Hacker News Reader

$4bn for an easily replaceable service that is little more than Microsoft Paint duct taped to a disposable camera?

Oh please!

Sure you can recreate the app pretty easily which, you can also do for most services (this does not mean scaling to the users they serve) but that is not the value of the service.

It's also why 'hackers' typically don't make great investors see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

View on HN

Haha you caught me. Had to poke a little fun at Snapchat after a long day of writing about such a simple little service :)

Snapchat is firmly entrenched in its spot due to its first-to-move position (see Facebook's failed "Poke" project) but the point is that if it tries to change the service in an annoying manner then there is nothing to stop people from moving to an identical (or better) service that does not annoy them.

To be fair, the vast majority of the comments in that link are really positive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com