>Yeah, the 13-21-year-old chunk of society

MySpace had that one nailed, and look how that turned out for them. This is exactly the kind of demographic that is susceptible to fads and keeps leaving dead services in its wake.

once it hits the mainstream it isn't cool anymore, take Facebook for example. kids hate it now, because grandma, mom, dad and aunt marie all use it.

when it comes to social media of any type, if your grandma is using it, you don't want to be using it, since it must be for old people.

according to teenager logic, anyway.

Well to be completely fair, it is quite embarrassing even for me as an adult to have my parents/grandma looking at the stuff I post of facebook, which has caused me to reduce engagement there and post to instagram, which is restricted to close friends.

That's exactly the reason why I, along with my circle of friends, moved to Snapchat.

Agreed. I didn't mean to bust teenage chops so hard, haha.

The MySpace argument is tired and stale and not even that insightful. MySpace made several mistakes as a company that had nothing to do with their premise (connecting people, the same as Facebook). It just turned out that Facebook had better execution in the long run.

Just because the myspace argument is stale doesn't mean it's wrong.

I don't know if you remember how that went down, but people loved myspace. It worked well, then all the cool kids jumped to Facebook. It was herd mentality.

Definitely a trend situation over product features.

With network effects, you live by the sword and you die by the sword.

I disagree, Myspace could have done incredibly well if they focused on their strengths in music early on. Instead they wanted to be a media company going in a bunch of different directions, which sounds very very familiar. Snap is doing publishing with content partners, they announced special formatted tv shows, hardware and glasses, AR and adtech.

Wanting to be big in music = wanting to be a media company, and comes with a similar set of pitfalls, namely being beholden to a bunch of anti-tech established music companies. Also, I'd challenge whether there is room for incredible success. What's the biggest music success? Spotify? Pandora? Compare that to Facebook, and it is clear which direction had more potential.

>big in music = wanting to be a media company

I would disagree, being a publishing company, a movie review company, a comic book company, video company ... these are all things Myspace was attempting, is not the same as being a music company.

Sure the bulk of their users are young, but several of the people I follow are betweeen 28 and 45.

It's not like Snapchat is an esoteric thing. Using it can be a function of how outgoing and expressive you are. Or if you have some purpose.

The same reason you post on Hacker News is why people post on Snapchat -- to interact with others.

Posting on HN (or reddit, or...) will never die, because you get to correct people who are wrong on the internet. Snap not so much...

I don't think that's quite right. Snapchat does have a chat feature which allows you to essentially send feedback on peoples snaps/stories, so you could absolutely tell people they're wrong for making some statement.

I think it was a joke.

I think it was a joke.

Sure, but it's far from part of a community discussion. There is no such thing as a snapchat community, just contact lists.

It also depends on whether you have friends that use Snapchat. I'm 24 and a college senior, so within the right age group, but none of my friends use Snapchat. It's only fun if you have friends who use it.

What do you/they use on a regular basis?

Most of my friends chat with either Google Hangouts or good old SMS

But do you think their actual sources of revenue (all the ads and paid stories) are focused towards older people? From what I've seen, it's mostly gossip and stories aimed towards younger people.

fb started out with younger ppl, and then gradually older ppl got on, tell now when like my feed is blown up by my grandma.

Oy, that. Honestly, with all their algos I'm confused why Facebook lets one friend cover my entire feed in Shah Rukh Khan. I don't even know who SRK is!

He is one of the most popular actors in Indian film industry, Bollywood.

Heck, I'm 24 and have a lot of trouble understanding the appeal of Snapchat. Despite lots of friends trying to get me to use it I've never figured out how to get value from it.

Like most social networks, getting value from it depends on following high-quality content creators. Mark Suster is a good one on Snapchat.

I thought the value of social networks was mostly in following your friends?

Most of the value I get from Twitter, Instagram, and Whale is from people I don't know in real life. Facebook is the only social network for me that's mostly real life friends.

Since you said "society", it's worth noting that Snap is really not a player in Asia. In Japan and Korea, Line is dominant. In China, there is doubtless something else to take its place.

"society" as in US population. Snapchat is also used outside of the US but it's not so prevalent.