared the same friend (mostly) list between Snap and Instagram and with the introduction of stories my Snap use dropped to basically zero. Instagram is a one stop shop for the accumulative feed, stories, and video DMs. No need to switch apps.

That said, I didn't get a ton of direct messages on Snapchat, probably because I'm older and the kind of 1-1 communication I saw teens doing on Snap isn't as common for my age group, however that feature is there in IG.

I might be an outlier, though I don't think I am judging by the numbers.

On a more crass note, from the business perspective, Instagram is in a much better ad position than Snap because it's really easy to buy ad space. Not only that it's going to be easier to develop content for AR filters on Instagram because they have an actual developer pathway for that.

As far as I can tell, Snap highly curates all broadcast content and advertising, and there is no third party developer support.

Not sure why anyone wouldn't see how bad that is - if anything Snap should have learned from Twitter that third part devs are core to longevity.

I'm a pretty casual user of Instagram and I hate the disappearing stories. I've never posted one, and I don't like the time pressure to view them rather than catching up at my leisure. I've never used Snapchat.

Can you explain the appeal?

Lower stakes.

The idea is that it's a more natural, free flowing expression because it's a low bar of entry that has no memory. So in that sense it can be anything you want without you having to worry if it's going to be indelible.

It's nice to read about your point of view.

I am curious how many people actually feel this is cool that Facebook can simply copy everything Snapchat comes up with? I understand that this is the way of the world. Big fish eats smaller fish yada yada. But is it good in the long run? I don't know how to do this, and I understand any solution will probably be riddled to the core with loopholes. But I do feel like there should be some way to prevent this kind of monopolization. What do you all think from a long-term, idealistic perspective?

And ofc you need this story with some 30-sonething superstars self promoting hotshot CEO who is the capable of coming up with the solution of simply copying the competition.

Any solution is hard to enforce. Idealistically, the computer world has largely decided cross pollination, while sometimes painful for just the reason you describe, is better for all of us (I agree, and purposely chose not to patent technology that has been worth millions for me and my competitors over the last 17 years).

The law feels it is illegal - but we don't enforce laws meant to limit market power and they've been weakened (by no coincidence) over the years. Welcome to Feudal Capitalism.

How do you feel about patent law?

I think it's perfectly cool, yes. I'm not concerned in the slightest with monopolization from Facebook implementing Snapchat features. Good for them, that must have taken a massive amount of business and engineering coordination.

From an ethical perspective, I think the amount of truly unique ideas is actually very, very low, I think most ideas (including all the snapchat UI concepts) have been had by multiple people, so I do not think it makes sense to give people a monopoly on ideas since by doing so you are restricting others who may have even come up with the same idea. The amount of obvious patents vastly outnumbers the amount of non-obvious ones.

There is an argument that says that large companies are better at execution, and so will just reap the rewards of other people's ideas, but I think that big companies are actually bad at execution and they are currently benefiting far more from the current legal regime.

So, all in all, we should abolish all patent law.

Software has always been about copying features, since the very beginning of the industry. With a software product there is always only a short window of having something innovative before others add it to their same products.

To someone with knowledge of the law regarding this stuff - Would features like these be patentable?

It might be a good thing long term as snapchat is seen as a market leader. Facebook will react and copy features. But in time they will copy so many it will take them off their primary course of gathering more information for the user ad segment program.

Snapchat can offer things facebook can't like privacy and trust that will become increasely important if snapchat can change the conversation through features it will put facebook in a difficult position.

Instagrams revenues are increasing because Facebook advertisers unwittingly are having their ads run in Instragram. You have to opt-out. Found that out after blowing through and ad budget that got consumed more quickly because of Instragram.

Instagram users as a cohort are the worst audience for advertising. Low conversions, lots of impressions and just all around less profitable than the exact same ad on Facebook itself.

Even music acts that would seem to be a tailor made product for Instragram – still, in my anecdotal experience, a complete waste of money. Instagram the “thing” might be a fun product, but Instagram as a provider of cost-effective advertising, no way.

Ultimately this should hurt Facebook if advertisers are tracking ROI they may just stop campaigns and go into other channels entirely.

One would think, but I think big brands don’t care. They are after “awareness” and not actual conversions. It’s like TV, how does one measure the ROI on a national Coca Cola ad? (I actually don’t know.)

In that case the Instagram ads may be delivering some value!

What you seem to be saying is that Instagram is a good brand building platform over the longer-term vs platform to generate leads and transactions over the short term. Unless, there is a study to prove that I am not too sure. I usually find media agencies and platforms make this argument when they cannot justify the RoI of their platform in a direct and measurable sense. It is much like how Google tries to prove effectiveness of its display ads using a fuzzy metric called view-through impressions.

On the coke bit, coke actually does measure the RoI on its TV using a mix of brand track studies and marketing mix modelling. I know this because I have worked with agencies that Coca-Cola engages to do both and is really scientific and serious about it.

I have to say that as a consumer, Instagram Ads sway my opinion far more than and grab my attention far more than Ads on any other platform. I'm a heavy user, but it's also something about the format and the quality photography that just gets me.

The targeting is incredibly good too. I've discovered random brands on Instagram that I've bought clothing from which I never would have expected to do. I would never consider such a thing if I see the same kind of advertising on Facebook or Twitter for example.

Instagram is extremely trendy right now, possibly far more than in the past when it was smaller.

I'm surprised it took Instagram this long to copy Snapshot. This guy seems super impressive but adding a competitor's features to your product to increase market share seems like a pretty obvious move.

It might be that it's all a part of execution of the product. Google tries and fails with their social networking efforts and they are also doing the obvious move and they can't .

This is such a good point. Personally, I'd rather not copy to win but in business, it's easily possible to copy poorly and fail hard.

There's a saying in Hindi - you need brains to copy well.

Google had to shift an entire business model to attempt to do social.

Facebook just had to add features.

Most of this will come down to brand equity anyway. I have to assume there are people using Lyft over Uber because those people have negative associations with the Uber brand. Uber and Lyft both provide the same products, but people prefer one brand over another.

People prefer Gucci over Versace, North Face over Patagonia etc.

Inevitably, the same will be true for Facebook vs Snapchat. Snapchat will likely prevail in a way because the "brand" ecosystem, talent pool(pr, actors, producers etc.) are concentrated largely in Los Angeles due to the existing Hollywood system.

Proximity to the talent might not have much to do with it, but I imagine Snapchat has been developing those relationships for a while.

Looking at Linkedin, he's had a remarkable career. Wow. He's made it from Engineering lead at 28 to SVP and Head of product at 34.

At the time the DOJ began seriously looking into Microsoft about anti-trust abuses derived from their monopoly, there were still a vast number of medium to large software & tech companies that competed head on with Microsoft. That of course meant there were a large number of parties that could sign on to the aggrieved list against Microsoft.

As Facebook formally kills off Snapchat in the next few years, it's a curious problem of which companies will supply the ammunition to go after Facebook for anti-trust abuse. Said companies will be the biggest motivating factor for the US Government to act, their prompting will drive the case.

Given the scale we're talking about now (Facebook is already more profitable non-inflation adjusted than what Microsoft was at the height of its power; and they might double their profit in a few years up to $20 billion before any government action would come through). I would expect companies to begin lining up with their hands out. Twitter as one example, stands to easily land maybe $5 billion or more as compensation for being one of the few survivors of Facebook's social monopoly. Something that has changed a lot in the last 20 years, corporate fines & costs of negative legal outcomes have skyrocketed in practically every industry. Google's worsening EU disaster is just the latest example of that. Facebook will need tens of billions of dollars set aside for settling with governmental entities and competitors (even semi-dead competitors like MySpace - its owners will show up with their hands out for a settlement, and they'll definitely get some crumbs as Facebook will settle just to move on as the lawsuits stack high after the blood hits the water).

As the world witnesses Facebook intentionally kill off Snapchat by leveraging its monopoly in nearly every way it can, there are going to be few people remaining in the Facebook defender camp as the number of major social players in the US & EU markets drifts toward just a few small competitors left standing. Snapchat better have been worth it, as I can assure you that crushing Netscape wasn't worth what it cost Microsoft.

> Facebook is already more profitable non-inflation adjusted than what Microsoft was at the height of its power

As a nit, what's the point of using a non-inflation adjusted comparison? You wouldn't say have compared Facebook to Standard Oil :).

It turns out that 1998 to today is only a 50% change according to CPI [1] and MSFT had $4.5B in net income for FY 1998 [2]. So your point still stands given Facebook's massive ~$10B FY2016 net income [3].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm [2] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar98/fins.htm [3] https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

Ok, serious answer. I used the non-inflation adjustment specifically because while I recognized enough time had passed to cause a not-entirely-trivial adjustment, I didn't regard it as enough time to matter enough to warrant a distraction to the more core points. Inflation adjustment precision is a notoriously disagreed upon thing, the more near term you get the less valuable the matter becomes. I knew that someone might lodge that point, so I wanted to potentially preempt it (hoping that it would make the responding comment not worth bothering with, that the person writing it would be too lazy to bother writing a comment just to argue inflation adjustment numbers for ~1997-2017). Why bother making the point at all then? Because it highlights Facebook's growing financial power. If their net income isn't beyond Microsoft's on an inflation adjusted basis today, it will be very soon (perhaps by the end of fiscal 2017 or mid 2018 on a run rate). Further, I suspected most people realize that while there has been some inflation since the late 1990s, it's not N hundred percent.

No problem! I'm notoriously incapable of guessing how much inflation has happened in the last {20, 30, 50} years. I was surprised it was only 1.5x (I had predicted ~2). I agree that CPI is a particularly clumsy measure (not mentioned is the fudge factor in how accounting for stock/option-based compensation has changed).

Your comment had the desired (ultimate) effect though: I really haven't been watching how much cash Facebook has been generating, and it's amazing to compare it to Microsoft at peak monopoly.

I voted you up for making good points, but I think Facebook's 3b buyout offer(which many thought was on the high side at the time) negates any accusations of abuse of power.

Microsoft tried to buy Netscape. It doesn't negate it on the part of Facebook, just as that did absolutely nothing for Microsoft back then and for exactly the same reason.

In fact it enhances the negative view of the monopoly company in question as a predator looking to dominate. That's how it'll be played in the press, it's how it'll be spun by competitors and by the government entities. If you go back and read about Microsoft's interactions with Netscape (Marc Andreessen provided a key piece of evidence of Microsoft's predatory behavior by taking notes in said meeting/s), you'll find that their efforts to 'buy or bury' Netscape was entirely relevant as the case went on as evidence of a sort of character portrayal the government was spinning of Microsoft as a company hell-bent on dominance (ie seeking to limit consumer choice to enhance their market power; which is perhaps how it'll be spun against Facebook - by wiping out Snapchat, Facebook can plausibly raise its ad prices, as consumers will supposedly have fewer social destinations, and advertisers will have fewer platforms competing for their marketing dollars, etc etc and so on; it doesn't matter if one agrees with this premise, it's exactly the sort of slightly subjective argument (that happens to be kinda hard to prove and kinda hard to disprove) that will be used by the government).

The fact that the offer was perhaps high at the time, will also be spun as proof that very clearly Facebook has too much power, that they are deriving such immense profit from their social monopoly that they can afford to overpay to sustain that monopoly. You see, anti-trust is an intentionally subjective field of law. It was designed to be vague, it enables them to go after you for nearly any perceived abuse of market power (with a more recent high-tilt toward consumer well-being, but back in reality the Microsoft case was overwhelmingly about powerful, rich competitors crying foul).

Snapchat better have been worth it, as I can assure you that crushing Netscape wasn't worth what it cost Microsoft.

What exactly did it cost them? Last I checked they never broke up and won their appeal in Federal court [1]:

The case found its way to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected Jackson's remedy and accused him of unethical conduct after it was revealed he had private conversations with reporters about the trial while it was still ongoing. Microsoft would settle the case with the Department of Justice in November of 2001 by agreeing to make it easier for Microsoft's competitors to get their software more closely integrated with the Windows operating system

Their settlement has basically nothing to do with why they aren't dominant today - only top 5 - they missed out on mobile to Apple/Google.

If the web hadn't become free, Microsoft may not have lost their foothold.

Become free? Netscape wasn't free. It didn't even try to be free before the Mozilla project really. In fact I remember switching to Opera before IE because Netscape was shitty.

> Snapchat better have been worth it, as I can assure you that crushing Netscape wasn't worth what it cost Microsoft.

What exactly did it cost them?

Microsoft became irrelevant when the web took off, and the web took off partly because Microsoft made it free to crush Netscape. They dropped the price of browsers to zero.

Good prescient analysis of the same topic from a year ago https://stratechery.com/2016/the-audacity-of-copying-well/

This seems like PR fluff...

This may be an unpopular opinion but I feel strongly against titles like this. They could have very well gone with "...Facebook take Instagram Market share" but they wanted to make it personal and human.

I'm disgusted by the choice of words here. One company gained an advantage over there other in a market, big deal! They're competing businesses and eventually one will up the other but there's no point in saying "down to its knees"

You're spot on that it's a bit ridiculous. It's intentional however and it's going to get a lot worse yet. Over the next few years the press will start using increasingly violent-sounding, negative, stark headlines against Facebook. Associated headline words will shift toward aggressive tones.

It's a portrait. They do the same thing to most dominant companies once they grow out of the up-and-coming phase. Amazon for example is starting to get deluged by such press coverage; Google has been the subject of it for years; and of course Microsoft went through a solid decade or more of it. Once upon a time, Walmart was portrayed as a cute & fuzzy hayseed retailer just looking to save the good 'ol consumer a buck or two.

It's not surprising that Trump rails against the mainstream media when it's becoming increasingly obvious that the news is written to rile people up and get clicks. The news is like professional wrestling - there are heroes, villains, story arcs, winners, losers, and the more you understand a topic the more you realize the press gets it completely wrong. But maybe it's always been this way, and I wasn't as aware before.

Interesting perspective, but I don't think it makes sense to take sides politically in this argument.

All media is sadly going this way, the argument could also be made that link bait titles are partly responsible for Trump's popularity. ALL media is sadly going this way. If you think Fox or Drudge or whatever are above these sad tactics, look closer.

I'd like to ask the bigger question of, how do we fight/protect agains this?

The problem is that journalism is unprofitable. They have to fight dirty just to survive.

This is why I take a nuanced view of so-called Net Neutrality. In such a world, how does anyone monetize? Well we have seen: through sleazy tracking and sly tricks to capture personal data. Personally I liked it the old way: you paid cash money upfront and then you got the product in your hand and the transaction was closed.

Agreed. I would rather have silence than constant trickery and scammy sales everywhere I turn.

Not everything is intended to be profitable. That's not to say that journalism can't be profitable, but my take is the current state is giving up on journalism in order to be profitable.

There's a yuuuge difference between having valid criticism of the news and just dismissing it because it's "fake news". Let's not validate infantile 140-character rantings now.

It's also ironic considering Trump rode to the presidency on a steady stream of strongly-delivered sweeping factless emotional appeals delivered as barely-coherent narratives.

"Is Everything Wrestling?"

> With each passing year, more and more facets of popular culture become something like wrestling: a stage-managed “reality” in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen, the audience’s addiction to the melodrama.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/magazine/is-everything-wr...

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