Snapchat usage triples among teens in the last year | Hacker News Reader

Snapchat usage triples among teens in the last year

survata.com

51 pointssouthkey25 comments

Only 300 teenage respondents? That's not enough to ensure such a conclusion, especially when considering percentages of the whole.

According to the raw data download, there are 365 data points, but 104 answered "I don't use any of these" which are stated to be excluded, so the actual amount of teenage respondents is 261?

You defininately need more than 300. Also you need to make sure you have people from different areas.

One school may be very facebook heavy while another may mainly use twitter.

Hi Max, Survata co-founder here. The 365 respondents were used as the denominator for calculating the % of teens that use a service (like Snapchat) regularly. So that's the sample size for the first chart shown in the link. (The margin of error on 365 respondents is about 5%). Naturally, we had to exclude the respondents who used no social services from the questions that asked about their favorite social service, like the second chart shown in the link.

Hope that helps.

How does 365 data points give your conclusions any sort of statistical significance? Snapchat's numbers are allegedly over 30M, Facebook's are over 1.2B and Instagram's are 150M.

I suggest reading "How to Lie with Statistics"[1]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...

Edit: I guess that sounded a little harsh. No doubt, Snapchat's growth has been explosive and if this was just another blog-spam post about that fact, I'd let it be. But you're selling a statistical software! I'd expect better from people who know what they're doing. Also, "How to Lie with Statistics" is a really good book, should be required reading for anyone dealing with numbers. Did not mean that as an attack on your product.

Gallup's daily tracking polls, which offer a +-4% margin of error, are based of 1000 data points (insert complaint about appeal to authority here). While 365 is significantly lower than that, there is nothing wrong with using the data to produce a value and a margin of error/confidence.

Hi Nathan, Thanks for your comment. And no offense taken. :)

Most people are surprised how "few" respondents it takes to get to 5% margin of error at 95% confidence levels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_of_error#Different_conf...

In this case, .98/sqrt(365) = 5.1%

So, perhaps counterintuitively, 300-400 respondents gives good read on large populations (like Snapchat users...or the US population!).

Assuming the respondents are uniformly randomly chosen, it takes surprisingly few people to get a pretty high confidence interval. I'm not convinced that the respondents are uniform, but I expect that there is a sufficient distribution that the results are still interesting. 3x vs. 1.5x seems like a small difference to me, but I am not an investor or user, so....

Yes, this exactly. The assumption of uniform distribution is not one to be taken lightly.

Nevermind teens. I'm 42. I use it with my adult siblings, cousins and friends. It's a delightful way to stay in touch. Sometimes it's a picture of my breakfast, or the weather outside, or our pets, or whatever other amusing moment is going on in our day that we'd laugh about if we were together. The ephemeral nature of the pictures and the ability to scribble on them is just delightful fun.

This is exactly what makes Snapchat fun and addictive. It takes all the friction out of taking photos and boils it right down. With Instagram, you spend a lot of time taking the right photo, the right lighting, the right filter, the right caption, etc. All of this is gone with Snapchat, because you know it'll be gone. People are happy to share slightly embarrassing stuff, like a mouthful of burger or no makeup.

Selecting who receives is easier, too, because you can uncheck some people. Instagram doesn't have that option, I'd need to create a new list with Facebook, and group texting is a lot more work.

I agree with all your points re: taking the friction out of the equation. However, I think it's more to do with the fact that you share with individuals rather than to a feed that makes the difference. Not so much the fact that it will sort of vanish after it gets viewed (less so now that they can get replayed)

When you share to a feed you'e sending it out for everyone to see. You want to know that people saw it and with services like Instagram and Facebook this is done via commenting and Liking/Favoriting.

With Snapchat you fire and forget. No one needs to like the picture in order for you to feel any sort of satisfaction. The only indicator you get is that it was viewed at all - and with the sort of content that gets sent over Snapchat, that's really all the information you need anyways.

TL;DR: I think the "choose indiciduals to send to" model is more important than the "they get erased" aspect. Of course, the vanishing part of it is what got Snapchat to become popular in the first place so it would be wrong to say they would have seen the same amount of success without that feature. However, at this point, I don't think that is what makes users keep using the service.

Out of curiosity, why not use text messaging or WhatsApp? Both have more options that Snapchat.

It's faster and the ephemerality aspect doesn't exist on text or WhatsApp.

I've found Wickr to be more secure and comes from a company that really seems to care about users. Where Snapchat is an illusion of ephemeral messaging, Wickr is the real deal.

The illusion is enough. It's the concept of ephemeral messaging that matters and set the context of how you use it.

Of course it did.

What's more appealing, a socially acceptable method for your girlfriend to send nude photos of herself to your phone that are then removed (allegedly).

OR Facebook, which is just reaching popularity with your parents...

Facebook.

No need for "allegedly". It is now a feature that Snapchats can be replayed. Users are able to pick one Snap per day that they want to replay.

it has all the benefits of social media (instant, low-friction communication) and none of the privacy concerns of faceboob, g+, etc.

unless of course we discover one day that snapchat messages all live on in some secret db ...

Considering that all un-viewed Snapchat's have to be stored, there's no need for a secret db. I've heard a rumor that snaps are stored in memecache and they are running in to scaling pains with the amount of un-viewed pictures stored in memory.

I wonder if they drop unread pictures after a certain length of time? it would seem sensible and fit with the ephemeral nature of the mesdages

Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't a whole shit ton of Snapchat users passwords and the like stolen in 2013/2014?

usernames & pws have to be stored of course... but I though the whole appeal of snapchat was that messages would self-destruct? i.e. communication between users is not permanent? (except in the brains of the sender and recipient, i.e. just like human oral communication)

well assuming no wiretapping ;)

I'm still not sure if there's a way to justify the lofty valuations for Snapchat that were discussed recently. Can anyone actually explain that well?

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