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Anecdotally my one Snap user data point has been wooed by Instagram Stories. Insta seems to be the juggernaut in the media stream space. It's not clear to me h

Anecdotally my one Snap user data point has been wooed by Instagram Stories. Insta seems to be the juggernaut in the media stream space. It's not clear to me how Snap competes since Insta isn't some crufty Suite like Facebook or Microsoft. They can radically change the UI just as easily as Snap to keep up with needs. The underlying tech is all known concepts. Maybe Snap can differentiate in some kind of AR features, but they're really just scraping by there with a fairly minimal offering. Still, that's where I guess I would focus if I were them: great creator authoring UIs, and advanced psuedo-authoring (filter long tail) for end users. Hard to argue you're going to beat Insta on filters tho. Edit: oh yeah, Snap can win a segment on privacy. Although Facebook seems like a more natural place for friends-only stuff. Snap has to fight network effects there.

eckza 9y ago
The primary focus of Instagram is achievement broadcasting. The primary focus of Snapchat is messaging. Snapchat's messaging platform is also heavily gamified. There are a lot of very clever psychological incentives to continue using the platform on a daily basis, which drives user engagement through the roof. Instagram's messaging platform feels bolted-on, secondary. I would never consider using Instagram as a primary method of communicating with someone, but I use Snapchat as a primary method of communicating with people on a daily basis.
- mvid 9y ago
  I disagree. Everyone I know who used snap now uses Instagram, with no behavior change.
- wcummings 9y ago
  Snap is basically the only social network I use at this point (except IRC, if you count that), mostly because it's fairly trivial and fun (same as IRC :). Take stupid pictures, draw stupid crap on top, send it to a "chat room", forget about it forever. To me SnapChat is a chat app with some cool multimedia features. I never ever use stories (the feature Instagram has notoriously cloned). Other than marketers, who is using stories? Very few of my friends do. Instagram seems like douchey lifestyle porn to me. For example, the presence of "likes" is very off-putting to me. I can't be the only person with this brand association.

eckza 9y ago

The primary focus of Instagram is achievement broadcasting. The primary focus of Snapchat is messaging. Snapchat's messaging platform is also heavily gamified. There are a lot of very clever psychological incentives to continue using the platform on a daily basis, which drives user engagement through the roof. Instagram's messaging platform feels bolted-on, secondary. I would never consider using Instagram as a primary method of communicating with someone, but I use Snapchat as a primary method of communicating with people on a daily basis.

mvid 9y ago
I disagree. Everyone I know who used snap now uses Instagram, with no behavior change.
wcummings 9y ago
Snap is basically the only social network I use at this point (except IRC, if you count that), mostly because it's fairly trivial and fun (same as IRC :). Take stupid pictures, draw stupid crap on top, send it to a "chat room", forget about it forever. To me SnapChat is a chat app with some cool multimedia features. I never ever use stories (the feature Instagram has notoriously cloned). Other than marketers, who is using stories? Very few of my friends do. Instagram seems like douchey lifestyle porn to me. For example, the presence of "likes" is very off-putting to me. I can't be the only person with this brand association.