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Comment by fluidcruft | Hacker News Reader

I actually like the idea of Stories (vs say a giant group text), but I don't think 24 hours is workable for the people I Signal with because we're not in Signal routinely enough and everything will just delete before anyone sees it. If it were configurable I'd probably set it to a week or a month. Actually, I don't know why they would fix the time at 24hrs. We've always been able to set the time period for disappearing messages.

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> I don't know why they would fix the time at 24hrs.

To use fear of missing out to cause people to check the app at least a couple times a day. It's an engagement hack, and the main reason I dislike this feature wherever it appears.

I suppose it does function as an engagement hack, but I like ephemeral messaging like this because it is low-stakes and I often don't care strongly whether any individual sees my post or not. If I did care, I'd simply send them a message directly! So at least in this sense, the short timeframe is a feature that defines the medium for me.

Of course, you could allow customization of the time interval, but that adds another layer of complexity, and other platforms that use stories have already pretty much standardized on a timeframe of 24h, so it's easier for platform newcomers to understand.

Is that 24h after receipt, or 24h after opening? I believe their text messages use the latter system and would expect the video ones to do the same.

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