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Comment by kvcc01 | Hacker News Reader

Snapchat is doing well. I sometimes get on the bus around the same time when the local high school is dismissed, and watch in amazement all the kids pull out their phones and work through their accumulated snaps for the day. Some have hundreds. It's a 45-minute ride to my stop and they’re still watching when I get off.

Few months back I got jealous and installed Snapschat myself. It conveniently scanned my contacts, and found that none of my friends are on it. (I’m late 30s.) To this day, the only snap I received is the default welcome message they send to everyone.

They’re doing a good job of confining their appeal to their target age group. The minute I and my peers appear on Snapchat, it's time to get worried.

And then there's snapchat.com, which is another enigma. I consider myself a reasonably competent technologist but Snapchat makes me feel like an ape trying to figure out a mysterious monolith.

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This is why I think their valuation is less absurd than it seems. Their rate of adoption among college age and younger demographics is astounding. Way faster than facebook, or twitter, or any other social network was adopted.

I think a lot of people are skeptical because the concept seems really dumb. But I've just kind of accepted that social networks get popular for very subtle reasons, some of which are non-technical.

Building a social network seems to be more of an art than a science.

Most people are sceptical for the simple reason that the social networks that shed most of their user base long before ever threatening to make a reasonable profit actually had far more lock-in. If Snapchat's user base - a demographic not exactly noted for their long attention spans - gets bored or sick of ads once Snapchat actually manage to sell them in significant numbers, they're not leaving anything behind when they download the next flavour of the month.

The terms attached to this probably make their chance of selling out to Facebook for ~$20bn slim too.

Couldn't you have said the same thing about early Facebook?

Perhaps, although snapchat is deliberately oriented towards a lack of history. I could move my messaging off facebook easily enough, but photo albums of vacations less so.

Early Facebook had the facility to get in touch (or stalk!) people I had no contact details for provided I knew their name, and check out upcoming party details, not mention a photographic record of my university life complete with comments and status boosting likes. Facebook didn't need to remain cool to be relevant and useful, and I logged in far more often than someone sent me an actual message from the service - still do a decade on.

Snapchat is a messaging app which distinguishes itself from the other messaging apps users also have installed on their phones by the fact it doesn't preserve any past interactions. Much like when I stopped bothering to log into MSN Messenger because people sent me messages in other ways, it dies in the eyes of its users once the daily updates stop, or even more quickly if the daily updates become near-exclusively advertising of the unwanted kind

This is why I think their valuation is less absurd than it seems. Their rate of adoption among college age and younger demographics is astounding.

Yep. But at the same time, there's no reason to think that these teens might also adopt a new app just as quickly if it were to come along.

One factor that probably affects rate of adoption is smartphones. It's much easier to actually observe your friends in the act of social networking.

Smartphone and technology adoption is higher than it was in the 2000s. Most new social networks will be adopted faster than Facebook was in the early 2000s. I believe even Pinterest at a point was "growing faster than Facebook."

You're sure they aren't watching one of the featured stories about a city or an event? At a 10 second maximum, that gives a minimum of 270 snaps - not too impossible but I think there might be more going on there if you're not too familiar with the platform.

Some of the more fanatical users I'm acquainted with have a 200+ second story, every single day. Three minutes a user gets you to 45 pretty quickly.

Yes, that's another possibility, other users' stories. But I would equate that to reading my entire Facebook news feed every day - I don't even think that's possible anymore with the current mysterious sorting algorithm.

these kids must have parents that spoil them with unlimited mobile data. That's the main reason why i'm not active on it.

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