It's the same damn model. It's all the same thing. Sometimes I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Does no one see this?
Snapchat will rule until he ads take over. Your stories will slowly be interrupted by ads. Then your stories will fall out of time sync and you'll only get some updates or a "Featured Updates" or some other features that's really just a way to prioritize and guarantee ad delivery. And while this is happening someone will put out something new, that essentially does what Snapchat originally did in a slightly different format. Maybe square instead of portrait or GIF or Live Photo or whatever. But it's all the same thing. This game will continue forever.
All people want is a way to broadcast into a stream of content, and view other people's content in a timeline. That's it. It works for a while until you get too big. Then you can't pay for it and you have to start inject ads and resorting the timeline until it's no longer a timeline or it's a timeline full of all this stuff no one ever wanted or asked for.
When I was 15 I'd get home from school and run to my computer to check my favorite message board. I'd hit "New Posts" and see all the content from my friends. Cool new video game discussion, new video card benchmarks, some photos someone uploaded, some rant. Honestly, nothing has really changed in 15 years except the format of the content has been continuously updated to be technically (and culturally) relevant. But a post is still a post.
I actually like Snapchat ads, while I hate ads everywhere else and install ad blockers on all my devices. The sponsored filters tend to be really fun, and I end up sending and receiving multiple pictures over the course of the day that used the sponsored filter.
And the ads in Vice, Buzzfeed, and other stories are well crafted to fit in with the content. The ads feel like snaps from friends, rather than the spammy, low quality crap that you see in other places on the internet.
Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have awkward, disruptive ad systems, but Snapchat already has a successful ad system that people actually enjoy interacting with, and that is amazing.
In a rather serendipitious stroke Snapchat don't have to maintain armies of servers to hold years of user data (unlike Facebook or Twitter). I think this will help them a lot in the long run in keeping their costs low and advertising to a minimum.
This topic actually reminds me of that great Gavin Belson rant in Silicon Valley:
Gavin Belson: "Data creation is exploding. With all the selfies and useless files people refuse to delete on the Cloud - 92% of the world's data was created in the last two years alone. At the current rate, the world's data storage capacity will be overtaken by next Spring. It will be nothing short of a catastrophe: data shortages, data rationing, data black markets... Datageddon!"
The real expense for FB is likely to be in guaranteeing realtime sync between dozens of platforms and gazillions of clients. All that JS and PHP has to be coded up and served somehow...
Same for Twitter -- everyone remembers the "whale" when they were struggling with infrastructure pains, then they massively invested to sort that out... and ended up chasing profits to pay for it all, of course.
Snapchat will soon get there as well.
That's only one use-case. I don't use Twitter at all to broadcast to my friends. I broadcast political opinion and tech humor to whomever it may concern, and receive condensed insights from public figures whom I find relevant for me.
The problem really is that no one wants to pay for services, or no one is willing to try charging for their services. Ads are the "safe" option, but it will also make your users leave in the long run.
I was pretty baffled when a publisher wrote that they would rather make money from ads on their site, than make money from people buying a subscription. Service like Twitter, Snapchat and what not seems to be the same way, there's no desire to try anything but ads.
It is still my belief that at some point some large seller of physical goods will announce that they're pull their online ads due to lack of profitability. After that the entire online media business will be forced to charge their users, and we'll all be better off. Maybe it's just wishful thinking.
app.net tried, but it was not successful.
I'm fairly confident that Snapchat could make money charging their users, if the fee is sufficiently small. Say $10 per year, perhaps as an in-app purchase, with the first 6 month being free.
We also may have to accept that some of these companies, Twitter seems the most obvious, isn't actually providing anything of tangible value to the average user and therefore can't exist. Of cause if some investors wants to keep throwing money at Twitter to keep the lights on, they're more than welcome. I know I'm not exactly being friendly towards Twitter, but it's a great example of a company that needs to fail. The only reason they don't is because investors have already wasted so much money that they're desperately trying so save it in hope of making the money back, by some miracle. Part of it might also be that investors, journalists and bankers are so heavy users of Twitter that they fail to see that the business isn't sustainable.
In the end the user will always be the one to pay the bill. Either by directly paying, or indirectly via advertising.
(Even on this angle, the problem right now is that Facebook's ad algorithm is a bit, er, dumb. At least, it hasn't figured out that I'm far more interested in local business X, Y, and Z that I'm following and not whatever unrelated spam some megagiantcorp is pushing...)
I firmly believe product placement, and the information exchange that surrounds it, is _the_ monetization scheme. Unfortunately, not only Facebook's ad algorithm is broken, but pretty much everyone else's. They have come a long way nonetheless, ad targeting today is one order of magnitude better that it was only a few years back.
People want advice not advertisements. When someone has money to spend and a need to fulfill, to have the right "advisor" is an incredibly valuable asset. Imagine a bot that knows my tastes, my assets and basically my life. This advanced bot could psyche me, at the right time, into making valuable and exciting purchases. A bot I could trust would succeed turning my money into happiness. That's the direction current algorithms have taken, with ever-increasing (and rather suspicious) omnipresence in our lives, grabbing any input they can get their hands on. The key difference is that companies look after their interests instead of mine.
You might be right about ads eventually ruining it, but that doesn't mean that it's otherwise identical.
Why is it different?
This. This. This. This. This.
I believe the value of the social networking platform to a user is inverse to the maturity of the company.
Facebook has already become choked with it's own content and advertisements so the next generation migrate to a "cleaner" platform. The centre of gravity shifts. New platform monetises and the choking cycle begins anew...
The stages -
Stage 1:
Platform Exclusivity
Platform Coveted
Platform Expanded
Stage 2:
Platform Opened
Platform Developed (upon)
Platform Expanded
Stage 3
Platform Monetised
PLatform Curated
Platform Locked (to previous developers to protect revenue streams)
Stage 4
Platfrom Alternatives
Platform Decline
Platform Obsolescence
You could, quite easily Venn Diagram where the current social media services are and how they are eating the older's market share. As platforms lock developers out, other pre-revenue companies are opening up to those developers stealing previously allegiant demographics.
It must be the ad blocker. 70% of the real estate via browser is ad based.
Those ads don't include promoted posts from pages you elected to follow.
The majority of content on FB is promotional.
I and another poster are discussing the UX experience which differs between browser with ad-blocker and other versions.
Thy kind of sarcasm is not really meant for HN. Do you have an opinion of substance?
Perhaps I misunderstand this comment. I use adblock on Facebook. I don't see all of the ads in your imgur pic. I seriously had no idea it was so advertisement-laden.
Here is a look into FB without ad blocker
you want to be connected with someone because you are friends but don't like the random shit they post but don't want to unfriend them? thats a problem for a different social network but not snapchat
My Snapchat looks just like my Twitter did in 2008, except with a few more boobs.
by definition of timeline correct, by UX of timeline no. it doesn't show you what it is without you explicitly diving into that story
Sorry a list of content sorted by time is a timeline. I don't know what else you call that.
This is the part I still don't get. Why would I want to constantly spam my friends with trivial photos of my daily life? Disappearing spam is still spam.
I'm 28, nobody I know uses snapchat/instagram/whatever so I haven't actually used it. If it's something I actually want to share, I don't care if it's gone in 24 hours and it's dead simple to just message them directly.
Like most social media apps, this just feels like a solution in search of a problem (except for sexting).
Snapchat's core is still revolving around soft erotic eye candy that's developed into a cottage industry at this point http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-arsenictv-snapchat-in... Now that they've got your attention there, they are bringing in media partners like BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly and celebrities http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-snapchat-built-a-... to fill up your feed with a stream of bite-size updates.
Peer-to-peer ephemeral messaging is no longer emphasized in the app, they are building a media destination to divert eyeballs away from TV, YouTube, Vine, Facebook or Twitter, in that rough order. Referring to ephemeral social messaging at this point as akin to bringing up Yahoo! as a directory of web links.
When you have more than a handful of friends that you're trying to keep in touch with, are you really going to ask every single one of them what they're up to each day? Snapchat solves this in a fun way.
Good god why would I care?
I imagine this difference in attitude accounts for some of the confusion over snapchat's purpose.
If you're not interested in what your friends are up to, why are you friends with them in the first place? Maybe they're really just acquaintances?
Like you said, maybe it's a difference in attitude. Still, I recommend you giving it a shot to get a better idea of what it is. I also thought it was dumb at first.
> > Good god why would I care?
> If you're not interested in what your friends are up to, why are you friends with them in the first place? Maybe they're really just acquaintances?
if I would care about what every single friend of mine is doing each day, it would be difficult to live a life for myself.
Most people crave this human interaction every day.
The latter. But there's a big gap between "If you prefer to have some kind of personal connection with another human" and "are you really going to ask every single one of [your 20 friends] what they're up to each day?".
I'm sure I don't have the typical use case, but as an expat, I have friends spread out all over the world. Usually I don't see anything from them on Snapchat, but when they're going on a hike somewhere beautiful, attending an event, or having fun otherwise, I get to see it and thereby "keep in touch". I get to see what my little cousins are doing at home as they grow up (which is quite annoyingly "snap back for a rate" or some nonsense I won't pretend to understand), and even see what their mother is cooking for dinner when she shares that.
If you don't like it, don't use it. But don't be fooled into thinking it's just pictures of lunch from people at their 9-5 office jobs. Even many of us with 9-5 jobs have something interesting to share, at least on an afternoon or weekend.
I think the whole phenomenon is fascinating - people these days can't experience anything without photographing it, or updating their status about it. It's as if they need to prove that it really happened.
It's not that it doesn't exist in physical gatherings, it's just way more concentrated online because of convenience.
ahhh the old-millenial-stuck-in-2013 version of snapchat
Follow @ArsenicTV, while your finance buddies snap you insider merger and acquisition tips on stocks, and then tell me you "don't get Snapchat"
get w/ it
Why do you want people to see what you ate?
Is everyone here living more interesting lives than me? I mean, my stories will be just the same old lunch and dinner pics, working before a computer, commuting to and from work...
If you go somewhere I haven't been to (or it's a place I go to often but never tried what you got) and it looks like something I'd be interested in trying, I'll ask about your experience and maybe go sometime (or set up a dinner event there).
There's been a few times that this has been the case, for me.
Or not everybody shares their everyday activities, just when something worth sharing actually occurs
Oh man. So at the after party of a recent wedding, the Bride had to post a picture of her nachos.
How would this be any different in Snapchat? I'd still have all these meal spam pics to skip over.
I still don't get it.
There are plenty of arguments to make in favor of synchronous, face-to-face etc communication, about the loss of privacy when you broadcast everything you do, about the lack of personal engagement in this kind of communication, and so on. I can see making a judgement call whether to participate in this kind of communication, because there are plenty of drawbacks and negatives.
However, it's obvious to me why people are willingly switching some(most?) of their communication to it. Just as we learned to use asynchronous I/O in place of synchronous, we started using multicast messages and event-driven notifications instead of polling over all your friend-handles "hey what did you do today". It seems like a natural progression to me.
In terms of "social" I see it as a mostly-write type environment - I don't sweat that I ignore 90% of what the people I follow write, and I mostly follow people for updates/news/commentary rather than social contact.
But then I'm very aware that I'm very introverted. I like social contact in moderation, but it exhausts me, and every now and again I just get "social burnout" and turns into a total recluse for months on end.
What doesn't work for me about Snapchat is primarily that it is video. Video to me is "high touch" - it takes much more energy than writing a tweet, and similarly watching a video requires magnitudes more attention than rapidly scanning past a bunch of tweets.
I'm with you though.
I think the difference here is that because the photos disappear after 24 hours, the expectation for quality is lowered. Also the fact that the photos are trivial is part of the attraction. There aren't as many expectations on Snapchat as on Twitter. Sometimes it's just nice to see your friends' face, and Snapchat is good for that.
I use private photos/videos on Instagram to share those things with my family, but it's very clunky and would feel like spamming to send more than 2-3 curated photos per day. I gather that with SnapChat there is far less curation.
No they aren't interested. They are just too nice to tell you to stop spamming them.
My immediate family are always interested. I don't bombard extended family or friends though many still voluntarily follow feeds dedicated to the children.
Where in the world do you and your family live? I imagine you must be in Antarctica?
I don't understand why I should force everyone I know to install yet another random social media app when a regular message works just fine.
That is the decease of our age. People really can't see the narcissism needed to keep all of these social networks going.
I've had a Twitter account for like eight years now and I'm still not sure how to have a conversation with someone. And trying to read a conversation with many replies confounds me every time.
And then I'm following a conversation in a shitty popup above my feed, click "view more replies" and suddenly I'm on someone else's twitter profile and not my news feed? And I press "back" and I have to scroll back to where I was in my feed?
Twitter's UX is horrendous.
Snapshot's confusing part is only in the strange UI decisions of the app itself. Those I feel they could easily remedy.
While I think Twitter could improve their UI by leaps and bounds, Snapchat's UI is just incomprehensible. However I'm a strong believer in it being 100% intentional at this point.
Some points from just using it now:
- The strange lower left/lower right hamburger slide out menu things with odd icons. Right one leads to news, left one leads to snaps.
- When you go to the lower, right hamburger thingy - to go "back" there is a camera (not a back chevron/arrow) at the top left. Go experience it - it is weird.
- You can swipe down from the main camera view to get your profile. Took my 31 year old ass a year to discover that.
- The view snap vs. message view is just... no. I know what it does and I still input wrong.
I know there are 'lists' on twitter. I tried adding my friends to a 'friend' list so that I could actually see their tweets amongst the sea of noise. However, that seemed to accomplish absolutely nothing. The only time I see tweets relevant to me are when I happen to already be looking at twitter when they pop up. And since I only look at twitter when queueing in a line, I almost never see the things that would make twitter useful for me.
But hey, PracticalDeveloper retweeted _something_ today, Twitter told me that. So... there ya go.
How in the world did humanity keep in touch with their family before Snapchat?
What makes Snapchat popular is their use of pictures. Turning the thesis of your point into a totally public, 160 character or less, textual format is effort. A lot of effort.
Pictures are what they are. They're also extremely difficult to parse (no practical reason to retain your message, deletion is a cost effective decision), and they're the easiest thing in the world to make. Who wants to carefully word your tweets when your camera will do?
Social media novelty machine 2.0.
I am not actually sure that is actually true. My wife and I run a moderately successful travel blog and know quite a number of other travel bloggers, some of whom do it for a living.
They are all technically on Twitter for example however the overwhelming majority have hooked up a service that automatically logs in as them then publishes tweets on their behalf freeing them up to never ever actually log in themselves.
If you look at active user numbers, tweets published etc it presumably all looks great but how many real actual humans are there? I suspect the answer is not nearly as many humans as Twitter would like to publicly admin as so many have been replaced by bots.
It feels like they could radically improve the experience by locking out the bots but doing that would make it obvious how few actual humans are present.
* it is terrible with comfortably looking at a stream of images,
* for one-to-many you have to keep mailing lists around,
* filtering such streams out (to separate notifications) needs to be set up,
* ...
You could do all that with e-mail, and some people probably are more comfortable with using e-mail for such purposes, but you don't get the same streamlined UX with e-mail. Somebody could write an app that offered most of it, but sadly nobody has as far as I know.
My friends and I went "offline" and we are much closer and happier. Social media is overrated. I think we will look back at this time in the future like how we look back at cigarette smoking in the 50s. It has its place but its usefulness is limited. I don't question Snapchat's business potential, though.
edit: also I find it funny (and pathetic) how industry analyst struggle to understand social media and what is the next big social media. They just don't get it.
By the way, I'd never heard of the term "self media" but I think it is perfect. I'm going to start using it now.
If this is the case, such a perception may act as a barrier to their ability to perceive that it is a platform that can be used for the creation and strengthening of interpersonal bonds (social media).
I'm guessing all your friends live nearby? If not, how do you keep in touch with them 'offline'?
With friends who don't live nearby, I don't talk to them as often. I still have my FB account but I don't follow anyone on FB, so my News Feed is empty. I keep it alive for FB messenger, which I use to chat with some friends occasionally. Or if I'm traveling nearby, I'll let them know and schedule something. I used the word "offline" in a sense that I don't subscribe to people and I don't broadcast my activities.
I've been using Facebook all wrong ...
How did you solve the problem of "Nothing interesting ever happens on Snapchat"? Maybe I have bad friends, but my feed is like a vast emptiness of nothing happening. Except for the 2 or 3 people who have decided that Snapchat is their new marketing channel. They post a lot and they post a lot of the same stuff over and over so I rarely watch.
Basically, my problem is that I can smell Snapchat is great. But it soooo rarely gives me a reason to come back that I miss most of the things.
Almost feels like I'd have to religiously "clean out my inbox" once a day. But it isn't interesting enough for that.
What am I doing wrong?
PS: I'm in my late 20's and I've had Snapchat installed ever since it launched but ... ugh. It just doesn't click.
On Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. your feed is the sum of all content, so it's immediately apparent if it's empty or underwhelming.
Disclaimer: I'm one of those who don't "get" snapchat, so I'd like to get this explained by somebody who does. Do you use snapchat to just have fun with friends and family from time to time, and some other way to keep up with the important things in their lives - like talking in person, phone, facebook, whatever?
Because I really don't understand how can you do the latter with such an ephemeral service...
Snapchat is ephemeral and more private, like the spoken word, and unlike pretty much all other social media that I know of. It is an interesting concept, people feel more open to share certain things when they know it will fade away soon after rather than be on historical record .
Sometimes those moments are worth sharing with people because it brings you closer or continues a conversation. However, like with a conversation you don't need to remember the exact words sometime later for that conversation to have been worthwhile.
Maybe this comment will spur me to give it a shot
This is sad. The whole thought; the whole idea that I can't read things back; to post apparently meaningless "stories" into the void.
We have/had blogs for this, with the exceptions that those are not ephemeral. To read back you own stories, your own mistakes are invaluable lessons and not having the option to do this, because you depend on a service provider, where you have no control saddens me deeply.
Get a WordPress and make posts disappear automatically after X hours - this is ~5 mins to set up and this way you can both keep and retrieve your stories from the public.
Once this is done post to Snapchat from that blog; via webhooks, bots, whatever. Yes, right now, this is tedious and requires technical knowledge, but the goal is to own your data. But do not store the only copy your original content somewhere where you have no control at all. (See http://indiewebcamp.com/POSSE for the whole idea)
Who said gossips? "Stories" have and utterly different meaning to me.
Journals stick around. Letters stick around. Notes stick around. They are important. We evolved to write, not just talk, and reading back who you have been 10 years ago, even if it's just a plain entry, can be surprisingly useful to maintain a healthy soul, especially in times when you think things are slipping away.
Take away the option to remember, what are you left with?
And no, I'm not exaggerating. No one scrolls back any more; yesterday deliberately out of interest, and I disagree with this from the bottom of my heart.
Whereas writing something which will be kept on the public historical record for all to see forever leads to both conscious and subconscious self-censorship and can be misleading when trying to "read back who you have been 10 years ago" because what you wrote may not have been what you were really thinking.
The ephemeral nature of the spoken word and the historical nature of the written word both have their advantages and disadvantages.
It took me a while to "get" Snapchat, but in my opinion there is no better way to keep up with friends and family digitally than via Snapchat Stories.
You can post pretty shamelessly the little things you're up to all day to your story, knowing it will be gone in 24 hours, keeping your feed really clean. Posting more than once or twice a day to Instagram/Facebook seems excessive, Twitter is a bit more of a firehose than a way to see what everyone is doing.
It took me a bit to get used to the interface, but the goofiness of the entire service is so enjoyable, including all their filters and whatnot.
I've noticed myself spending way more time on Snapchat than on other services as of late, even in my "old age for social media."