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Comment by sergefaguet | Hacker News Reader

not quite. let me point several things out:

- bitmoji takes a long time and a lot of mental effort to set up. i have no idea what my face shape is and had to ask my ex-gf whether my eyes are green or brown.

- with bitmoji you cannot add other people to your emoji because even if you DO go through mental effort and time to create yourself, you won't do a bunch of other people. and often you really want this – e.g. i want to send an image of YOU as Captain Obvious if the situation calls for it, not of ME.

- over time this will get better and better in terms of quality, while Bitmoji will not.

- bitmoji has no market share in any other language than English, and little market share in non-snapchat messengers.

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My experience trying it just now with my girlfriend: I think we both like bitmoji better. With Mirror my girlfriend took her selfie probably 5 or 6 times to get one she was happy with, and had to try her hair in different styles to see what she liked. She also asked if there was more customization options like bitmoji. I don't think people really mind the setup time of bitmoji and possibly actually like playing with it.

Anyway, it's a cool app. I'm not trying to be a downer, just wanted to give you honest feedback.

thanks for sharing! i wonder if there are just different demographics here where some people want to customize while others don't.

i remember that at our hotel booking company, only 10-15% of people used any filters/sorts for hotels, and >80% just picked from the top list of what we gave them. to me this is shocking given a hotel is a big and rare purchase. but it makes me feel the majority of the world want the fewest taps and the fewest mental barriers.

plus we kind of feel like we want to force ourselves to do a good job out of automatic creation, and a lot of manual customization is defocusing.

If character creation screens in games has taught me anything, it's that people love taking time to customise things like this. I don't think you should try to make your competitive advantage speed.

i don't think it is merely speed though, it is simplicity too. i hear you about character creation screens, but there are hardcore gamers and there are casual gamers. the latter are far more prevalent. and i say this as someone who loves my Divinity 2 and Baldur's Gate :)

(also see comment below about hotels, same discussion)

what do you think?

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