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Comment by jmathai | Hacker News Reader

This has been circulating in my mind for some time now. It seems to me that Silicon Valley is so obsessed with "home run" start ups that we've lost track of caring if they make our lives better.

I'm not necessarily making a moral judgement on Snapchat but I do think it is something to consider. You can see the same mentality around Chatroulette. I realize the value of something is not concrete at first; Twitter comes to mind. I think we all agree that Twitter plays an important role in society today, yet that was unclear a few years ago.

As a society, are we rallying behind an app that helps people engage in extramarital affairs as this post suggests? Without getting into morality, don't we agree that affairs impact not just the two participants but the families surrounding them?

Are we simply justifying our obsession with "success" by attributing some theoretical benefit when the drawbacks seem obvious?

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As a society, are we really rallying behind an app that helps people engage in extramarital affairs as this post suggests? Without getting into morality don't we agree that affairs impact not just the two participants but the families surrounding them?

I use SnapChat daily and its starting to cannibalize a lot of my other methods of communication: its fast, more personal, more affective, and a lot more fun to use. I only have ~forty SnapChat friends compared to the ~1200 on Facebook or ~300 phone numbers I have, and it makes it a lot more intimate: you're not gonna send a goofy face of yourself to that study partner from freshman Biology who you never talk to.

(Honestly, it reminds me of what Path could be if Path wasn't so pretentious.)

Oh, and email helps people commit extramarital affairs, too.

I'm sure there are useful scenarios like yours. But that alone doesn't magically make the app have a net positive impact. I'm not claiming it is positive or negative but rather something to consider.

The comment about email isn't really logical. Crow bars help you kill people but that doesn't mean we should treat them the same way as guns. I'm sure there is a technical term for it (logical fallacy) but that's besides my point and I'm on mobile :).

This is exactly my point.

>> This is exactly my point.

Not sure I follow. Are you saying that "crow bars kill people too, so we shouldn't have legislation for guns that don't also apply to crow bars?"

If so, we probably disagree fundamentally on debates - which is fine but an important point.

My point is that SnapChat is a crowbar, not a gun. A lot of talk about SnapChat revolves around affairs and sexting because that gets more page views, but there's really no proof that people are using it primarily for amoral reasons. The totality of people I know use it just for goofy temporal messages (and, yeah, occasional sexts to their S.O., but nothing they wouldn't otherwise do via SMS)

I think youre arguing against someone with an agenda, they cant possibly be this stupid.

If the majority of SnapChat users are using it to have extra-marital affairs, there may be something to it. SnapChat wasn't created because we as a society were lacking in communication tools.

Alright, I'll go there: What is wrong with developing an app that is used for extra-marital affairs, even if that is its explicit purpose?

For the sake of argument, lets just say that extra-marital affairs being immoral is axiomatic (I don't agree, but that is not going to be a productive discussion). The two people who made vows are the ones with the moral obligation, not the rest of society. Every individual third party is not part of that arrangement, and who are they to second guess somebody who is in that agreement? Both are consenting adults, there is no justification for us telling them what to do. If they want to promise each other something, and then go back on that promise, that is entirely between them.

Offspring.

> As a society, are we rallying behind an app that helps people engage in extramarital affairs as this post suggests? Without getting into morality, don't we agree that affairs impact not just the two participants but the families surrounding them?

I think that line of reasoning is projecting far too much onto a photo sharing service. I use it to share silly photos with friends. Just because someone else uses it to conduct an extramarital affair doesn't make the service per se immoral.

Yeah. I'm not making any moral judgements or conclusions. Just stating an observation. I definitely don't think Snapchat in and of itself is immoral. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't consider the net effects of the app.

It could be that Snapchat is terribly useful.

Just because you are cheating on your wife doesn't mean that everyone else is too.

Not sure what this means.

> This has been circulating in my mind for some time now. It seems to me that Silicon Valley is so obsessed with "home run" start ups that we've lost track of caring if they make our lives better.

You're just now coming to terms with this? Jesus Christ, we're doomed.

>I'm not necessarily making a moral judgement on Snapchat but I do think it is something to consider. You can see the same mentality around Chatroulette. I realize the value of something is not concrete at first; Twitter comes to mind. I think we all agree that Twitter plays an important role in society today, yet that was unclear a few years ago.

I tend to assign the values the other way around; Snapchat seems like something people get a lot of fun from (and I don't mean affairs, just friends sending each other pictures they don't want to post publicly). It's not a "worthy cause", but it's a moral good, possibly the greatest such thing.

Conversely twitter seems like a net negative; the main way it impacts me is that news organizations now seem to think it's ok to publish comments from random people as if they were news. And people in fora like this seem to think they can dismiss an idea by linking to a witty tweet about it. It's a dumbing down of discourse and I'm seeing no upside; I think I would genuinely have a better life, and be happier, if twitter didn't exist.

Interesting points. I agree that "fun" is a valuable thing, or can be anyways.

Twitter isn't perfect but one thing if does is to give a voice to those who didn't have one before. I'm thinking specifically of oppressive governments and the affected citizens or folks being harassed by law enforcement.

I hope that benefit outweighs the media's misuse of it.

>Twitter isn't perfect but one thing if does is to give a voice to those who didn't have one before. I'm thinking specifically of oppressive governments and the affected citizens or folks being harassed by law enforcement.

Does it really help with that? I'd think for anything important you'd want to spend more than 160 characters explaining it; long-form blogs and tumblr seem like a more effective way to spread such stories. E.g. the report of events in Turkey that was on HN a couple of days ago was fascinating, and I suspect quite influential - and I don't think it would've been anywhere near as effective as a tweet.

I think both have their place. Twitter serves as a real time stream of events. Longer form posts are useful in a different way.

Say, abused/neglected person looking for a way out, but not feeling safe without some sort of social support outside of marriage. Don't be too quick to judge.

Both Facebook and Snapchat were created by students in college to suddenly explode in popularity.

I'm definitely not a Mark Zuckerberg fan, but imagine one of your hobby projects suddenly turning into this phenomenon, when you probably just created it for a certain social circle.

I think we should cut "incidental start-ups" some slack for a while, but Snapchat definitely need to do something about their privacy, especially since it goes against the entire value proposition.

> I think we should cut "incidental start-ups" some slack for a while

Agree. I'm just not sure we're taking the "effect" of a start up into consideration when we put them up on pedestals.

Perhaps there isn't interest in the "effect", which is what I was alluding to.

"I think we all agree that Twitter plays an important role in society today"

Uh, how does Twitter play an important role in society?

Subjective, I guess. But many movements in countries with oppressive regimes use Twitter heavily to spread information.

That's very nice, but also very localized.

In most other countries I'd value Twitter's contribution to society about as much as McDonalds commercials...

The Oscar Grant shooting by police in a BART station in Oakland, CA is another of many examples. I don't think it's localized at all.

I'm not saying this makes up a majority of tweets. Most tweets are pretty meaningless, IMO.

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