Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimkleiber | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com