Snapchat's decline and the secret joy of internet ghost towns | Hacker News Reader

Snapchat's decline and the secret joy of internet ghost towns

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79 pointspaulpauper36 comments

One of my friends who is still resolutely on Snapchat has told me that it gives her, “a space to be visible just to some people, to not have to share everything with everyone in order to share anything with anyone. That, to me, is too high a cost, and it’s a cost that so many other platforms require you to pay.”

One of the main reasons why I still use Snapchat.

What I don't understand about snapchat is its functionally useless. Me and a small group of friends send funny images and like the silly bitmoji's but we never have a proper conversation on there or exchange anything of value. I don't really see it as a true social media.

What you just described (useless jokes) is not useless at all!

I agree...

It’s certainly not a business.

I find that it is a non committal means of getting to know a person through humor. At least within the context of dating. It is an excuse to share random, humorous nonsense about your life that would be out of place in text, and does not require a response.

Wasn't that the main idea behind Google plus also?

I just asked several friends, all millennials, if they thought snapchat use was declining among their friend groups (semi disparate), and all said no and were surprised I asked. Obviously a biased sample, but just another data point.

As a millenial myself, I've seen Snapchat usage stay roughly the same, but I've seen an explosion in Instagram usage. So IMO it's really just that Snapchat is stagnating relative to Instagram, and stagnation is death for a social network.

I'm convinced the death of Snapchat will be its failure to expand to new international markets like South America. Insta, FaceBook, WhatsApp, etc (all FB owned) have exploded and maintained themselves overseas. Meanwhile, a year ago reports came up that Evan Spiegel of Snapchat said that his app is not for poor countries like India.

That hubris is dangerous. I can't wait for the company to go under.

India is fairly unique in how bad the cell phone internet is. Snapchat is a video & image heavy app even compared to instagram or facebook, which is why the app design doesn't work well. Get rid of the media richness and your back to facebook.

When I visited my family in the Philippines, I was asking my younger relatives what social networks/apps they used. When I asked about Snapchat, they said nobody really used it. It made sense in the way how data plans are structured over there, along with how Facebook's Internet.org has really gained a lot of usage in the country in their partnership with the carriers.

Back in the 2000s I was probably the only one in my friend group who had any sort of presence on the internet. There was no way I could convince any of my friends to start a blog or join LiveJournal. Even sites like Flickr was a stretch.

Instead there were some old ICQ accounts that no one used anymore, and occasionally someone would send out a group email with some photos attached.

And then it's 2007, Facebook appears out of nowhere, and suddenly all of my friends are sharing like mad on the internet, as is everyone else.

My first impression was that this is great. Finally my friends are on the internet. Facebook is like Internet for Dummies. Six months later I would deactivate my Facebook account.

I do miss LiveJournal though, or at least the idea of it.

I miss nascent movements like pre facebook era. Maybe it's a psychological profile. I'm a contrarian and/or an early adopter. When things become too massive and somehow impersonal (even though it's a social network) the magic vanishes to my eyes.

So do I. Made a few very close friends via LJ. All non technical oddly enough.

Up til that point, people would type. If they were having a bad time they'd type A LOT. You couldn't help getting to know them better than you did.

Then Facebook etc arrived, and now it's "Life's shit. Inbox me", if that, or a photo of lunch/cat/coffee.

I think we took a wrong turn somewhere along the way.

If you have a WordPress.com account, you can start a private blog and invite friends to it. It's very similar to how LJ used to work.

Another "secret joy" is getting in early to new networks before the brands come rent seeking. Telegram communities have this feel, though many are invite only. Mastodon may be the next big one, and has a bit of an early Tumblr vibe.

You might be interested in this article about subculture dynamics: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

I really find Mastodon really empty. I had a look and the first things that popped up into my federated feed were escorts.

It depends on where you look and who you follow. Swifter.at became a refuge for sex workers and is one of the larger instances.

However, you can filter instances, and/or sign up on an instance that blocks switter users.

There is activity, especially if you sign up on a huge instance like mastodon.social (although I don’t recommend this). instances.social lists all active instances that you can peruse through.

Is it easy to run your own instance and be highly selective about federation? How about not being listed on lists of instances?

It's easy to run your own instance. Mastodon provides a docker image, provided you have a server or VPS that can handle its asset compilation. I think you can get by with 2gb minimum. You can filter any instances that you don't want to federate with.

I'm not sure what you mean about not being listed on lists of instances. If you mean not federating your own instance, well, that goes against the entire premise of the fediverse / federation. Running your instance means it will propagate. Your posts will show up in the instances of whoever is following you.

Thats likely because sex workers are being banned from centralized social media services and censorship is difficult on a federated network such as Mastadon.

If the allusion here is that Instagram is a lot better, anecdotal experience of one person suggests that Instagram is no different. More people seem to be creating Instagram accounts to promote stuff or to create a brand.

People tend to follow many others just in the hope of a Follow Back or getting more engagement on their posts. It's like Twitter all over again. The number of likes that posts get seems to be extremely low compared to the number of followers (except those who are celebrities of some sort or were already famous for something). The likes also tend to be done with an expectation of getting more likes. What's worse than the number of likes? That'd be the number of comments. Most people's posts, except those of a personal nature intended for (real) friends, tend to get no comments at all. It looks like a ghost town. Or rather, a zombie town, with the inhabitants chanting "follows", "likes", and so on.

There's way too much content, way too small screens to consume them on (photos and videos), and way too less time for it all.

Every young person I know and see around me in general is using snapchat as a primary means of communication. The real user base is not boomers, gen-xers, and perhaps not even millennials but rather gen z. As such, it will take some time for them to grow into their full earning potential as a generation. If snap continues to innovate and meet the needs of this user base, they could do very well in the future.

This also assumes snap hires people who know how to run a successful tech business. They may need to move their HQ and primary strategic operations away from LA and up to SV or SF to take advantage of the concentration of tech talent (not just devs but execs, sales, product mgmt, devops, marketing, etc).

I find this hard to believe (I'm not doubting you, your experiences are valid)

Snapchat used to be where gen-z were, but now with Instagram "adopting" the story format it became easy for all those folks to post stories on IG itself.

They are using IG and snapchat for different things. These two apps are not seen as mutually exclusive.

This has been my experience as well. The several younger people I know (high school age) also use it. I was told they use instagram for general posts, and snapchat for communicating.

This also fits my experience (if you're looking for another data point.) Snapchat just needs to recognize this and capitalize on it correctly.

Another example of the transient nature of social technology companies (aol, friendster, myspace, facebook, twitter [fill in the blank]) compared to algorithmically founded technology companies (Google).

I use Google Plus in a similar way, except as a link blog. Hardly anyone is listening. At first that was a concern, but I've come to enjoy it.

Remember the echo in Apples old 90's social network eworld? There was never anyone there, it was like being in an empty shopping mall

The amateur porn sharing platform tried to expand it's scope too much.

I still can’t believe you can’t look at Snapchat in a browser/desktop, makes it useless for me. Instagram is far more accessible.

urbex of the web?

Is Snap considered a doomed failure now? It got to IPO and tanked, did early investor/owners effectively bilk the sharebuying public?

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