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Comment by greghinch | Hacker News Reader

Ha, I still think Vine and Pinterest are stupid ideas. But, Pinterest at least has done a good job at making lazy, vapid, narcissism easy, and there's certainly demand for that. Not sure how you monetize it (is Pinterest?), but they have a lot of users.

I'm not sure Vine is yet a "success". I don't see a lot of activity there yet. My (completely biased and limited) litmus test for social apps is to see how many of my non-techie friends get on board and how quickly. With Facebook, Instagram, and even Pinterest, that was pretty quick. Vine seems to still be lagging. It's too much work for the payoff for most people, is my gut feeling.

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lazy, vapid, narcissism

Care to elaborate? My interpretation of Pinterest is really "visual social bookmarking."

Sure.

The main use of Pinterest is to show your friends and everyone else what good taste you have. "Look at this collection of bridal dresses I like!" "Check out all these vacation spots I want to go to!"

If you just wanted to collect photos of these things to give yourself ideas, you wouldn't need to share it with everyone. So you have an easy way to show everyone how cool all the stuff you like is, and by extension you are, with very little effort on your own part to actually create or realize (i.e. actually do work) those things into being. Sure there are elements of this across all social networks, but Pinterest has really distilled it down to the lowest common denominator point and click.

More of an indictment of society than of Pinterest itself I suppose. Pinterest or something like it was bound to show up sooner or later.

I can't help but feel this is just an uncharitable way to describe sharing ideas in general. My fiancee and I have gotten a lot of good use out of other people's good taste on Pinterest — we've found outfits to steal for the wedding, decorating ideas and lots of tasty recipes. How is this any more vulgar than sharing ideas in any other context?

I think my sister actually uses it more like Reddit, as a source of interesting (mostly funny) things to look at.

Lagging?? Vine has grown fastest out of all of the social networks you mentioned within my group of non-techie friends. All I see on my Twitter feed is Vine links. All anyone talks about in person is whether we're going to 'Vine' whatever we're doing. Maybe this is just my group of friends though (early 20s).

Will Sasso alone has over 250k followers and the app has been live for like, a little over two months now? I'd say it's growing pretty rapidly.

While I can't speak for your personal experiences I've noticed that Vine is becoming increasingly popular with my High School classmates (I'm a sophomore). Many of my friends I wouldn't necessarily consider "techie" found Vine and are enjoying it. Maybe age is playing a role in its adoption?

That is entirely possible. I think it still comes down to how much work it is for the payoff, but perhaps the payoff is bigger as a high school student where these things can have more of an effect on social status than they do to the late 20s/early 30s set*

* I hope that doesn't come off as too condescending to HS students, I certainly don't mean it to be!

>* I hope that doesn't come off as too condescending to HS students, I certainly don't mean it to be!

I think that it's exactly the right kind of condescending to high school students. An environment where something like Vine can significantly effect your popularity is probably so toxic that only scum can breathe in it.

That didn't come off as condescending to me at all, I appreciate the comment. I'm not entirely sure if my classmates use it to gain popularity or simply use it for fun but then again I'm not exactly "popular" myself so I'm not sure.

Look back at every social network success, and you'll see this kind of confused, dismissive condescension, before, during, and even after the product is adopted by millions of normal humans.

Vine is a good idea and doesn't really infringe on your privacy so I approve of it. Pinterest is just pointless.

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