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Comment by joshdance | Hacker News Reader

I am 29 and a lot of my friends and I use SnapChat. I don't love it, but it is useful enough that I post pretty regularly to it.

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So, I've witnessed this horrifying thing where someone snaps a photo of, say, the floor, or a blank wall, and then uses the caption line to send their actual message.

Packing roughly 60 bytes into 8 megapixels makes me cringe, although thankfully at least the backdrops are usually high compressible.

Is this practice common, or do I just find myself around the wrong sort of bandwidth-sociopaths?

I believe that's how it's done.

What do you use it for?

I ask the same question. What can snapchat do that mms cant?

Edit: So they took a service that was as simple and flexible as could be, put arbitrary restrictions on it, and wrapped it in pretty UI. Kids are dumb man. (I'm 26)

Do it's best to guarantee that a post will be removed.

In a world where everything you do is recorded and stored long term the promise of something fleeting is a beautiful promise.

It is also a lot faster. App owns to the camera. Tap to take a picture. You can add a caption or a doodle and send it to multiple people.

MMS doesn't even come close to that experience.

Not send a picture already taken. There's a sense of immediacy on the sender side (and urgency on the viewer side, before it goes poof) that reinforces the nowness. If you're into that.

Doodling on the photos is surprisingly useful. To do that via mms you would open the camera app, take the picture. Open the drawing app, draw it save it. Open the texting app, load the picture and send. Snapchat is snap, doodle send.

I'm 27 and I have two separate use cases:

1) With my girlfriend we just say hi and see a little bit of each other's daily work lives in each picture

2) With my buddies on inside, fleeting jokes that require the context of a picture and some art work

Fleeting jokes is one. Like you were talking about a shirt, you see that shirt, you want to tell the person but sending them a text and a picture that they will have to delete or keep forever seems heavy.

Snap Stories are also very common. I don't want to tell someone explicitly what I am doing, but it is still fun to share slices of life, so I will record a few seconds of an event and post it to my snap story. If someone wants to know they can. Usually about 30 people watch each of my stories.

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