How Teens Really Use Apps | Hacker News Reader

How Teens Really Use Apps

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69 pointsweitingliu67 comments

As a 25 yeah old I feel like I've completely missed this second wave of social media.

- Facebook is all old people that post horribly made memes and highly ignorant content.

- Tumblr is...what is tumblr again?

- No one I know uses Snapchat...plus what would I even send to other people "hey, bro! check out this cool bowl of cereal I'm eating".

- I've been with my significant other for 6 years so tinder, etc. is something I've never had to use.

- I do use Twitter.

- I also use instagram but only as an artistic outlet, not just random photos of daily life. I have a clear strategy for how I use my instagram account.

- I browse reddit but most of the time the quality of the content is extremely low.

- I use more industry specific social media like Github and Dribbble but are those even considered social media? Is HN social media?

I'm hitting 30 this year and I can definitely relate to this. I feel like I'm in social network limbo, and nothing really caters to me.

Just to add my own data point, I'm 26 years old:

- Facebook is alive and well, even among the < 20 crowd I know. I love using it.

- Several of my friends use Tumblr, but I don't get it. It looks like a mess to me; I have trouble spotting the content I'm supposed to look at.

- A lot of my friends were on snapchat when it first became popular, and the content they sent me was sometimes hilarious, but mostly boring. Most people I know have lost interest.

- I've never been able to get into Twitter.

- I LOVE reddit. I'm one of those weird people that finds the default front page hilarious (granted, it does get old after a while), but the more time I spend on it, the more I appreciate how it allows me to connect to people I never could have met in real life. For example, I was curious what police officers thought about a recent shooting in my hometown, so I posted to a law enforcement subreddit and got perspectives from all over the world, including from officers in New Zealand where they don't regularly carry firearms. Another time I was discussing SSL on the redditdev sub, and a reddit engineer jumped in and explained why reddit doesn't force https (infrastructure capacity reasons).

Care to share the link about the unarmed officers in New Zealand?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLEO/comments/2ys2cb/is_it_ever_j...

Here's the conversation with the NZ officer that responded: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLEO/comments/2ys2cb/is_it_ever_j...

- Facebook is infact full of old people. People are stuck using it because most people have it.

- Tumblr is twitter with better photo/video/audio focus, and no 128 char limit.

- Snapchat is a messaging program with a 'in the moment' or 'hey check out what's going on over here' type focus. Sorta sharing a portal into your current situation with friends.

- Reddit works better if you unsubscribe from the +100,000 subscriber reddits. Signal:Noise degrades with the larger groups. Smaller niche or alternative subreddits work much better.

> - Facebook is infact full of old people. People are stuck using it because most people have it.

Yeah, and most people I know really only use it for chat, and only out of convenience.

I will occasionally use FB to post pictures and content to curate my public image in case people want to search for me, and most of the people I see on news feed appear to be doing the same thing. The rest are posting stupid content which they will regret making public in 10 years.

Personally, I'm still trying to find a social networking tool which provides truly transient, private communication which is securely deleted and not logged or mined by the company providing the service. Snapchat seems to come closest to this model, but the fact that it is limited to mobile and it's weak encryption prevent it from being used for actually meaningful conversations.

try diaspora. its missing a chat service, but skype and others cover that. missing a photo management service, but no possibility of security sweeps on account of its distributed nature. No adverts or spam and secure as you want, you only share with whatever aspect you like, public, private or with groups.. Simple

Diaspora, much as I like the concept, is full of woo and crazy.

Not quite sure how Facebook is in fact full of old people. If all your friends are "old people", then your facebook is full of "old people." If your friends are "young people", how do the "old people" bother you?

Facebook is what you make of it. If every person you've ever met is your "Friend" then it'll be noisy. If someone posts stuff too much, block them or even unfriend. It's hard to understand complaints when they literally allow you to manage who you're friends with.

All social networks have value, if 1.) they enable forms of communication you find valuable, and 2.) you can find the people that broadcast relevant information.

Personally I find niche social sites to be far more valuable than general sites.

HN is social news for technical audiences. Reddit is social news curation across different demographics. GH is social software development. Facebook is Linkdin for my personal life. Tumblr is lazy blogging. Very noisy. Snapchat is faster picture texting. For many people this really is just cereal-bowl-boring. Instagram is photography made easy. I'd probably use this if I had more friends into real photography, but as-is it's just more cereal bowl pics.

There's always noise but niche networks encourages higher quality because people care about the niche. Social noise is much less acceptable there. General sites will always just be "random shit no one wants to hear about in person".

> "hey, bro! check out this cool bowl of cereal I'm eating"

People who use snap chat have more interesting lives than you.

Well I think I do cool and exciting things aside from eating cereal. I just have no urge to share that with people I'm not with. I personally can't see how anyone would care about the specifics of what I'm doing so much that I need to send them an instant photograph or video. I mean maybe close family and friends but I wouldn't use an app like snapchat for that. I'd just text it.

To me I just don't see the point of snapchat, but that's fine. It's quite obvious that im not their intended audience.

Flawed methodology. If you use Instagram 21% of the time, Facebook 20% of the time, and other apps less than that, the study puts you firmly into Instagram bucket despite you using Facebook with the similar frequency. There is no accounting for people who use more than one app, which is what most people do.

I'm old so I've missed the Snapchat wave...but I've slowly been getting into Instagram, after having initially dismissed it since I used to spend enough time on Flickr. Most of the students I know use Instagram regularly, as do many of my friends my age, even the ones who were once big FB users and have since dropped out.

I like Instagram's "feel", and I imagine Snapchat's is similar. Its main point of sharing is tied to a low-friction hardware feature (using the mobile camera, then picking a filter) and so just posting something, anything, is easy. Unlike a banal Tweet, a banal Instagram photo just sits there to be looked at, and so you don't have to worry too much about being judged harshly (with Twitter, most novices fear that the format constrains their "deep" thoughts to superficialities...which is partially true)...And even if photos are worth a thousand words, their domain is relatively constrained. It's hard to stumble onto political/divisive content the way you can on Facebook or Twitter, and there's less room for content-sharers to bloviate about their lives (since some of them are confident in their visual skill to think that their photo alone says it all). You can just lazily browse the stream, contribute something if you feel like it, then get back to life. So for an older generation that grew up in the age when blogging was hot...there's a kind of appeal in having online social networks being so loose and "shallow"...then you can get back to real life and not be so obsessed over how all of your high school friends are now married with two beautiful babies and living in a perfect house according to their Facebook feed.

The effect of this ephemeralness is probably different to the younger crowd, though, who may have less incentive/discipline to peel away from their phones.

I really don't understand why teens would need facebook, and why people are always surprised they don't use it more. They see most of their friends on a daily basis. They have different communication needs. Maybe once they get to college I would expect that to change.

Relavent quote from article:

"While talking to several members of the teenage\young adult age bracket, it became clear that the above results did not mean teenagers did not use Facebook. Facebook, even if not their “primary” social network, continues to play a big role. It is, however, more of a utilitarian role than before."

So Facebook has become akin to your public "phone book" listing for younger users.

I don't think it's a matter of how often they "see" their friends, as Snapchat, Instagram and other app usage is very high so clearly - they want to connect in this manor - just not on Facebook.

>So Facebook has become akin to your public "phone book" listing for younger users.

This makes sense to me. I am 21 and "use Facebook" every day (i.e. open the Messenger app). Almost everyone I know is on there and I am on several group chats with both online and real friends. It's very useful.

Haven't logged in the actual Facebook site in a while, though.

Facebook is practically a utility these days. It's not just your friends on it, it's your family, distant relatives, etc.

That makes it a lot less cool, but it also means its position is safe for now.

Teen here.

I don't see 95% of my friends on a daily basis (even good friends). Facebook is incredibly useful for managing events, messaging others (my main use), groups (school and interest groups), and keeping up with what's going on in my friends lives (Snapchat and Instagram don't really solve this).

Former teen here. When I was a teen, we used MySpace and slowly transitioned to facebook. So why did I spend so much time on it despite basically adding only people I saw at school?

- you don't see people every day at school. or if you do, your time is limited with them - texting gets you so far but facebook is not a direct communication channel anyways, never was. It's a "let me tell everyone something!" type of thing. MySpace was the same thing - FB/MySpace let you post pictures. Sending pics is still cumbersome and you can't just "blast it". Instagram, obviously, is better at that and definitely my new app of choice (and SnapChat too but Snapchat has less of my friends on it).

Idk, just some thoughts.

If MySpace was still relevant when you were a teen, and you transitioned to Facebook, then it sounds like you were just using the best tools available. Nowadays there is more out there for teens, so I'm not sure how your (or my) experience really helps in cracking this nut.

"Former teen here" is my new self-introduction in all settings.

The Tumblr part where the kids are saying "I'm a huge nerd" or "I'm a big geek" made me unnecessarily angry. Why did being a nerd have to become a trendy thing? I remember when my love of C++ and Calculus wasn't something to brag about. I guess I'm just old.

I don't think it's a trendy thing, I think the etymology of the word "nerd" has evolved to mean that you have a deep and detailed understanding of a particular subject.

Perhaps Tumblr, in the eyes of teens, has a steeper learning curve than spewing out pictures with Instagram/Snapchat and being adept with the platform indicates you have better technical capabilities.

Either way, I don't think it's a bad thing that the word "nerd" has changed in this manner.

Are you silently protesting the spelling of tumblr or was that just a typo?

Just a typo. I fixed it.

I think the etymology of the word "nerd" has evolved to mean that you have a deep and detailed understanding of a particular subject.

I more see it used as a way to signal that you are interested in a subject relatively more than whatever main group you identify with. So someone would call themselves a "book nerd" even if they only read a couple books a year, because most of their friends don't read at all.

> I think the etymology of the word "nerd" has evolved to mean that [...]

I don't think the definition of the word "etymology" has evolved to mean "definition" (or "current usage").

Nerds developed our own culture. Now it's being aggressively colonized by the mainstream culture and the actual nerds being sidelined again.

It became trendy when "nerds" and ostensibly nerd-related things started making tons of money. Now it's mainly signaling: you can be a nerd for knowing some secret Facebook shortcut.

hah, no kidding. The term is thrown around so easily now that in most circles it's lost it's meaning and resorted to someone with a very basic understanding of anything.

It's not a trendy thing. Tumblr is, in fact, a platform for outcasts and niche fandoms that would otherwise be ridiculed on any mainstream sites or even anonymous sites like 4chan or reddit. They are using the words "nerd" and "geek" in the original, correct sense of the word. It is you who is using these words wrong. "Geek" means "freak". "Nerd" means "social outcast". It does not mean "I can code and know math".

By your definition these people should not be proud to declare themselves nerds. They are, however, proudly declaring themselves as nerds meaning it's something they see as a badge of honor. I would suggest you look up what the word means before telling me I'm using it incorrectly. Have a nice day.

I think it's important to remember that Instagram is a part of Facebook. That bumps their market share up quite a bit.

WhatsApp is also owned by Facebook and this will further bump up their market share.

Yes and considering they are trying to get snapchat too, it's pretty clear they knew early on the right strategy to own the market.

I wonder, with a snapchat merger, if they would run into monopoly issues with the FTC.

Images like that concert photo really are unnerving. Instead of actually just having fun, people have become more concerned with letting everyone know how much "fun" they're having. It's so strange to me. "See how cool I am? Aren't I special?!?!"

Or, people are actually having fun, and want to share and remember the experience. The two are not mutually exclusive, and most people enjoy looking back on a video or picture they took at a (possibly shared) event or experience, and can recreate or re-experience it that way. I think your cynical 'Aren't I special' motivation is going to be way off the mark for most of those people at the concert. How can you be special in a crowd of tens of thousands doing exactly the same thing?

No one wants to ACTUALLY remember the experience / recreate it. That's purely a justification of the vanity.

And cynical? I don't think so and I'll explain why.

It goes way beyond events like this concert. It's the notion of publishing every aspect of your life just so others will notice it.

I once saw on facebook where a girl had posted an image of her family all huddled together, grievously hugging: "Just found out that my grandma has cancer." Who decides that's the time to step back and snap a photo for social media? And why, to get "likes"? Maybe add a filter somewhere in between.

My brother saw the same thing as that concert image, but at a funeral.

It's ALL to get noticement and it weirds me out.

There's definitely a certain breed of people who get off more on showing other people that they're AT a concert/event rather then participating in the experience of the event.

It's evident that some people express little interest in the music being played, but rather enjoy taking selfies with the artists in the background.

I disagree. There are possibly a vanishingly small number of those people but, due to the high cost of concert tickets and the duration of concerts, I am pretty confident in asserting that 'selfies' taken there are merely a side-issue, and people are there because they are interested in the music and the experience. And of course the concert-goers want to record themselves and the artists, the same way you might take a holiday photograph of yourself in front of a famous attraction.

I really dislike this cynical attitude, it almosts sounds like 'these people aren't enjoying the concert properly the way I would, becuase they're taking photographs, therefore they must be there solely to take those photographs, and therefore they are inferior to me.'

There's a wide variety of people and motives at play, and there's not cynicism in taking note of folks who are out to collect instagramable moments.

Just as many people find it more enjoyable to play with their phone instead of paying attention to their local environment, there are people who find it more enjoyable to broadcast "Look at me, I was here", rather than participate locally (many often do both, but there's a noticeable amount of folks who don't participate and only document, be it photographers, or selfie obsessives). Taggers share the same mentality. Also concerts and events in my city are often free, so it attracts a more casual audience who's bored enough to have left their house and yet not invested enough in the event to be engaged or participating.

"See how cool I am? Aren't I special?!?!"

Wasn't that always an important part of many teenager's lives? I don't think the underlying behaviour changed, just the way it's expressed. Instead of telling everyone how great the concert was (regardless of the actual experience) they can instantly upload a cool picture to instagram.

It goes hand in hand with the quality of modern "EDM", compared to 10 years ago, where DJs actually played unique sets at each event, which wasn't a Beatport Top 20. They had to hunt the songs physically, so naturally more effort went into building a song portfolio, mixing sets etc. Nowadays everyone can spin a cracked Ableton and play a producer.

great example of this is watching the way lots of people act on http://boilerroom.tv

.. not really dancing for the music or the moment, but playing to the camera feed and taking selfies with the artist in the background.

It's mind-blowing how much money and value is creating from teenagers wasting time.

What do you consider "wasting time"? All the apps listed can be used in productive ways: Facebook and Snapchat can be used for communication with peers, not unlike talking in person but with less scheduling overhead; Twitter can be used as a quick communication network both for news and for efficient contact with a wider circle of acquaintances; Tumblr and Reddit can be used both as news sites, for acquiring advice from a wide range of people and for broadening your understanding of the world.

Of course all those services can be misused as well and can become wastes of time or even be detrimental (for example Tumblr and Reddit are famous for their possibility of creating very powerful echo chambers). But for all I know those teenagers could be using their time much better than I did at their age.

No Whatsapp in survey! Strange.

No one really uses Whatsapp in America.

Agreed - definitely the main app for kids at my son's school in London. They do use instagram a lot too though.

It is not very used in US. This is the danger of relying too much on US tech press and bloggers, when there are more and more trends and use cases common all over the world, except US.

A very interesting thread is Whatsapp acquisition news. Lot of US HNers were shocked with its value; but a lot of people from a lot of other places just knew whatsapp as THE ONLY messaging tool that matters in their respectives countries (and that in a lot of very different countries).

Edit, said thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7266618

Ah! Whatsapp kind of main source of communication in India atleast this days.

In Brazil too. Being used to get in touch with strangers too now, just like your cellphone number. Business contacts, flirts, everything.

One of the biggest mobile service provider here (TIM) is betting big, advertising a mobile plan that gives you unlimited internet usage through Whatsapp. Everything else has a usage quota, internet through Whatsapp is unlimited (and I wouldn't be surprise if Whatsapp is not paying a penny for this kind of advertising)

in Mexico the two biggest carriers offer too plans with unlimited Whatsapp, but also include twitter and facebook.

Yeah even in India many operators provide such packages for whatsapp and facebook.

But I think it kinds of breaks net neutrality!

Not Whatsapp in the report. Hard to come to any conclusion based on the information provided considering we don't know how they came up with that information. For example, they list the top 8 apps... but is that top 8 based on mentions, rankings, or something else?

tl;dr: Teens follow fads.

I'm going to ask:

Why do we care what teens use?

- They don't make significant purchase decisions

- Ad-views are mostly wasted on them

- The interactions and contexts they like at their age, they likely grow out of before you can monetize the longterm relationships

Why are we chasing after the teenage fools gold. Owning a communications channel that is used by adults making significant purchasing decisions on a regular basis while doing work via you channel seems to be infinitely more valuable.

I have a website for a video game that probably appeals to a lot of age groups, but the content is overwhelmingly generated by teenagers. I think it's safe to safe that a TON of the content on reddit, especially default subs, meme subs, and stuff like /r/atheism, is largely also made by teenagers.

Even though they aren't useful viewers for ads or spending any money, it's important to understand the people that generate a large chunk of your site's content.

So teens are a vangaurd that is needed to attract 20's and 30's who will actually spend money?

I don't think that adds up. 20's and 30's will use things like Tinder, Craiglist, eBay, etc that meet their needs and... generate useful outputs for both parties.

Teens may not have much in the way of independent resources, but they've always been an important market.

They may not use it in the same way, but the fact that they are using them to make life decisions is pretty huge:

http://time.com/3762067/college-acceptance-instagram-high-sc...

Were people actually asked "Facebook" instead of "Facebook or Messenger"?

Teens are a separate subspecies of human. Eventually they metamorphose into adults. Trying to write apps to appeal to both is an exercise in frustration.

No Kik? Of the few really young mobile phone users I know who use social media, that and instagram are their go to apps.

How Teens in USA Really Use Apps

Reply on news.ycombinator.com