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Comment by nixpulvis | Hacker News Reader

Whelp, there goes the neighborhood.

Honestly, why can't we just make products and services that do one thing and do it well. Leave "stories" to the social media applications.

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WhatsApp has had stories for years, just called statuses. Most of my American friends don't use it or know they're there, but my East African friends use them all the time. Frankly, most of my US friends aren't even on WhatsApp or Telegram or Signal. I don't know where they are :-D Maybe iMessage, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook.

How do you define the difference between a messaging app and social media app? Many seem quite blurred to me.

It's the blurring of lines that some users are objecting to. Instagram is a perfect example where yes, important communication happens via Instagram messages, but the problem is that once the app is open, it's exceedingly easy to accidentally spend minutes/hours listlessly scrolling. In order to avoid listlessly scrolling, users will uninstall the app or set time limits on it, or other techniques to avoid it sucking up so much time. Compare this to a 'plain' messaging app without a broadcast stories feature - there isn't the same distraction factor and for those that abhor the algorithmic-feed and distraction factor, it's a huge turn-off to add that feature.

Go into Instagram/Twitter/TikTok/Snapchat/Facebook and try and turn off the stories/feed. You can't, that's the main engagement loop for the app!

Ah, yeah, fair point. When I was building an app, I tried to make it as not addictive as possible, and yet the thought that would come to my mind was that if what I make is not that addictive, they may just use the other one. So this back and forth about not wanting people to be addicted to it but also wanting to be compelling enough to pull people from the other ones. I've thought about this with podcasting—I don't want people to listen to my podcasts all day, I'd prefer they also talk with people around them. That being said, people will listen to podcasts and would I prefer they listen to me over someone else, given no matter what I do, they may spend X hours per day listening?

I appreciate you saying what you did about the blurring.

Why are you conflating a finite amount of content generated by only your contacts on a daily basis with the infinite amount of content suggested by an explore section? After the couple of minutes or less that it takes me to check out the stories of people I care about the content is exhausted, there is no more stuff to check and look at. When I look at all my Whatsapp stories there is no algorithm that shows me content from random people around the internet. The reason why Whatsapp (and Signal with stories) is completely different from Instagram is because everything happens only between you and your contacts and there are no other avenues into the outside world, no "discover" tab. That's what makes them a messaging application vs a social network imho, you can't be hooked on Whatsapp more than you can be hooked on MMSs

I didn't think the "Stories" feature would be as controversial as "MobileCoin" integration but apparently it does on HN? This would just push me to disable it (if possible) whenever it is finally rolled out or, inspire me to remove it from my system.

Could you elaborate over what the "one thing" a messaging application should do actually is? Because I could argue that sending people pictures, videos, documents or general file blobs is waaaay outside of what a "pure" messaging platform should offer

I can tell you that posting a story is clearly outside this domain, but as for the exact set of features, that's a harder question.

I like the idea of MMS tho, so I'd personally like messages to be like short and quick e-mail. Packaged up media is nice to be able to send as opposed to just links, since they are more direct. Though links are good too, esspecially when files are large and might be shared with multiple people.

Building a streamlined interface still remains an unsolved problem it seems, which is why it pains me to see yet another chat app fail to prioritize features effectively.

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