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How Snapchat Built a Business by Confusing Olds
- macscam 11y agowhat is 'olds'? old people? Why would any business grow by confusing them?
- Animats 11y agoBecause brand preferences are locked in by the mid 20s, or at least many major brand managers think that.
- nightski 11y agoI think it's far more likely that Snapchat is a very shallow experience. It's common sense that adults wouldn't be the target market. Adults generally prefer richer interactions.
- CharlesW 11y agoAdults generally prefer richer interactions. Any in-depth references that support this? (Strikes me as curious, as I watch my 6-year-old playing a fairly elaborate Minecraft map…)
- nightski 11y agoMaybe I should caveat with "richer social interactions". I also did not claim that users of snap chat were not intelligent or did not enjoy rich experiences. Simply that those who use snap chat enjoy the shallowness of it. Here is an interesting article that was posted on HN - http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-teens#.spXjAD7J3G http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-te...
- nl 11y agoDoesn't this prove the opposite of your claim? Look how much richer their use is than say the interactions on HN!
- ssalazar 11y agoMighty fine view from that high horse of yours.
- oldmanjay 11y agoAre you seriously doubting the premise that people mature as they get older? Biology bestowed the high horse here. I don't mean this as dismissively as it may sound, but it seems possible you'll figure this out in a personal sense over the coming years.
- nl 11y agoMaturity does not imply richer social interaction. I can make a good argument for the opposite: as one matures one stops caring as much.
- oldmanjay 11y agoWell, it's an argument. I certainly don't know to call it good, and it doesn't match my experiences in any way. Perhaps you have access to a hidden cache of deep teens that I, as an old, wouldn't understand.
- nl 11y agoTo me "richer" implies more complex, with more subtle features - not "deeper" in any intellectual sense. As an older person, I really find it difficult to care if a particular friend didn't like an Instagram pic I posted. I really don't care how quickly they liked it and I don't even know which of my Facebook friends don't follow me on Instagram. They are all social interactions that add complexity and richness to the experience, and I don't pay attention to any of them.
- nightski 11y agoTo me richer means conversations and experiences. I love a good discussion about technology, politics, brewing, and many other subjects. Or just about life in general. I also like experiences such as a good hike, bike, camping trip, eating out, etc... Sending a friend a pic or even interacting on facebook doesn't really do much to further the friendship.
- lotso 11y agoI think you may be unfamiliar with Snapchat because Snapchat has some of the richest of interactions of any messaging or social network. You're literally communicating to your friends with videos and photos. The only thing that could be better than that is being in person. For some users, they're sending Snaps to dozens of friends every day, that they wouldn't otherwise talk to. It makes texting/email/fb feel so boring and almost formal. I feel comfortable Snapping my friend I haven't talked to in a couple months something random, whereas I would be less likely to hit them up randomly on text. Stories, the Snapchat broadcast medium, also let you feel more connected with your friends and loose connections. I don't need to talk to some friends every day, but it feels nice that I can share these silly, mundane experiences with them. This is a much richer experience than browsing my friends' highly curated photos on their Instagram, their boring/activist/humblebrag FB statuses, or their pure text tweets.
- samcodes 11y agoThank you; this is the comment I was looking for. Someone who uses and appreciates Snapchat and can explain to an outsider what the value is. Am I wrong in saying that you like that it feels more authentic?
- nl 11y agoI think you are going to need to define what you mean by "richer experience" there. There are plenty of examples of how younger people develop their own complex (rich) social norms and behaviors which confuse the fuck out of "olds". The (now outdated) behavior of "deleting" (ie deactivating) your Facebook account every night and reactivating every morning (so you couldn't get tagged and embarrassed) is a great example that confused most older people.
- cbd1984 11y ago> Adults generally prefer richer interactions. I suppose that's why TV is now the province of the 50+ set. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2014/09/05/tv-is-increasingly-for-old-people/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2014/09/05/t...
- zerocrates 11y agoCompared with Twitter or Facebook, Snapchat can seem almost aggressively user-unfriendly. If you’re new to the app and looking for posts by your kid, your boyfriend, or DJ Khaled, good luck. It’s hard to find somebody without knowing his or her screen name. This is by design. “We’ve made it very hard for parents to embarrass their children,” Spiegel said at a conference in January. “It’s much more for sharing personal moments than it is about this public display.” It sounds like part of the claim is that the app/platform is intentionally a little clunky and unintuitive so as to prevent an influx of the older generation a la Facebook. I think. I'm not between 14 and 24 so I don't know the first thing about Snapchat.
- stephenboyd 11y agoThis part of the claim doesn't hold up. The first thing that happens when you sign up is it will show you the username of everyone with a phone number in your contact list, including your embarrassed kids, and let you start following them right away.
- grrowl 11y agoIt's only useful if their "Who can view my story" setting is "Everyone". If it's set to "My Friends" you must send a friend request and they must accept it. There's also "Custom" so you can specifically block cooldad1969 or pick a subset of friends. Similar deal for "Who can send me snaps" — settings are "Everyone" or "My Friends". edit: I guess this is a good example — without deep familiarity with the app you could assume they don't post to their Story if it's empty, or could believe that snaps received in the message view (not the main list) were recently taken (those have been sent from the camera roll)
- kmfrk 11y ago"Olds" is a coy term by "millennials" who wanted the older generations who invented and keep using the term to get a taste of their own medicine. As far as keeping out "olds", look at what Tinder did by demanding a premium from 30+ users: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/tinder-charging-people-30-tinder/story?id=29335809 http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/tinder-charging-people-30-t....
- indignation35 11y ago"Olds" is a coy term by "millennials" who wanted the older generations who invented and keep using the term to get a taste of their own medicine. No. It comes from Autoadmit/Xoxohth, which is like Hacker News for East Coast lawyers in "biglaw" (although I doubt that most XO posters actually made biglaw). In the mid-2000s, it developed a robust troll culture and people brought back the archaic (Dickens Era) usage, "poors". This led into the nouning of other adjectives to describe people in a derogatory way: in addition to poors, fats, dumbs, olds. Most of us, in the early days, were relatively normal people with trolling habits. We weren't actually assholes; we were just pretending to be "prestigious" shitheads on the Internet. However, the gray-hat trolls eventually left when some actual assholes (black hat trolls) started getting in the game. It's a stupid usage and I'm rather disgusted that people would use it without irony. Using "poors" and "fats" and "olds", unless you're making fun of the American upper class, doesn't make you hip and it certainly doesn't make you "prestigious". It makes you an idiot with subpar grammar.
- oldmanjay 11y agoAre we supposed to find it pejorative? It just sounds clunky.
- mgiannopoulos 11y agoI don't think Tinder wants to keep out 30-year olds. In fact they want to monetise them as they know they have more available income and are more willing to spend it in a dating service.
- vuivugvuov 11y agoAnd perhaps most hilariously, there's almost no actual way to prevent people from lying about their age on the internet.
- indignation35 11y agoThere's a website called AutoAdmit (or Xoxohth) that was big in the 2000s where a lot of the more educated trolls congregated. Adjectives were "nouned" for derogatory use: poors, olds, fats, and dumbs. (OK, we didn't invent "the poors". We just revived that horrible phrase because part of the trolling was pretending to be rich and "prestigious" and generally trying to be the biggest asshole on the Internet. Unfortunately, some people took it too far and became assholes in real life.) Never did I (now an "old") think that I'd see that kind of shit, used without irony, in the mainstream press. It's a stupid usage. I'd be offended if I cared, but mostly I find people who use it to be uneducated and silly. For those who are unaware, Xoxohth/AutoAdmit is like Hacker News for lawyers, but with passive-aggression replaced by active aggression, and with the racism more overt. I wouldn't go there. It's ugly and a big waste of time.
- to3m 11y agoPresumably young people would rather use a service that doesn't have any boring old people on it. (As to why young people rather than old ones - the value of young people to advertisers is well known.)
- jrockway 11y ago> old people? Why would any business grow by confusing them? Eventually they die.
- dinkumthinkum 11y agoI guess the new way for a company to make money is to be fiercely disinterested in anyone who might ever have any? :) Anyway, it seems like a great thing for making memes on worldstarhiphop but as far as having the kind of economic impact that companies like Coca Cola have .... well I guess it's fun for the valley community to think this way.
- bsder 11y agoIt doesn't. Snapchat doesn't confuse me in the slightest in spite of being an "old". I actually laugh at "youngs" because I can run rings around them on any tech they use. Snapchat does what tweenage girls want. Because the girls are on it, the guys are on it. Those girls age (hopefully before they), get pregnant, give birth to another set of tweenage girls and another "hip" service takes its place. Cue Elton John singing "Circle of Life". As for why a fat, old record producer cares: tweenage girls are the only demographic spending any discretionary money (from the wallets of the "olds", natch). Everybody else is tapped out or doesn't give a damn or both.
- hellbanner 11y agoDoes anyone have a link where one of the Snapchat founder admits they created the app to send photos of their penises to college girls?
- gcb0 11y agono link. but it was when his Stanford frat house. same place where he start the app with the guy that coded the thing but then got outed, so probably a good indication of who leaked.
- hellbanner 11y agoThanks. I bet ^parent downvoted because it sounds like slander but I did read this on a few articles.. linked from HN IIRC. http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/28/confirmed-snapchats-evan-spiegel-is-kind-of-an-ass/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/28/confirmed-snapchats-evan-sp... Let's not forget that human sexuality plays a core component in business motivations and the environment in which this XX billion $ company was formed.
- yomly 11y agoFor the non-believers of Snapchat, here is where I think its value lies: For the past 50 years brand strategy has largely been (fairly) well characterised. Conventional wisdom in the industry did well enough for brands like McDonald's and Coca Cola to expand across the world and capture generations of customers. This is in part due to an incremental pace of innovation in how customers have consumed media in this time period. Then came along the internet and a bringing a huge stepwise change, driving not only unprecedented levels of fragmentation/segmentation/individualisation of users but also changing how we interact with and consume media. The generation of "millennials" and "digital natives" are people who now spend more time on the internet than in front of a TV. Facebook, with their 1Bn+ daily active users who are known to spend nearly 18 hours a week on the Facebook mobile app, saw the value in Snapchat - younger users don't have a Facebook account. It's uncool, it's creepy with its privacy policies. Snapchat has extremely strong market share on viewership for a generation of users that are arguably the most impressionable/valuable. This same generation don't really watch TV. Considering individual brands would spend hundreds of millions on TV, if Snapchat can capture even a fraction of this media budget, they'll be hugely profitable. NB I chose McDonald's and Coke as brands as they are two good examples of previously invincible global brands that are now showing significant decline. They also had huge media budgets. For the purposes of my argument, I've chosen to ignore other market trends such as growing health awareness but my point still stands.
- ljk 11y agoseems like advertising will always be ingrained to our culture, no matter how fast the technology is changing
- arbuge 11y ago>> I chose McDonald's and Coke as brands as they are two good examples of previously invincible global brands that are now showing significant decline. Not sure about Coke but McDonald's is doing pretty well these days. Its stock recently hit an all-time high and is one of the best performers this year, following their success with all-day breakfast.
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
- dec0dedab0de 11y agoThe best part about snapchat, vs sms/mms is when someone doesn't respond it just goes away. So when you message each other later it's not hanging there as a reminder building silent resentments.
- xufi 11y ago"Hey did you see my.........hey where did you go?"
- gcb0 11y agocase in point: everyone here comparing IM with TV or Facebook. at least say telephone in you analogy.