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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

Snapchat continues its nearly decade-long habit of forcing changes on users that they hate. Remember the massive UI redesign that saw them lose millions of users ? https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17661878/snapchat-earnings... or when they turned on everyone's location sharing and made it opt-out?

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The UI redesign called Cheetah was also forced internally and a lot of OGs left during that period including the long time VP of Eng Tim Sehn. Lots of internal politicking, late hours, and then layoffs the next year, for a project many of us weren't sold on. Not fun. And when the rollout data showed what many of us suspected, it took too long to pivot. The thing is up until then I think Snap's top-down design-driven culture was a strength and supported its innovation. Sometimes you have to do the unpopular thing. It works until it doesn't. I hear things have softened since.

Thanks for sharing this. Yea, I was a heavy user of snapchat until that update. Only ever have used it since as my default camera app. All the people I knew that used it for the social network aspects stopped using it around the same time as well.

Given the abysmal usability of the app I would not call Snapchat a design oriented company.

Or the 3D Bitmojis. My 2D one looks awesome, but the equivalent 3D version looks like a sex offender...

The 2D ones had soul, they were kinda cringe but there was a wit to the stickers that won you over. 3D ones just look like any other design by committee 3D avatars like Memojis, Samsung's avatars, horrible soulless things with no artistry, look like bad freemium game assets.

I was shocked to find them using bitmojis at all. I find them terribly off putting visually. Not a big deal of course, but until I installed Snapchat I hadn't seen one in years.

Snap (then Snapchat) acquired them back in 2016

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/tech-news/snapcha...

I have a feeling that My AI's weird avatar is one of the many variables as to why he was pushed back by users. It is a smug looking character with purple skin. To me, the avatar enters the uncanny valley.

You can change the avatar and name.

Defaults matter. You could change Clippy to be Albert Einstein on a bicycle, but we all remember it as Clippy.

But every socmed site/app does this. You'll never find user research that says "I want to see more strangers I don't follow on my feed". It's not for the user, it's for advertisers that need users to spend more time in the app.

On the contrary, I'm a user of social media for exactly that purpose. When I use Twitter or Instagram, I'm specifically using it for the natural discoverability it offers. Almost half of the people I follow on Twitter are people I never would have known existed if I didn't see them pop up in my feed one day.

It's why I can never get into stuff like Mastodon or Misskey with how they are today, it's extremely difficult to just naturally find people to follow.

You're contradicting yourself I feel. As you said yourself users use the app more and don't churn for other apps which means they do find value in the feature. No company cares about what users feel or say but rather about what they do. The former is merely a proxy for the latter.

The success of YouTube and TikTok proves there is demand for content from people that have not been followed. Most of the content people watch on these platforms are from people they are not following. People gain value from seeing content that is relevant to them.

YouTube has a "Show me something different" button that'll show up every once in a while. I don't click on that button but that's my choice. Give people an option, sure - but don't force it on them.

It'd be pretty sweet if autoplay also followed this principle... but it doesn't, so I just disable it.

Really? I've used YouTube for years and i don't think I've ever seen a "show me something different" button. Occasionally it'll have a too bar with a list of topics i can choose from but it refuses to let me enter my own desired topic and seemingly only randomly shows me the bar anyway. I find myself frustrated that it's never there when i want it, and a selection that was there last time is not there this time. Very frustrating to see the potential of a better user experience but be refuted it for seemingly no reason.

If you're familiar with the YouTube homepage (where it displays videos in rows by topic) you can usually scroll down and find one of the cards a sort of colorful "Show me something different" card instead of a regular video card.

I putzed around with YouTube for a bit and was unable to get it to come up but it's a pretty rare thing to see - it's possible it was a limited time feature trial but it also just might require a lot of weird actions to summon. I swear I have seen it before and it wasn't just a fever dream though!

It doesn't really matter, they made up the DAU within a year [0] and even back in 2018 had grown their revenue despite lowered DAU numbers, from your link.

> The rest of the company’s financials exceeded investors’ expectations. Revenue increased 44 percent year-over-year, from $182 million in the second quarter of last year to $262 million this year.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/545967/snapchat-app-dau/

>It doesn't really matter,

Given their stagnant/declining stock price since IPO (covid tech bump aside) I would say it does matter in the single place it matters most to a public company. Potentially because to get that revenue and users they had to spend so much money that their net loss was 65% of their total revenue in 2019.

they reverted many changes after several months because they were hemmorhaging DAU:

https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/11/snapchat-rolls-back-des...

Right, what's important in internet social media are whales.

Infact, most of capitalism is glomming on to this model.

Hooking whales is expensive in the beginning, cause you basically need millions of users and some underlying psychological or pathological business use case.

Once you know the whales in the barn, you can do a lot of treeshaking as long as your $ metrics are accurate.

But, it's not just whales as it's not just revenue that grew, their DAU is now almost double what it was back in 2018.

> or when they turned on everyone's location sharing and made it opt-out?

Possible related article for that quote: https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/23/15864552/snapchat-snap-ma...

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