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Comment by outime | Hacker News Reader

I find it funny that if I were to read your comment outside of this website, I could most likely identify it as a HN comment because it mentions barely-used sites popular in HN (such as Bluesky, Signal, Jitsi, IRC, etc), but skips mentioning actually popular ones everywhere else (like Snapchat, Facebook/Messenger, Instagram, TikTok, etc).

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Oh, I agree so much, but I am not sure about your examples either:

Snapchat - does it even exist anymore? It had its time, but personally I don't know anyone still there.

Same with Facebook Messenger, which has completely been replaced by WhatsApp in my (non-nerd) circles.

I thought about including TikTok but it would be more in the

- YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, PeerTube

category. To me, these are borderline social media and more akin to television - pure consumption, heavily discouraged participation. Just look at the comments on any of these for a proof.

I'd give you Instagram, it seems immensely popular and intensively used as a communication platform.

If we disregard our own bubbles and go strictly by popularity we should have considered WeChat and Douyin too, I guess.

> Snapchat - does it even exist anymore?

I can't say overall, but my children and their friends use snap as their first line of communication, with iMessage a close second.

Great point about disregarding our own bubbles. Here's a good example re:Snapchat. Slightly more than 5% of the world is on Snapchat daily. That number has been going up, almost without fail, quarter over quarter for 12 years.

Snapchat - does it even exist anymore?

It's the primary mode of group communication for my teenage daughter and everybody in her social circles. Second place is probably Discord, but that is heavily skewer towards people she knows via gaming.

That is interesting. I have a teenage daughter too and never heard Snapchat mentioned. Some of here friends are on TikTok though, but we don't allow it. Communication is mostly iMessage, old fashioned phone calls and the MS Teams provided by her school.

I get the sense that Snapchat is mostly the current 18-27 crowd, but not necessarily the 13-18 crowd. Would be curious to hear the experiences of other parents in this regard.

Mine is in the younger category, Snapchat is their main communication tool, even for calls. She reaches her screentime limit on it very quickly.

I checked back, and yes, you are right Snapchat and Instagram are indeed popular with her friends.

I think to label YT, TikTok etc as pure consumption is not accurate entirely. I get your point, but on the ways they specifically differ from television is the ability to make reaction/response or whatever else videos. So for some at least it’s not pure consumption (even though it is for many users)

I do remember YT video responses did exist, but I haven't seen any in a long time. Google found this [0] 15 years old video explaining how to do it. According to the comment section it is historical. Video replies no longer exist.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93Q5ChkkCnc

The social media landscape vastly differs from country to country. WhatsApp is basically not a thing in the US outside of immigrant/expat circles.

None of the other ones that you listed are popular in the US either with the exception of Twitter, Zoom and Slack (and the latter two aren't social media platforms).

Edit: I was wrong, 40M MAU is peanuts and shouldn't even be considered an app really.

It is absolutely barely used.

I say this as someone who used it exclusively for 5+ years before giving up and using WhatsApp.

There is hardly even a comparison between Signal and WhatsApp.

Downloads != users.

Compared to the other examples, it's rarely used. For instance, Messenger has 3B MAU whereas Signal has 40M, which is just a bit over 1% of Messenger's user base, yet Messenger wasn't mentioned in OP among others which is my point.

Seems like you're splitting hairs. His point was that some of these services popular with the HN crowd aren't as popular elsewhere. And Signal has historically had a reputation of being used primarily by techies, not the general masses (even if the current numbers indicate that's shifted).

From these I barely heard about Bluesky and never used it. I have no clue about what Jitsi is, first time even reading this combination of letters :)

The rest I know. And I do read Hacker News...

Second this Jitsi is unknown to me. Bluesky I only heard about because they did marketing push with limited spots to drive demand and it got good press coverage being an investment/board seat of Jack

Jitsi is a video calling platform (that you can self host also), it's mostly used for business-related video calls.

IRC is not a website.

Speaks a lot as to the changing sands of time.

IRC is not a website.

Neither is WhatApp, Discord, Slack and many of the other ones mentioned (yes you can interact with them via a website, but the same is true for IRC)

Yeah, you're right, even though we could say the same about Signal and others. In my defense, I know [1] very well - it's not a website!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39689796

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