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Instagram daily use surpasses Snapchat
- klondike_ 9y agoThis isn't exactly surprising. Snapchat is a messaging application, and Instagram is a messaging and picture sharing platform. Obviously users would spend more time browsing images on Insagram than just shooting off some messages to friends in Snapchat.
- baddox 9y agoTrue, but I doubt Snapchat the company is fine with being "just a messaging application" that unsurprisingly gets used less per day than a key competitor.
- trhaynes 9y agoSnapchat does have Discover, with "snap stories" from news sites and even stuff they curate themselves. https://support.snapchat.com/en-US/article/discover-how-to https://support.snapchat.com/en-US/article/discover-how-to
- toomuchtodo 9y ago> with "snap stories" from news sites and even stuff they curate themselves. That has to be even more depressing if Instagram users are still using the IG app more with the effort SNAP is putting into the content.
- k-mcgrady 9y agoThe problem is that Snapchat Discover is totally bollocks. I'm a mid-20's guy and 90% of the content I see in it is either about the Kardashians or stuff like '10 things you totally hate about your bra'. There is absolutely zero targeting of that content and unfortunately it's not even neutral 'everyone will like this' content. It's 90% for teenage girls.
- nrhk 9y agoDifficult to target when you have no user data and your app fundamental can't integrate it in. They're counting on SnapMaps to be their savior in terms of advertising data. I see Discover turning into a fix of local discovery options and general nationally curated stories
- meathook 9y agoWhat do people think about "minutes per day" as a metric for success? I think it represents a fundamental misalignment of goals between users and the company. By this metric, the more of your waking life that can be taken, the better.
- dvt 9y agoI don't get it. It's not like users are forced to use these applications. If users like Instagram more than Snapchat, they're bound to use it longer (which the article seems to imply). Hence, the metric.
- wott 9y ago> It's not like users are forced to use these applications. Nowadays, everything in this line of business is designed to be addictive.
- yellow_postit 9y agoSee "Hooked" by Nir Eyal which is all about how to get people addicted to your product. Hence time glued to app metrics.
- dvt 9y agoWell, I guess we have different a different understanding of addiction. Building a great habit-forming app (what Hooked is about) is slightly different than selling crack-cocaine. I would argue one is morally acceptable (building the app) and the other isn't (selling crack-cocaine).
- bduerst 9y agoWhat do you think the pay-to-win mobile apps qualify as? Specifically, the games engineered as Skinner boxes?
- _tulpa 9y agoI would argue that the app is morally ambiguous unless you know what habits it teaches the user. What if it teaches users the habit of selling crack cocaine? (stupid example, but you get the point)
- hahahsnap 9y agoMetrics exposed by instagram is a pure scam aka growth hacking by fb engineers as their comp is aligned towards that. Snapchat: Stories are not autoplay. You touch and see the story you're interested in and the view closes. You have to scroll and open another story. Instagram: Stories are autoplay. You click once and it's a slideshow. So you can assume metric here are orders of magnitude higher than what it should be. Snapchat: Story introduced a new revenue source without affecting bottomline. Instagram: Stories at the top of the app is a very bad user experience. If an users spends more time in story, he spends less time in scrolling instagram feed. (Nobody in Instagram wants to talk about that). Snapchat: People post whenever they feel like posting. Instagram: People post when they feel something is of very high quality. Snapchat: Doesn't want to grow the number of users as it doesn't matter to company's revenue. FB makes 75-80% of revenue with just it's 10-20% of users which snapchat already own.
- yellow_postit 9y agoWhy would Snap not want to grow the number of users?
- electic 9y agoYou can think of it as Apple vs. Microsoft. You can have every desktop in the world and not make as much cash as Apple.
- ridruejo 9y agoExcept Snapchat is not making real money and less prospects to do so by the day https://stratechery.com/2017/snaps-apple-strategy/ https://stratechery.com/2017/snaps-apple-strategy/
- vit05 9y agoApparently, Evan Spiegel has said they do not want to expand to poor countries like India and Spain. And he doesn't care so much about the Android version. http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/snapchat-evan-spiegel-only-for-rich-people-anthony-pompliano-1202028526/ http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/snapchat-evan-spiegel-only-...
- packetized 9y agoI'll be concerned about $SNAP when Instagram is used in lieu of texting.
- mcintyre1994 9y agoI wonder how Snapchat's messaging metrics compare to Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp - if I had to guess, both easily squash Snapchat.
- kfriede 9y agoProbably very highly dependent on which age group. Pre-teens/teens? Snapchat. 20's? Messenger. 30+? Messenger and WhatsApp.
- NemesisOfNo 9y agoMy celebrity and personal Snapchat stories have started dwindling. My stories are about 1/3-1/4 of what they were six months ago. When I post to Snapchat, I used to get several dozen views from friends. Now I'm lucky if I get ten. Snapchat just needs to allow you find and add friends more easily. That's what's holding them back.
- hahahsnap 9y ago>>> Snapchat just needs to allow you find and add friends more easily. That's what's holding them back. Not really. There is a balance which needs to be achieved. I have around > 500 friends in Facebook/Instagram but i don't really care much about what he/she shared every day. Having lots of people makes the social media experience better in first few years but not long-term.
- sreejithr 9y agoNo shit, Sherlock!
- nv-vn 9y agoThe whole point of Snapchat is that it's not about sitting down, taking a high quality photo, editing it, etc. It's a messaging app meant for quick replies. You send someone something and they reply back. That's fundamentally different from Instagram's model of user interaction. It's like comparing time spent in iMessage to time spent on YouTube: it doesn't make sense.
- alaskamiller 9y agoNope. Now the point of snapchat is to binge watch videos of other people. Snapchat sells ads the same way the media company does. So their KPI is time spent, like how a broadcast company determines ad rates. Their strategy is to detach the accountability of clicks or performance. You spend six figures with Snap to impress your brands to the same demo (Gen Z) that used to tune in to MTV (Gen X) and Youtube (Gen Y). As such, here Instagram is following suit. Vertical scrolling is just manual scrubbing.
- dx034 9y agoPosting on instagram won't take much longer than on snapchat, most of the time to arrange the picture will be spent in the camera app. When it comes to viewing (which is where ad revenue is generated), both apps have similar customer behaviour.
- kul 9y agoFB are the best at creating and controlling the narrative. Since the start. They'll push out numbers that always favor them.
- seppin 9y agowhen you own all market share it's not hard to "push out numbers" that are favorable.
- Rjevski 9y agoAn app with a decent UX surpasses a shitty one with dreadful UX - who would've thought?
- izacus 9y agoYeah - I think everyone here just ignores how dreadful the Snapchat app is on Android phones. It's so dreadful that even non-techy users which usually don't care about app quality jumped ship from Snapchat to Instagram. A lot of iPhone users followed because that's where the content is now.
- Rjevski 9y agoEven on iPhone it's dreadful now. I miss the first few versions of Snapchat when it launched. An UI that at least kinda made sense, no stories nor "discover" garbage, and the list of everyone's top 3 "best friends" was cool.
- cvsh 9y agoDreadful UX was Snapchat's selling point from the beginning, though. Kids love it because the olds can't figure it out.
- Rjevski 9y agoTo be honest their UI used to be nice when they launched, and that hasn't prevented kids for liking it. They made it worse later on for no benefit, and eventually got taken over by Instagram.
- eosophos 9y agoI do not understand the hype about Snapchat... Doesn't IG do everything and more?
- kfriede 9y agoNow, yes. Snapchat was first to market (between the two) with expiring photos and stories.
- astrostl 9y agoI really can't get over how poor I find Snapchat's UI/UX to be, and I don't _think_ it's because I'm old. But I second-guess it.
- smrtinsert 9y agoI think this is part of why most people end up leaving. Instagram is more interesting to check and its ui is significantly better.
- slackoverflower 9y agoSnapchat is very easy and intuitive to use. I'll never understand people saying they can't use the app. Also every US college student right now uses Snapchat for all communication. FB should be scared
- astrostl 9y agoHidden information is the definition of unintuitive. "Easy once you get the hang of it" is the definition of unintuitive. Snapchat has six main screens: home, west, north, south, east, and east-east. There is no indication that this is true, it has to be (randomly) discovered or taught. That it is easy to swipe left or right, or to remember that the up screen is your profile, has nothing to do with whether or not something is intuitive. Intuitive would be this being obvious. Touching an app icon to open it is intuitive and easy. Force-touching a keyboard display to open up a cursor slider is easy, but not intuitive.
- klondike_ 9y agoI believe this is part of their strategy, it requires somebody else who already uses the app to teach you. This keeps the platform exclusive to tech-savvy youth instead of being infested by old people and falling out of favor with those groups like Facebook did.
- loveass 9y agothere's more ass on instagram, that's why. snapchat needs ass
- yalogin 9y agoAt first glance I thought snap had more users than Instagram and that surprised me a lot. If it’s just the amount time users are using the app, I don’t know it should be that surprising if Instagram cloned snap’s feature. Unfortunately for Snap FB has a lot bigger pockets than them and so it’s unlikely they will ever relent.
- tedmiston 9y ago> If Facebook’s goal was stop Snap in its tracks, it’s largely succeeded with Instagram Stories. Snapchat’s monthly active user growth rate has plummeted from 17.2% per quarter to just 5%... Does HN think that these two events are even related? From my experience, the content I get via Instagram Stories is mostly from people I don't know but follow whereas Snapchat is still where most of the interactions with my friends happens. The products have similar features but the audience, especially being public-facing, is totally different in my experience.
- Markoff 9y agoi feel old (in 30s) when i have problem to distinguish these two services, do I remember correctly that Instagram is just some photo albums for food (not sure what's difference from Google photos) and Snapchat is some chat with stickers for teenagers? I don't use Twitter, Facebook or pretty much any social media (besides Reddit and HN) and I don't feel like i am missing on something.
- visarga 9y ago> What happens, for example, if we recreate the structure of the brain on a computer by interacting silicon chips where you had interacting neurons? Would it be missing anything that’s missing in the mind? I’d like to think that a computer could be conscious. I don't think consciousness is reducible to a pattern of interactions in the brain, but I do think that if one reproduces that pattern of interactions in fine enough detail, one will reproduce consciousness. Perfectly said. Consciousness is not reducible to a pattern of interaction in the brain because it's a system of brain+world that creates consciousness. The brain learns from the world first, only later it is capable of independent imagination and thinking. A brain never connected to the world would not be conscious. An AI connected to the world (or a simulation) could be conscious of the world it exists in, and of its own existence there.