Snap Out of It: Kids Aren't Reliable Tech Predictors

I agree with the headline, but the argument is crap.

Kids aren't reliable predictors because of a few fundamental lifestyle differences with adults: they don't spend much of their day working away from their friends, and their social network is usually within physically short range. For kids, everything in their lives happens within a short space of time within a small radius.

What works for kids may never work for adults, including the adults they will become, and vice versa.

So it's hard to tell whether the popularity of something amongst kids is a sign of a social change, or just a kids thing. (The latter not necessarily making it a fad, it could work for multiple generations of kids.)

Of course the even less reliable interpreters of such signs are old school dead tree journalists...

Other things that kids have flocked to that haven't quite panned out as long-term, large-impact businesses: Formspring, Livejournal, Xanga, Chatroulette, Fart sound apps, snap bracelets

There's nothing inherently wise about what a kid thinks is a worthwhile thing to do. I can only guess that those who target them know the power of peer pressure, so if you get many kids roped into your product, then you'll get many, many kids -- and presumably, their parents. Other than that, hard to see the wisdom in pre-adult crowds.

As a 16 year old, the main use for Snapchat is a photo sharing service. Students take a picture of themselves, caption it, and send it to their friend(s). Think of IM but with a photo attached to each message. However, the conversation is based off of a photo, and only used for short conversations. Awkward phrasing but get what I mean?

However, at the same time, teens are more willing to send racy photos if sent over snapchat. They just view this as an added bonus, not the core feature though.

Any minute now, all of this inconvenient, annoying change will stop and things will go back to the way they used to be, when adults writing for newspapers headquartered in New York decided what people think!

Something is wrong with the premise of this article.

It goes on to say that most companies that mad it huge were not "initially popular" with young people. But that is a bit of a sleight of hand for two reasons: (1) many of those businesses were <invented> or revolutionized by young people or students; and (2) it ignores the role that young people played in the discovery/momentum/tipping point to their widespread adoption. In otherwords, the two most critical parts of their value realization. Lastly (3) is the category of items that were or are only relevant in the land where (1) and (2) already happend. These are essentially "derivative works" in terms of their core value. Things like LinkedIn (derives value from FB proven use case); and Gmail (widely adopted and propogated through google) etc. come readily to mind. Out of context, they would likely be worth an order of magnitude less than they are perceived today.

Once you eliminate all that, there is really not much left in the article. The premise and idea may still have value, but whatever value that is must be found using different examples and explanartions, IMHO.

"How many of the products and services that you use every day were created or first used primarily by people under 25?"

And the author goes onto mention how Google, youtube, twitter, gmail, pinterest were never targeted under 25.

Maybe so, but under 25 were certainly the early adopters of them.

The author failed to make a decent case for his argument befitting of the link baiting headline.

> There is only one problem with elevating young people's tastes this way: Kids are often wrong. There is little evidence to support the idea that the youth have any closer insight on the future than the rest of us do.

And we grew out as kids and we actually were the one pushed social network and youtube to its fullness. High school kids and young college undergraduates are kids right? I remember Youtube back in 2005 when I was a freshman in HS.

I agree that buying snapchat is a risky investment. In fact, I am not really sure if that's going to make Facebook stronger. What is Facebook lacking? One of my friends today said "John I like the new Facebook messenger update. It's pretty!" I agree with my friend the messenger app is getting better. But what is taking Facebook down?

It's the way we share photo and videos. Frankly as someone who tries to become a successful security engineer, I can be lazy and agree to FB tracking me as long as my money isn't stolen. I can accept that and try to keep as little sensitive personal data like whether I am still a virgin away from the Internet. I can do that. Kids like me just want to enjoy socializing with friends and the Internet as much as possible.

So if you own things like Instgram or whatever social app you have, integrate that fully into your product. Why is GIF still not supported in Facebook? I heard they used to support gif in the early days of Facebook.

I am not saying there is an easy solution. I don't know and don't think anyone has any idea what would be the coolest yet functional comfortable interface Facebook should have. We need to focus on what people want to see. Facebook, GMail they are just becoming everyday's gadget. It is not exciting. Snapshot is exciting, maybe. Maybe it will continue but I know people soon or later will change to another one. We need to look at what FB messenger can't do that snapchat can.

I think kids can be reliable tech predictors, but you have to look at the service and why the kids like it. Is it something that also translates reasonably with adults?

Facebook started with college kids, and the value seemed obvious to me at the time. I was not surprised at all that people continued to use it after college and that other adults joined when it opened up.

Snapchat on the other hand, doesn't seem to have the same kind of value proposition. The thing it seems to be used for is teenagers sending things they don't want adults to see. As a general rule, this is something they will grow out of, and not something that will spill over. I have no use for snapchat, and I'm quite confident that I never will.

Now, obviously Snapchat has a lot of users and they are sending a lot of messages, but that doesn't mean it will grow into mainstream adult usage. Lucky for them, we keep making new teenagers every day.

I think the author doesn't know how to prove a hypothesis that's why the article is confusing.

He tries to prove that kids are not predictors of successful startups, but then he cites successful startups that were popular with adults. That's not how you make a prove, you can't make a prove of x causing y by showing that z causes y.

For this article to make sense, the author has to find out if the ratio of successful startups that were initially popular with kids is higher that the one of successful startups that were initially popular with adults.

Example: If 30% of startups that were initially popular with kids became successful and 42% of startups that were initially popular with adults became successful, then his hypothesis holds true. That's how you prove a hypothesis, but not at all the way the author did it.

I've been following fashion bloggers more closely as I believe they are a huge part of the success of services like Tumblr and Pinterest. I can remember when I first heard of Pinterest was because some blogs my girlfriend followed posted links to these new-fangled "photo pinboards" and a year later everyone was using it.

I'm not saying that fashion bloggers or kids for that matter are always right but perhaps there's something about the environment in college that makes services that are catered to these people much more likely to spread (the desire to fit in, to look cool with the next new thing, etc.). On the fashion front, tastemakers will be tastemakers, as much as the HN crowd may not be the target audience, fashion/style are important to a lot of folks.

What this means is that kids' tastes change and as they grow up, so will their tastes. Being popular with kids does not the next Facebook make. Instead, you are more likely to be ChatRoulette, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc.

Please cite examples of technologies that kids embraced and did not become successful.

I'm never really been a fan of Farhad Manjoo's writing when he was at Slate and now he's jumped to WSJ. Hopefully his replacement at Slate is better.

I love cranky old guy columns, especially when the author is self-aware enough to point it out. Very nicely done.

Having said that, the problem we have with startups is stated rather simply: startups do not succeed or fail based on somebody's ability to argue whether they make sense or not. That's why these beauty contests masquerading as business plan competitions or swimming with the sharks or whatever are such bullshit. It's not about whether you can make a reasoned argument one way or the other. It's about market traction. That's it.

Now everybody and their brother wants to play armchair epidemiologist. What are the "risk" factors associated with startups? Do the youth really play out? What should team sizes be? And so on. And no doubt some of these tidbits of data are actually showing promise.

But arguments like this always fall flat, which, incidentally, is one of the reasons that HN "rate my startup" comments need to be taken with a huge grain of salt. You don't reason your way to success. You test your way there.

How do you think this would affect Snapchat?: Apple or Google adding a self-destruct feature to text/picture messages.

Interested in getting some opinions.

Of course kids are good predictors. They have time and enthusiasm to discover something new that will allow them to communicate, alternative channel. When it becomes mainstream, they will leave, like they are leaving fb.

Does SnapChat is really worth 3bn or more, nobody knows for sure.

Am I alone in the conspiracy theory that SnapChat's founders are just pranking us for the heck of it? "We're 23, we can code just fine, the worst thing that can happen if this all goes south is that we get a job somewhere."

The article reads like a jealous 30-something founder/ceo/evangelist/whatever_is_trendy writing off snap-chat as a 'boy-band'. Facebook offering $3 Billion shows that snap-chat is indeed starting to eat facebook's lunch (future users)...you know facebook, the company geared toward teens, college kids, and in the last few years, older adults. So maybe the article is right, kids aren't indicators toward the future of tech (kindle, ipod, whatever), but they are indicators of the multi-billion dollar market that exists for them that Facebook current resides within. The author needs to throw out the "i know more than you" attitude and look at the market that snap-chat has either created (facebook not gearing toward teens) or is stealing.

This should especially ring with HN, as everything i've read here is about how if you have some crazy idea there's probably a market for it.

Ehh, I feel like this is written from the perspective of the investment industry, who foolishly pumped money into the incredibly-overvalued Facebook IPO.

No dismissive hand-waving can account for the fact that Facebook has little room to grow, and next to no goodwill among younger users. Anecdotally, I can say that by far the largest users of facebook on my feed are 50-somethings posting the sort of libertarian pseudo-intellectual shit I used to get forwarded to me in emails by my grandparents.

Kids might not be reliable tech predictors but if they aren't adopting your product with no room to grow outside the Kid Demographic, then good luck to you.