How Snapchat took over Yale | Hacker News Reader

How Snapchat took over Yale

haufler.org

74 pointsshaufler36 comments

4chan has a very similar dynamic vis-a-vis ephemerality and lowering social inhibitions. On 4chan nothing is saved (internally) and threads disappear minutes after people stop posting actively in them. This was the first thing I thought of when hearing (just now) about Snapchat: "Oh, it's like 4chan."

My 12 year old and her group of friends are hooked on Snapchat. No idea it had reached the University/College level. My understanding is the kids love it because several parents insist that their children never delete their texts until the parent has reviewed all of them each night.

People will share more when they know that content goes away. Makes a lot of sense but would have never thought of it that way prior.

I am not one that checks my daughter's txts every night, but I do educate her that her actions can have farther reaching consequences than a young person might think at the time. Doesn't the false sense of privacy that this app creates give you concern that your daughter and her group of friends might overshare and create problems for themselves or others? The content does not go away, there is no way to prevent that. There have already been several workarounds (hacks) to persist the images being sent and I could think of a few more low tech solutions (second camera to take a photo of the snapchat screen is one that comes to mind).

All those are much easier to fake, and thus deny.

A lot of things worry me about my daughter(s) and the technology that they use. It sounds like you take the same approach. I can't tackle each new app in a tactical fashion so I can only drive the 30,000 foot level stuff. "Would you be proud of this if someone else saw it? Do you think that's hurtful to other folks involved?" etc so that she asks herself those questions. Honestly the ones that seem most vulnerable are those ones where their parents are micromanaging - but that's probably just symptomatic of larger issues.

It started at the college level. For months it was literally only on Stanford's campus (where the founders are students).

Did not know. Thanks for sharing.

Since snaps disappear seconds after they are opened, users feel comfortable sending spontaneous and personal messages that they would not want ingrained into digital histories.

I donno but taking a screenshot and posting it on FB isn't very difficult. Do people really believe the images 'disappear'?

Seeing that someone took a screenshot will usually deter you from sending more embarrassing photos in the future.

If you're expecting something potentially embarrassing, then it's not so hard to be at the ready with a camera to take a photo of the screen.

Heh, it's hard just because very few people have another camera nowadays.

Yeah they do. It's more of the fact that it alerts the other person when someone does that. If for instance I knew person a's trust in me would be decreased a lot if they knew I tried to save something they didn't want to be saved, then that gives me my own moral I guess gauge as to playing by the rules. If I didn't know the person then obviously the limiting factor my internal gauge might put in is decreased. If a friend trusted me and I let them down and risked a friendship by going around that then the barrier is higher. OF course that doesn't stop me from just being a bad friend, taking something private and making it public either. So there's still risk and trust involved.

This App promotes itself with 'temporary photo's'. But they're anything but. Combine teens with 'private' photo's that really are not temporary and basically it's an accident waiting to happen. I think we've all heard our share of jealous ex(boy)friend stories dumping loads of pics when the relation crashed. If people feel save because the images are 'temporary' odd are they'll find out things were not so private.

Teens doing teen-things is fine. But the sense of security they think they're getting is false.

>I think we've all heard our share of jealous ex(boy)friend stories dumping loads of pics when the relation crashed.

This app certainly discourages that collecting of pics though. It's not like sexting where they are just sitting in the texting logs. Yes, people can work around the restrictions but the key is they have to work around it.

The key here is intention. While of course it's quite possible for images to be reproduced in one way or another, the fact that they must be reproduced, and not simply 'shared' or 're-*ed,' changes the user's relation to the app.

I think this gets to the tone of the article, as communicating this way implies a level of trust and/or intimacy usually reserved for analog methods.

Snapchat is brilliant in this regard. I think we're going to see a lot more communication platforms built on limitations rather than sprawling features.

I think we're going to see a lot more communication platforms built on limitations

-- This would be an interesting brainstorm.

Almost every single piece of popular social software is built on limitations. In fact, their models are almost all exclusively made up of boundaries that box in a certain measurable behavior.

AOL -> Myspace -> Facebook -> Twitter -> Pinterest -> Vine or whatever comes next has always been a dialog of editorializing and limiting communication into models that are smaller and easier for digital communication.

The problem with the internet was different that any other communication technology of the last thousand years. Unlike books, phones or even TV, it provided too much access and too vast an audience with boundless communication (i.e. AOL Mass chatrooms) and people felt lost and faceless in the masses. Social media has been an exercise in limitation to solve that problem since its inception.

lets do it! I'll go first: How about a chat program based on sharing websites? Or an email program without a subject line?

> Or an email program without a subject line?

What about email with only a 140 character subject line? Who would want to write more than that anyway?

I've been experimenting with text summarizers, but the content of email is so subjective that it is hard to make a meaningful summary. Anyone have experience/thoughtspace in this area?

Nice article - It seems lazy to me when people hastily assume snapchat is only used for sexting.

From my experience with younger siblings and their friends, it seems much more mainstream among high schoolers and is genuinely being used as a legitimate communication tool, not just a sexting app.

Is this true or do you think it does lend to more of a sexting crowd/behavior?

It does have those connotations at first when people use it I believe. It's just one of those things, I'm sure a lot of people use it for naughty behavior but there's not really a way to do know for sure except surveying. It does make it easy, but in my experience it can be used for non-sexting type things. Just a funny hello or capturing emotion of messages back and forth is quite fun.

the best part of this article is that we learn even yale undergraduates have no idea how statistics work. "i estimate that the contacts in my phone are a representative sample." based on what? the fact that you want to make generalizations?

Of a typical Yale student I assume be meant. And I don't see how you can fault the author for that.

I hope I'm not coming off as a conspiracy nut, but I can't see the US Government being too keen on something like this that's truly untraceable.

IANAL, but it seems to me that every service or software that is used for personal communication is forced by the Feds to allow accessibility for wiretapping circumstances.

Of course, I'm completely against it and I believe the situation is completely untenable for them to persist, but I don't think a social picture app will be the ones to stand tall on user privacy.

This hardly untraceable. Everything going through the networks is recordable and the Government has access to it all.

Right, but the same could be said about Facebook and other social networks. The FBI wants more specific access to social media services so that they can gather contextual evidence instead of just whatever is out there in the ether:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57544139-38/judge-prods-fb...

The point is that at a technical level, SnapChat imposes no barriers to an actor like NSA. It's not even designed to. So it's already far from "untraceable" and it's gratuitous to suggest that the government will kill the service or even need to change anything in order to see what you are sending on SnapChat when they want to.

I'm curious now, is anyone over college age (say, 25+) using this thing? The way it's based on impermanence intrigues me more and more, but no one I know's on it yet.

My group of friends (young 20's) all use it, although not very frequently. I have a feeling it will continue to grow outside of college populations.

I have the same question. As a social phenomenon it intrigues me, but nobody I know uses (or at least, has admitted to using) Snapchat or Facebook Poke.

Given the fact you can send out messages to multiple recipients, how do they stop it from being bombarded by spammers?

Users need to accept you as a friend before you can send them Snapchats

Unless it has changed recently, I think anyone can receive Snapchats until disabled. At least, that's how it was when I opened an account a few weeks back. That was discovered when I received an unsolicited snapchat from a name I didn't recognize (I have no friends on the service aside from the default teamsnapchat).

Rather than risk viewing something regrettable, I deleted the "message" and quickly found the setting to disallow unknown users from messaging me. :)

quick tip for the author: If you are doing a 2x2 grid, the convention is you want better to be up and to the right. So you want snapchat to be in the upper right quadrant. I was initially confused when I glanced at your table and thought "Morse code is the best solution?"

Better in this case is subjective.

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