6 ms·

"The cost of content creation is extremely low, and Snapchat makes it fun to think about what aspects of what I’m doing every day might be cool for other people

by soneca 11y ago

"The cost of content creation is extremely low, and Snapchat makes it fun to think about what aspects of what I’m doing every day might be cool for other people to see." But what is the reward of content creation? Honest question. How do a user feel their effort in posting was worthy? I never used Snapchat, so I don't get it much. Although I'm for sure not dismissive as some, I just never tried it.

squeaky-clean 11y ago
It's incredibly easy to post to your story (you can also take a snap, and send it privately to certain people, which will notify them, while also posting to your story), so there's really not much effort involved. I agree with the other commenters, that a reply to your snap (directly through the app, or in person at a later time) is pretty nice. One of my favorite little things, though I don't know if it's common with other users, is my friends will often have a sort of open "conversation" indirectly with each other through their stories. Last weekend, a friend of mine posted snaps of her working on some ambient music to her story. So I posted some snaps of me playing a synth. She posted snaps of her playing her synth. Another friend posted to his story him playing his piano, then another friend just playing the Mario Bros theme on a keyboard. And this continued for a few hours until my "Stories" section was just filled with friends playing music.
Touche 11y ago
The reward is when someone replies to your snapchat, it's social validation.
- CIPHERSTONE 11y ago
  Your comment really speaks to a larger problem that social media would appear to have created, that being a "need" for as you put it social validation. You hear stories about people becoming severely emotionally distressed because they only get a low number of "likes" an confront friends for not "liking" or commenting. It just feels (to me at least), that this is a problem. Granted before what we consider to be the electronic age of social media, this kind of validation existed -- for example, getting a phone call from a friend would give one a similar level of validation - I have a friend! He/She likes me enough to call me!" - it wasn't something someone expected to happen every ten minutes and it wasn't something that required you to do anything.t Now that we are all connected, we post, we expect validation that someone has read the nugget we posted. Yay! Friends! I dunno, just strikes me as something to be leery of..
TheBiv 11y ago
The reward are those random bits of validation you get from friends that say to you in real life "I loved your Snap the other day" and when your friends directly respond on snapchat
- soneca 11y ago
  Smart! That plus striking comment: "You can see the number of, and names of, the people who view/screenshot your Story." That ocasional and random reward that make something addictive (like what keep you checking your email all the time, at last receiving that one useful/interesting email in the middle of several useless one). Contrasting to predictable Facebook likes that are measured solely by quantity. I end with the impression that is a more genuine connection than the commoditized "FB like" and more personal than the "Retweet" and "FB share" that are performed by people you don't even know.
  - jonesb6 11y ago
    With cash I can buy happiness, if I get a Facebook Like, Twitter follow, snapchat view, I feel happy, therefore Social media validation is like cash.
striking 11y ago
You can see the number of, and names of, the people who view/screenshot your Story. Other replies to your comment are right about individual Snaps, but I think the article is mostly talking about the Story feature.
- Jordrok 11y ago
  "There’s no public view count, follower count, likes count, or any other social dick-measuring contest. You can just put whatever you’re doing on Snapchat; if people don’t like it, who gives a fuck, you’ll never know." Hmm...I guess you guys are talking about somewhat different things - a public viewer count that you can compare to other people vs a private one that only you can see. It still feels a bit contradictory to me though. I would imagine that being able to see how many people view something you post and who they are still rewards the same type of attention-seeking, dick-measuring content - just to a somewhat lesser degree.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    Maybe it's the difference between admiring your dick in the mirror and hanging it out the window.
parfe 11y ago
Maybe someone replies. Maybe they don't. It's a low effort way of saying "Hey, I find this thing is worth 10 seconds of your time." My friend sent me a snap of her niece throwing a temper tantrum. It was funny. I chuckled. It disappeared. We got lunch weeks later, and I asked if her niece ever calmed down. She laughed, we moved on. She got to share a funny moment in her life with me (and presumably other people) because she thought I might be interested. If she posted on facebook? You'd have people asking what was wrong, giving advice on how to calm a child, commenting about child abuse, and writing essays about the ethics of posting children to social media. Whatever.
- soneca 11y ago
  So Spapchat achieved what Path tried limiting friends? Real connections with real friends. Funny thing, went to Path.com now and find out two interesting things: i) they have two apps at the same website now - Path, the social network and Talk, a messaging app; and ii) they don't even mention the 150 friends limit anymore (contrasting that it was the core feature and the epicenter of their launch campaign)
  - parfe 11y ago
    altonzheng got it right I think when he wrote I had a similar revelation a while back with Snapchat. Users complain that you can't create groups to send to, you have to manually select each person. I like this - it means when you receive a snapchat, you know that person intentionally selected you to share a part of their life with. It adds a subtle but meaningful quality to a message that could be considered spammy and impersonal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10860501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10860501 Snapchat requires you to select who you want to see your snap. There's no facility to push into everyone's feed. I'm not sending it to my "Friends" or my "Family" without consideration. You aren't going to click 200 people, or 150, or 50. You're going to think "These five people really love hiking." Or "My cousins were talking about adopting a husky." Or "Last time I burned bacon like this was with John and Jane." Saying "you can only have 150 friends" wasn't the key to a more personal experience. It just meant there was a hard limit on how many people could spam you. The key for me is the tiny marginal cost of sending something to N+1 people, so instead you choose more thoughtfully.
toomanybeersies 11y ago
I don't believe that Snapchat offers content creation. Given that nothing actually persists, is it really content? I feel that it's content as much as small talk with a coworker is content, it's more filler than anything actually substantial. Now if I was to have a discussion about some technical issue or whatever, that would be creating content, but Snapchat is hardly the ideal, or indeed a feasible platform for that.
- justin 11y ago
  Exactly what people said about video of people playing video games "not being content." Content you don't want to watch or don't understand is still content if other people want to look at it.
- NoahTheDuke 11y ago
  Is content only content if it lasts forever?
SpaceCadetJones 11y ago
To contrast with some other snarky responses, for me Snapchat has very little to do with "social validation". Personally snapchat is another tool for me to connect with people. I get to see what people are up to on their shared stories, we exchange cool/funny things we see, and my musical friends and I exchange short videos of what we're working on. It's a little more humanizing than pure text chat. I only text/chat with a few people on a regular basis, but there's about 10 people I exchange snapchats with pretty frequently. It's a nice way to keep in touch, and it's a platform I tend to share on more than Facebook. The content is only there for 24 hours, and is only seen by the ~50 people I added rather than the 800 on Facebook.
dorian-graph 11y ago
The reward for me is just having fun with friends. Laughing at each other's snaps, just keeping up-to-date with what we're doing, seeing things that remind you of each other, etc. Having no # total of followers publicly available and the usual metrics encourages this too.
mehwoot 11y ago
But what is the reward of content creation? This is actually one of the reasons I like it- it is deliberately counter to a lot of social media. There is no like button, no retweet count, no permanent record- just ephemeral little moments you share with friends, and occasionally they'll mention that they liked one of your snaps to you. To me, it feels like social media in a way it can actually enhance our lives- it encourages you to share moments but once they are over, it's gone, and there are no statistics that you can use to obsess over whether you are fulfilling your social media potential.

by soneca 11y ago

squeaky-clean 11y ago

It's incredibly easy to post to your story (you can also take a snap, and send it privately to certain people, which will notify them, while also posting to your story), so there's really not much effort involved. I agree with the other commenters, that a reply to your snap (directly through the app, or in person at a later time) is pretty nice. One of my favorite little things, though I don't know if it's common with other users, is my friends will often have a sort of open "conversation" indirectly with each other through their stories. Last weekend, a friend of mine posted snaps of her working on some ambient music to her story. So I posted some snaps of me playing a synth. She posted snaps of her playing her synth. Another friend posted to his story him playing his piano, then another friend just playing the Mario Bros theme on a keyboard. And this continued for a few hours until my "Stories" section was just filled with friends playing music.

Touche 11y ago

The reward is when someone replies to your snapchat, it's social validation.

CIPHERSTONE 11y ago
Your comment really speaks to a larger problem that social media would appear to have created, that being a "need" for as you put it social validation. You hear stories about people becoming severely emotionally distressed because they only get a low number of "likes" an confront friends for not "liking" or commenting. It just feels (to me at least), that this is a problem. Granted before what we consider to be the electronic age of social media, this kind of validation existed -- for example, getting a phone call from a friend would give one a similar level of validation - I have a friend! He/She likes me enough to call me!" - it wasn't something someone expected to happen every ten minutes and it wasn't something that required you to do anything.t Now that we are all connected, we post, we expect validation that someone has read the nugget we posted. Yay! Friends! I dunno, just strikes me as something to be leery of..

TheBiv 11y ago

The reward are those random bits of validation you get from friends that say to you in real life "I loved your Snap the other day" and when your friends directly respond on snapchat

soneca 11y ago
Smart! That plus striking comment: "You can see the number of, and names of, the people who view/screenshot your Story." That ocasional and random reward that make something addictive (like what keep you checking your email all the time, at last receiving that one useful/interesting email in the middle of several useless one). Contrasting to predictable Facebook likes that are measured solely by quantity. I end with the impression that is a more genuine connection than the commoditized "FB like" and more personal than the "Retweet" and "FB share" that are performed by people you don't even know.
- jonesb6 11y ago
  With cash I can buy happiness, if I get a Facebook Like, Twitter follow, snapchat view, I feel happy, therefore Social media validation is like cash.

striking 11y ago

You can see the number of, and names of, the people who view/screenshot your Story. Other replies to your comment are right about individual Snaps, but I think the article is mostly talking about the Story feature.

Jordrok 11y ago
"There’s no public view count, follower count, likes count, or any other social dick-measuring contest. You can just put whatever you’re doing on Snapchat; if people don’t like it, who gives a fuck, you’ll never know." Hmm...I guess you guys are talking about somewhat different things - a public viewer count that you can compare to other people vs a private one that only you can see. It still feels a bit contradictory to me though. I would imagine that being able to see how many people view something you post and who they are still rewards the same type of attention-seeking, dick-measuring content - just to a somewhat lesser degree.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  Maybe it's the difference between admiring your dick in the mirror and hanging it out the window.

parfe 11y ago

Maybe someone replies. Maybe they don't. It's a low effort way of saying "Hey, I find this thing is worth 10 seconds of your time." My friend sent me a snap of her niece throwing a temper tantrum. It was funny. I chuckled. It disappeared. We got lunch weeks later, and I asked if her niece ever calmed down. She laughed, we moved on. She got to share a funny moment in her life with me (and presumably other people) because she thought I might be interested. If she posted on facebook? You'd have people asking what was wrong, giving advice on how to calm a child, commenting about child abuse, and writing essays about the ethics of posting children to social media. Whatever.

soneca 11y ago
So Spapchat achieved what Path tried limiting friends? Real connections with real friends. Funny thing, went to Path.com now and find out two interesting things: i) they have two apps at the same website now - Path, the social network and Talk, a messaging app; and ii) they don't even mention the 150 friends limit anymore (contrasting that it was the core feature and the epicenter of their launch campaign)
- parfe 11y ago
  altonzheng got it right I think when he wrote I had a similar revelation a while back with Snapchat. Users complain that you can't create groups to send to, you have to manually select each person. I like this - it means when you receive a snapchat, you know that person intentionally selected you to share a part of their life with. It adds a subtle but meaningful quality to a message that could be considered spammy and impersonal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10860501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10860501 Snapchat requires you to select who you want to see your snap. There's no facility to push into everyone's feed. I'm not sending it to my "Friends" or my "Family" without consideration. You aren't going to click 200 people, or 150, or 50. You're going to think "These five people really love hiking." Or "My cousins were talking about adopting a husky." Or "Last time I burned bacon like this was with John and Jane." Saying "you can only have 150 friends" wasn't the key to a more personal experience. It just meant there was a hard limit on how many people could spam you. The key for me is the tiny marginal cost of sending something to N+1 people, so instead you choose more thoughtfully.

toomanybeersies 11y ago

I don't believe that Snapchat offers content creation. Given that nothing actually persists, is it really content? I feel that it's content as much as small talk with a coworker is content, it's more filler than anything actually substantial. Now if I was to have a discussion about some technical issue or whatever, that would be creating content, but Snapchat is hardly the ideal, or indeed a feasible platform for that.

justin 11y ago
Exactly what people said about video of people playing video games "not being content." Content you don't want to watch or don't understand is still content if other people want to look at it.
NoahTheDuke 11y ago
Is content only content if it lasts forever?

SpaceCadetJones 11y ago

To contrast with some other snarky responses, for me Snapchat has very little to do with "social validation". Personally snapchat is another tool for me to connect with people. I get to see what people are up to on their shared stories, we exchange cool/funny things we see, and my musical friends and I exchange short videos of what we're working on. It's a little more humanizing than pure text chat. I only text/chat with a few people on a regular basis, but there's about 10 people I exchange snapchats with pretty frequently. It's a nice way to keep in touch, and it's a platform I tend to share on more than Facebook. The content is only there for 24 hours, and is only seen by the ~50 people I added rather than the 800 on Facebook.

dorian-graph 11y ago

The reward for me is just having fun with friends. Laughing at each other's snaps, just keeping up-to-date with what we're doing, seeing things that remind you of each other, etc. Having no # total of followers publicly available and the usual metrics encourages this too.

mehwoot 11y ago

But what is the reward of content creation? This is actually one of the reasons I like it- it is deliberately counter to a lot of social media. There is no like button, no retweet count, no permanent record- just ephemeral little moments you share with friends, and occasionally they'll mention that they liked one of your snaps to you. To me, it feels like social media in a way it can actually enhance our lives- it encourages you to share moments but once they are over, it's gone, and there are no statistics that you can use to obsess over whether you are fulfilling your social media potential.