Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the Doubters to Keep Mum

Re:Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the... by deftturtle on Saturday November 11, 2017 @01:21PM (#15677405)

Snapchat is very confusing and poorly designed. 100% agree with you on the intuition part.

But I don't think spectacles really has much influence on future of company; that is, Snapchat will fail or succeed for other reasons entirely. It might look expensive on paper, but the glasses project is more of a marketing stunt than a mass market product. If people don't want to use Snapchat, they won't use a device that is designed for it. So problems with the platform will make people not buy them.

The app is being copied by others, and their app also is getting worse. More features, more bugs, more ads. People promote their image and show off happiness and wealth on their stories. It has all of the negative experiences of other social networks, and it's got the sexual harassment aspect, too. Many many female friends of mine receive unwanted dick pics.

It's easy to see why they're struggling to grow. My first impression was that it was a messaging solution. Then it morphed into a social network, and some people expect to add you as a friend as casually as they would on Facebook.

In my opinion, Snapchat was more intimate and not something you just add everyone.

As a result of people adding hundreds of low-intimacy relationships to an app that was intended to be a 1-to-1 messaging solution, they are becoming disenchanted with the novelty. It's no longer fun to use Snapchat like it used to be.

Looking back, if paying $5 for the app would have kept Snapchat from doing their media stuff and led to making it a secure, encrypted platform, I would've gladly bought it. Just sad that it's become Facebook.

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Re:Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the... by tinbucket on Saturday November 11, 2017 @01:31PM (#15677449)

    > and it's got the sexual harassment aspect,
    > too. Many many female friends of
    > mine receive unwanted dick pics.

Same here. If I was in charge of Snapchat I'd be working on some way of automatically identifying and killing those images in-flight, and banning people who sent them repeatedly.

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Re:Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the... by str33t_punk on Saturday November 11, 2017 @01:44PM (#15677506)

But many use Snapchat for legitimate non-harassment sexting. What you would need to do is combine this with a reporting feature. That way those using Snapchat for it's originally purpose don't get banned along with the unwanted dick-pic-sender crowd

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Re:Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the... by dboreham on Saturday November 11, 2017 @08:14PM (#15679143)

I think you just killed the goose..

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Re:Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the... by ISL on Saturday November 11, 2017 @01:23PM (#15677409)

Would $5 have been too big a barrier-to-entry for the youngest Snapchatters?

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Re:Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the... by rjromero on Saturday November 11, 2017 @02:12PM (#15677622)

Absolutely, this new generation of kids don't want to pay for anything on the App Store. Maybe the generation of ~5 or so years ago that had a stockpile of iTunes Gift Cards from Christmas did so, but the attitude towards paid applications seems very different now, at least from what I've seen with my younger cousins.

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Re:Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the... by giancarlostoro on Saturday November 11, 2017 @02:31PM (#15677705)

Till they discover they can earn gift cards for app stores through Google Opinion Rewards and buy any app they want. To be fair I know a handful of adults that do this.

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Re:Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the... by skinnymuch on Saturday November 11, 2017 @03:56PM (#15678144)

The more people that do surveys like Google Opinion Rewards, the less frequently each person will receive surveys and the payouts will decrease. It's nowhere close to that but the Google Play Store also isn't close to the App Store for me at least. I have like $50 from doing surveys but there were barely any apps I wanted or want on Android.

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