Hacker News Reader

Comment by moinnadeem | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

The draw to snapchat seems to be the ephemeral nature of the communications. Both Facebook and Google have taken the path that everything you ever put online should be saved forever and shared with everyone.

Snapchat is very much the opposite Pictures and conversations are with specific people, and meant to be thrown away. It seems like this leads people to be more open, more interesting and less worried about inappropriate (or drunken) messages. Screenshots can be a problem, but it's definitely not on the same level of risk as drunken Facebook posts.

Everything you ever send to Snapchat is likely saved forever.

I wonder why more people don't look into Facebook Poke, which explicitly guarantees the encryption keys to your content will be deleted after two days, unless there's some kind of legal order to the contrary.

Because people don't trust Facebook when it comes to privacy.

Thanks for the perspective. Understanding how things are perceived by others is an incredibly hard thing to do.

> Students take a picture of themselves

Is that how kids use it? Me and my friends are a lot older but we also use it as a photo sharing service - for sharing random stuff from your day, not on yourself.

So, it sounds like you're saying a fundamental use case is "sending illegal pictures", which seems like it will eventually result in a devastating lawsuit / prosecution.

He didn't say that at all

That's not at all what he's saying. He said that teens user SnapChat to send photos that aren't super important or need to be shared in the future.

Er, "not the core feature" seems clear enough.

That might happen if their privacy/security systems fail and everybody's dick pics are exposed. They don't store data and probably actively purge it, but they might be eavesdropped.

That's almost certainly already happening, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com