At first, I dismissed snapchat thinking "people will hack the protocol and save messages anyway, and the whole idea will fall apart". Then, I was a little envious that someone else had the idea, and I now think it was a good idea, and that I was blinded by an overly-technical analysis of their product.

But it doesn't look like the couple good ideas they had were enough to make a long-term business. So, unless they do something cool in the next 12 months, RIP. Founders got a nice payday, so who cares?

40 year old, here. I mainly use snap to play with filters with my young kids. I'd never use it for communication because the UX is horrendous. A while ago, there was an odd corporate push to try to use snap internally (was there some marketing push?). And, all of my co-workers spent lots of time brainstorming how to even use snap effectively.

The swarms of 13 years olds that roam through my house only ever seem to use their mobile for Instagram, snap, and youtube. However, more recently I've noticed that the boys have been walking around with bluetooth headsets on as they have a large group chat going on in the background. Not sure what app they're using.

Discord is growing like crazy and their voice chat is easy to use and reliable for groups

My reasoning for loathing snap was their refusal to even allow a snap client for windows phone to exist.

No more entries, we have a winner for the most obscure reason to dislike a social service.

I don't loathe Snap, but I do dislike their decision for not supporting Windows 10. Microsoft even offered a cash incentive to Snap for creating an app and Snap still outright said no. Surely no matter how much you hate a platform, if you're being offered an incentive, you would say yes?

There's a huge opportunity cost in putting some of your developers on creating an app for a niche market. Snap probably felt that Microsoft's incentive didn't cover that cost.

Not to mention maintenance and upkeep.

Sounds like they made the right choice because the platform collapsed. It makes no sense spending design and dev time on a platform that simply isn't taking off.

I think he's on about allowing a third party to create and support a Snapchat app for Windows devices. There was 6Snap which worked really well, but got shut down because Snap were forcing third parties to close their apps. Someone also created an open source app on Windows, but I'm not sure what happened to that one.

There actually was an unofficial Snap client for Windows Phone for a time. I thought it was pretty good to be honest.

6snap, also the same author as tinder and insta clones.

I have an android phone (S7 edge). Before I got this phone, I was a light user of snapchat. On the new phone, Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram were pre-installed. I set them up, they started working perfectly. I downloaded snapchat. It crashed on login. I literally could not get it to work on my brand new flagship device. That's my reason.

PS: also a millennial here, not very crazy though, regrettably

Confirmed - it's a frivolous plaything - very well put!

It's because people at SNAP made a lot of money and {HN_user} did not.

Downvoting doesn't make it false.

> As for why HN hates Snap, I'm not exactly sure.

Why must it be hate? Couldn't it just be, simply, that we're not that interested in yet another chat application? To me, Snap is a slightly modified ICQ client. Fine, but not very interesting.

Real progress would be some sort of open standard, so who you're speaking with isn't determined by which company's chat server you connect to. But then again email has supported this for several decades already, so maybe the demand isn't there.