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Comment by anilshanbhag | Hacker News Reader

I shared your skepticism of Snapchat (I use Instagram pretty often and browse Facebook multiple times a day - rarely post on it). I recently hopped on the Snapchat bandwagon and here are a couple of things I really liked:

> Less focus on metrics. There is no likes and you only see views if you really want to. This is bad for influencers but I have to give it that it is a good break from Instagram/Facebook where people are conscious of likes.

> Its fun. The filters and emoji are better on Snapchat. The maps feature is cool - I used it to browse snaps by Harvey/Irma victims. The Discover section has crappy publications but there is NYT, Mashable, WSJ, etc. I pay for WSJ but I still like to read news in the Snapchat format.

On the downside, the app is buggy and does crash pretty often for a 1.8k strength company.

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I get the feeling that this is park of what guides the decisions from the board. One need only look at YikYak to see what happens when you mess too much with your winning recipe and how fast users will leave what they love. Snapchat's essence, the temporary nature of content and posts, is at odds with the financial aspect of it.

I'm going to guess that they want to try to find a way to capitalize on the spirit of Snapchat without compromising what actually brings people to the service. Maybe there's a way of doing this where popular posters are able to show metrics to advertisers, or maybe such a scenario is seen as detrimental to the spirit of the service, but I absolutely appreciate Snap Inc's caution about mucking up the formula too much here.

Would you feel like sending snaps if none of your friends sent you snaps or even replied to them by text message?

Yup. I like being able to share without anyone being obligated to see it. Sharing on Facebook carries, for me, some social burden--I don't want to pollute friends' timelines with things only I find fun. But on Snapchat, if you're watching my Snaps, you chose to swipe left into them. (I really hate messaging on Snapchat, in part due to its lack of end to end encryption.)

I share this sentiment. I dump almost daily photos on whatsapp statuses. I won't do it on insta or fb(except on their analogous stories/status feature). I like posting updates but since I don't like when people clutter my wall with a lot of updates, I don't do it to others. The only people who see my updates are people who explicitly click on it to see it.

Facebook also has the stories feature, along with AR camera. I think it's just available through their app though.

I use snapchat exclusively. It's fun, I never got into social media before. I post mostly to my story and only occasionally interact directly with other people. Mostly just making jokes about something they post to their story and visa-versa.

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