Introducing the new Snapchat
snap.com
snap.com
I think this is a problem.
I went to a concert a few weeks ago. The people beside me would stand still for 10 minutes and then someone would pull out Snapchat. The whole group would turn around, flash a smile and start dancing for the camera. 9 seconds later, they were back to watching the concert.
Performance is a cultural virus that affects our happiness and creates a kind of perfect self-consciousness. It’s “instant replay” for all of life. And just like in American Football, when instant replay arrives, we start to (1) glorify the spectacular, (2) hyper-analyze every angle and (3) expect more moments worthy of instant replay.
Snapchat pushes us to create more of those “replay worthy” moments. We narrate our lives according to the expectations of our “fans.” I hear 8-year-old kids yell “do it for the likes.” They are quietly subverting their self while sublimating the value of the crowd. How do I have an identity when I consistently invite other people - often strangers - to affirm my experiences?
Those concert-goers felt the need to misrepresent their experience of the concert. The 8-year-olds adjusted their behavior to optimize for likes. When I was on Snapchat, I loved seeing myself in other people’s stories. It made me feel popular. I, too, adjusted my behavior to appear more likeable on camera.
Adjusting Snapchat’s interface will do nothing to address the intrinsic ways that Snapchat reorients our relationships around performance.
Perhaps this is obvious, but family and friends should love me the way I am. Not some imaginary version of me. And Snapchat nudges me to fake it.
It's just "the medium is the message" applied to Snapchat.
And if we step back from social media, what about regular pictures? They’re supposed to take candid moments of the real world, but even if we’re having a bad day, we smile and act happy for pictures.
I agree that a divide between reality and ideal is happening here, just that it isn’t really new.
What social media do people think is more candid?
By that metric traditional newspapers are much worse - the ratio of stories on golf versus on dishwashing is much greater than 5x.
I'm not sure that is an accurate representation of photography as a medium, nor has it ever been.
That would be by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in this NYT article.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/06/opinion/sunday/dont-let-f...
I felt the same sense of misrepresentation browsing Instagram recently, where the photo no longer represents the experience, but rather it is the experience (if one can call a posed and doctored product an experience).
One problem with this is the behavioral reinforcement it creates. If dopamine is released enough times when a certain action is performed, it would seem there's a point where your brain is essentially making you continue to reproduce that action. And these services aren't primarily targeting adults, which is concerning as well.
Maybe the Instagram experience is how people actually want to behave? And it gives them a chance to express that ideal self. In other words, it's like the phone is a magic wand, and when it's pointed at them, it's suddenly socially-acceptable to break out of their shell and act silly.
Obviously it's weird that it only happens when the phone is pointed at them. But maybe, over time, this "behavioral reinforcement" will give them the courage to act like that all of the time (if that's how they want to be), rather than only when the phone is out.
In other words, the key notion that I challenge is this claim that HN is fit to judge Instagram as a misrepresentation of reality. How can we claim that the moments when the phone is away is more real than the moments when they are out? They both happened, therefore they're both real. And there's this unquestioned assumption that just because people behave a certain way when the phone is away, that's how they truly want to behave, when it may as well be just the opposite.
But since they likely spend more time as one version of themselves - when no camera is pointed at them - and less time as the on-camera version, I'd argue that the latter is less authentic.
It's a bit like using alcohol (ie, the camera) as a crutch to give yourself permission to loosen up in social situations. It gets the job done but I'd argue it's not authentic.
They are quietly subverting their self while sublimating the value of the crowd. How do I have an identity when I consistently invite other people - often strangers - to affirm my experiences?
Preserving a memory there in a few sentences or a quick photo that I just save for myself fulfills the desire for me.
Out of curiosity are you and your friends younger than 25? I don't know of anybody in my age demographic that would behave like that.
I've seen a couple of bars where they ban it, but not in nightclubs, especially high end ones. It's too hectic to "ban" something there, and the more exclusive the place is, the more likely the visitors want to instagram their visits, the better marketing it is for the club, therefore they allow it.
People go to night club to party. And most people take photos when they're partying. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Sure it's annoying (I know it's annoying because I actually experience it first hand) but saying that should be banned just means you're out of touch. Even some of the most hipster nightclubs in Williamsburg would never throw you out just because you took a photo.
People will hate you if you take a selfie in the middle of a dancefloor, and some may even complain about it to the bouncers (most don't), and the bouncer may ask you not to do so, but NOBODY throws you out because you took a photo. In the nightclub nobody cares that you're taking a photo in the corner.
Lastly, it's kind of ridiculous how this thread turned out. This was not at all the point of my comment.
This sums it up so perfectly. It precisely explains what I've always failed to when people ask, "why didn't you take pictures of that? or share them on Facebook?" I was just overseas for several weeks and I was able to fully absorb the entire experience because I wasn't worried about what anyone else in the world thought of what I was experiencing at the moment.
I do think there can be a middle-ground with social media if it's designed thoughtfully, with this perspective in mind. I wrote a little about it recently [0], specifically on how Mastodon shouldn't have ported over the favorite/like functionality from Twitter, because functions like that do hijack our brains to use these tools for the subconscious reward, rather than to truly improve our lives in some way.
With prevalent awareness of the issue, thoughtful design, and a change in financial incentives for platform makers I think we can come away from this crazy time of intrusive, subconscious-altering social media with just the good parts.
I think I personally like the like notifications on Twitter though to gauge what resonated with people. Though I do keep the push notifications off so it's more of just I review the notifications timeline every day or two.
Also, in the beginning it was not unusual that the only portrait of a person was post-mortem - to preserve the memory (as in 100 years of solitude). Difficult to smile in that case.
However, photographs were serious business for quite a while. You don't see people smiling on official portraits for the same reason. Imagine that portrait of Napoleon on a horse, but with a smile - doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?
Same for early photographs; they were expected to be solemn.
>Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere.
-Marshall McLuhan, From Cliché to Archetype, 1970
IMHO I think they tried to make people share spontaneously instead of a curated feed. Instagram and FB forced a change.
Do you think this is something Snapchat should even care about? How is Snapchat nudging you? Is it more insidious than somebody saying "say cheese!" before snapping a photo?
or in another way, photography exposes the difficulty of translating your recollection to a third party. when I show you a grainy photo of some bright lights and blurred, sweaty people, I remember a great concert with friends.. but you just see the grainy photo.
though I agree with what you are saying, I think this is just the mass adoption of the imagification (both actual and meta) of life that began with portraiture back in the middle ages. why rail against snapchat when we already live in a world of fake family portraits?
I think the real question is, who are you without this medium? Are you still the same person? The artist who was encouraged by the responses of strangers can continue to do his or her work without the medium. The affirmation has helped them but it's not something they rely on.
In contrast if you find yourself craving it so much that without it you are anxious and suffering, then you have a problem. If the concert kids you mentioned were enjoying the concerts anyways, dancing and cheering all the way through on snapchat or not, then it wouldn't be worrying at all.
This is really the same for anything that's potentially addictive. Can you live without it? Do you goto lengths that are otherwise uncomfortable to you to acquire it?
Yes, snapchat has made it easier for us to fake ourselves, but only in the same way the internet has made it easier for us to look at pornography, and the industrial revolution has made it easier for us to have access to alcohol and cigarettes. I think in time this will pass too, just like all the other harmful things we could indulge in, as people have self-control and are smart enough to eventually realize that being our authentic selves bring about the most happiness.
First, people shouldn't love you for who you are. That assumption is in popular culture but it's really pernicious if you examine it. I don't love my mother because she's my mother. I love my mother because she's nice to me, she cares about me, she sacrificed for me, she wants me to do well, etc. If my mother acted like a robot, or worse, was abusive or exploitative, I wouldn't love her. That's true for everyone I do love, and I think it should be true of all love (possible exception for one's own children). If you expect people to love you regardless of what you do or how you act, that's demanding a lot from people for no reason.
Second, consider the group of people at the concert. Going to a concert is fun, even if you're just kind of standing around watching. The problem is, when taking a photo, you can't convey visually the fun of being there - so you exaggerate the visual aspect, you look happy, so you can take a picture that represents what you're actually experiencing. I grant that it could be the case that people are cynically trying to create a fantasy life for Snapchat to seem popular or whatever, but my experience with such things is just that you're trying to convey your experience with images. Going to this concert is fun, so look fun so we can snap shot it!
Over Thanksgiving I took pictures of my mother, my sister, and my sister's daughter doing the same thing. On the one hand, two of the pictures were staged (I asked two of them to come here and do this so I could take their picture). On the other hand, it captured the similarity that I could see between the three of them. The picture is authentic in the same way that the Snapchat picture is - it had to be created artificially to capture something authentic.
You're making a mostly semantical argument. When you say that "you don't love your mother because she's your mother", you're saying that you don't love your mother strictly based on the fact that she was the woman who bore you (`with respect to her identity`). You then say that you love your mother because she acts `how she acts`.
In my experience, when people say they want to be loved for who they are, they mean that they don't want to have to act differently than how they would naturally act in order to be liked or popular. In essence, `who someone is` is commonly interpreted to be a superset of `how someone acts` in union with other sets (like `who someone is with respect to their identity`). Thus most people would understand "be who you are" not only to mean "be who you are strictly `with respect to your identity`" but also "be who you are with respect to `how you act`". You're missing the latter in the definition in of who your mother is.
Your second point is valid. In my experience it is difficult to maintain physically a peak level of excitement for a whole event.
Regarding your second point, there is a spectrum here between "recreating authentic experience" and closer to "making something that isn't real" for likes. An extreme example is that I live in a hipster neighborhood with a bunch of European inspired architecture (in the midwestern USA). I once saw two people hold up their small puppy they had on a leash up to autumn leaves in a plant in order to take a picture, around shoulder level with outstretched arms. The dog was clearly in distress, but they continued for one or two times while the dog was whimpering and trying to get down.
The dog was not "experiencing the autumn leaves." Instead, I'm guessing this was closer to "I've seen these sorts of posts in ig, and it's popular, so I'm going to try to recreate it for likes." Why else would someone do that?
So that's an extreme towards GP's point while you seem to be on a spectrum towards another area where it's more like amplification over manufacture.
It's most obvious when you listen to someone phone home, where people from home have a different accent from where they live. Their accent will start switching back. They'll start reacting to social and conversational cues in remembered ways, rather than current ways. A facet of identity is keyed to its culture. (I think this is why FB is so disturbing; I stopped using it in 2010 or so. It just creates context cross-talk.)
I agree with you on the distorting effects of the camera, causing people to exaggerate to communicate a specific story. I don't see it so much as misrepresentation, though. People have sent misleading postcards of holidays to friends and relatives for decades, before photographing everything was feasible, never mind video snippets. It's more about constructing a social object that acts as a kind of structural element for a narrative one wants to write in the shared cultural space of the viewers. And Snap certainly encourages it, probably to excess.
On my first significant holiday abroad, I didn't take any photos, because I wanted to stay in the moment, and not be concerned about creating narratives. The experience stays within me as a series of scenes without order, almost like a remembered dream. I could say that it's part of me, my identity. But since I can't share it with anyone, it's impoverished. Shared experiences are bonding in a way that unshared experiences aren't. The shared narrative creates a shared mini-culture, where members belong. Being through a tough spot with someone can be the seed of a deep friendship, and the shared narrative is a big part of why. Whether the narrative is authentic or not isn't actually the point.
The interesting part is what happens once enough people become aware of it. A total glamour killer. Every day there seems to be so much talk about dangers of social. Would be an interesting strategy for Snapchat to amplify this conversation and position itself as an alternative.
On the other hand, the tight knit and private nature of the Snapchat network is going to keep it more attractive to me. At least for me, the amount of time spent in an app is more correlated with the depth of my relationships with other nodes on that network, and not just with the size of my audience.
I’ve loved Snap as a company for a long time, and I like their pitch of using innovation as a moat: they have consistently innovated every year since their founding (Ephemerality, Stories, AR filters, Memories, Spectacles (although this has largely been a failure)), have a core set of users who really really love them, and are now playing to their strengths by positioning themselves well as the private space for you and your closest friends.
On this spectrum, the Snapchat experience is a lot more authentic and closer to real-life interactions than Instagram/Facebook, which are a lot worse multipliers of inauthenticity.
An important and totally missed point! Nice one.
You can set your Instagram to private and even if friends from Facebook see that you have an account there they can't just view your content. They'd need to send a follow request to do that.
IG can easily still be a private space. I don't accept everyone who's on my friends list from Facebook.
e: Also, while it's potentially more work there's nothing stopping you from having multiple accounts on Instagram. The UI is actually pretty simple when it comes to swapping between more than one as needed.
That's a huge differentiator, in my book. It provides a simple interface for sharing experiences with specific people. Not really any different than a group SMS or other form of group chat, really. But a very different experience from Instagram, for sure.
It's possible to send disappearing video or photo stories to only selected individuals or selected group chats or a mix of both.
I was laying down my observations on what's the default, and hence seemingly most common behavior for the given network. All snapchat accounts are private by default (yes, you can make stories public like on Instagram). All Instagram accounts are public by default (yes, you can make it private) The power of default has a significant role to play in how people think about and use a particular network. This is even more true for the people who are not very tech savvy, which is the majority.
Again, not arguing if Instagram is better than Snapchat, or vice versa. Instagram probably will win the majority of the market, and will have an order of magnitude, if not more, users, engagement and revenue. Will Snapchat become irrelevant and die? I'd say it's too early to make that call.
And here they are, trying to add more 'features' into an app where its main feature has been inherently broken since inception.
edit: this post kinda blew up. to see a real side-by-side comparison, https://imgur.com/a/wuaZi
1. Compatibility with old devices or API levels 2. Performance optimisation for the filters 3. Lack of priority for the Android app
On my iPhone, Snapchat definitely uses the full fledged APIs and even uses OIS or the image processor to pick/merge the best frame out of the video stream (a lot of blurry photos I take are unblurred), so I’m not sure why the Android experience is allegedly so lacklustre
I am an Android user as well (I own a Nexus 4, 5, 6, and the 2013 wifi version of 7) and I welcome this feature. I think they will fix the Android way of doing things at some point. In fact, if I had the choice of entirely disabling the new swipe right vs a beautiful camera API experience I'd pick the former. I don't care about the Kardashians and I don't want them on my snapchat. If that means I have to live with a crappy camera, I am ok (mostly because my friends are all on iPhone and I mostly watch snaps rather than post them)
This seems unlikely.
More likely scenario: the developers chose to keep their jobs and did what management told them.
Dealing with Camera 1 vs Camera 2 Android APIs, and device specific issues is a mess, I don't blame them for taking the easier route. The iOS camera system is a lot easier to develop against, so I blame Android for this rather than Snapchat.
It's not as if Snapchat are a tiny company with nobody smart enough to notice there's a camera API, this is intentional.
If you want to send a quality photo to a friend, there are apps for that.
you literally take photos and send it to people
This hasn't been the primary focus for years. You can now send Snaps that don't expire after a time limit, and can save your snaps to your storage or Snap's cloud storage (called "memories").
If I was making an app with photo taking capabilities, I would explore the Snapchat route. Obviously Snapchats users are ok with this for the most part.
I have made countless cross-platform AR apps for mobile and desktop. Never an issue with WebRTC/getUserMedia, iOS, windows, etc. However Android is always a nasty problem. From incorrect aspect resolutions, image stretching, silent fails. Each device needs a custom fix which is time consuming and costly. No wonder why Snapchat went an alternative route.
I kind of blame Android too, as a dev I know how crappy the camera APIs can be. But as a user, it stands that only Snapchat takes crappy photos because it doesn't use the standard API, everything else works fine. (Okay actually Facebook Messenger does this too, but oddly the main Facebook app does it right).
Good thing it still has the native app
Is Snap obligated to transport your high-res images via the agreement you have when using their software?
Sounds like a market opportunity for software that doesn’t screw you over
In case you haven't noticed, Snapchat main hurdles these days is that their growth is vastly slowed down by the "stories" timeline on the Facebook app (Instagram, WhatsApp, messenger) that do offer higher quality of pictures.
We’ve been here before. Especially on this HN. The whole setup itself is banal
Are we supposed to sit here and fix their problems? What point does that serve
It’s like forcing an author to change their story.
Get over it, America! No one cares about gameifying Silicon Valley
Technical debt is always the last concern in the product. But for once, it's manifesting itself as a real user-facing problem which was acknowledged in the last SNAP earnings call for the Android app.
On Android I really had trouble in getting the preview stream to line up with the photographs. I needed to keep the preview resolution low enough that devices could process it and present to the screen in real time. But not all devices have the same preview and photograph resolutions.
I found there were inconsistencies between the way the image was cropped (on the OS/hardware level) between different resolutions.
You can take a preview stream at resolution X, and it would appear full frame. Then you would take a photograph at resolution Y, and despite being the same aspect ratio, it would be cropped differently. The results varied between devices, with some matching the crop, some vertically, some horizontally, and (as far as I could tell) there was no way to identify programmatically how the camera was doing the cropping. It seemed to be being done at a level much lower than I could access.
In the end we just had to compromise on a resolution in the middle and use it for both preview and photo.
It may not be the reason, and maybe there's a way around this, the project was a year or two since now. Implementing the same thing on iOS I didn't run into the issue.
In the end, these photos are meant to be looked at for max 10s with stickers/drawings/text superimposed. You don't need a high quality shot for that.
The excuse of "oh it's just for quick sharing so we don't have to focus on quality" is a strawman argument that doesn't really work, because the tech is there to allow it to function both beautifully and quickly - they just don't put the resources into making it happen.
I am but one person, but there are far more complaints about the quality of the photos, than the milliseconds of lag you see hitting the capture button.
Example: If I get a plaintext chat message through snapchat, and I tap the notification to open it, do I go straight to the chat thread? No, I'm dropped at the camera, which has to start streaming and download all the new filters and god knows what else until it allows me to swipe left to get to chats, then tap the specific thread to see the new message.
Every app that I have on my Android device has been updated to this granular permission modal and for Facebook I manually turned off permissions after they started using the Storage permission to access my camera roll to display a carousel of photos that I've taken recently on my timeline.
> The new Discover page to the right of the camera...
This reads like the manual to an early-90s text adventure.
> The one thing that we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use, and our team has been working on responding to this feedback. As a result, we are currently redesigning our application to make it easier to use. There is a strong likelihood that the redesign of our application will be disruptive to our business in the short term, and we don't yet know how the behavior of our community will change when they begin to use our updated application. We're willing to take that risk for what we believe are substantial long-term benefits to our business.
It just doesn't work the way you described. Frustration will never equal curiosity in users minds. Not saying Snapchat didn't try to get the curiosity angle, but that if they did they failed.
Especially the idea that lack of friendly ux leads to more communication and cooperation between players. I don't think it's completely unreasonable that forcing network effects in "Mealsgate" (how do I even install pokemon go) might help form stronger network effects - which in turn is what surveillance machines/skinner boxes like snapchat needs in order to spread.
Yes, they can change their design for retention; do not expect it to work.
You forget in your arguments about 'network' that literally every teenager uses the thing. There is no exclusivity, no special bond between users. Your entire high school would be plugged into the app.
Personally, I don't buy it. Snapchat still manages to onboard new users who eventually learn how to use the app despite all its shortcomings, because people really want to use Snapchat. Having 'good UX' is just a shortcut for having people inside your app who aren't as committed to it.
Their stock isn't necessarily enjoying it as much as they'd probably hoped. I might speculatively buy in if it seems like it's not a Digg v4
Note: this is not investment advice.
Just to add clarity to my earlier post: I did pull the trigger and take a long position in snap. We'll see how it goes; I've still essentially written off the principal as a loss, but if there's an inflection point, I suspect it'll be here.
(likewise none of my commentary here is investment advice)
In the post, the author outlines a strategy which Snap can use to regain its relevance and importance in the social space. The author mentions how Snap can rebrand itself as a "self-expression company" that respects users' humanity.
Interesting to see Snap taking steps in this direction.
[1]: https://exponents.co/snap-facebook-key-competitive-strategy/
Edit: oops I thought this was in reply to a comment where someone complained that the photo was taken from a screenshot of the viewfinder instead of using the camera functionality. Been a long day :-)
In addition to UI being most confusing and impossible for me to figure out, it was also super slow on a mobile network in Asia where I was at the time, near unresponsive.
If I, as 25-30 years old tech person cannot figure out how to use your mobile app, you got a problem. I completely understand why the user base growth has completely flatlined. I assume there are a lot of people similar to me.
I am very bearish on Snap.
For a unique spin on it?
So meta.
> You can think of it as a more sophisticated Best Friends algorithm that makes it easier to find the friends you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them.
I can't for the life of me understand why I'd need something like this to help me find my existing friends when I want to talk to them.
This passes the "subway test". You're walking out of a busy subway station and want to quickly take an action on the go - how fast can you get it done on a tiny mobile screen with so-so connectivity?
On desktop, this is less of a problem when you have all the time, connectivity, and physical dexterity in the world to perform searches rapidly.
They charge publisher brands to appear in Discover.
They charge users for geofilters for their own events (https://www.snapchat.com/geofilters).