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In One Tweet, Kylie Jenner Wiped Out $1.3B of Snap's Market Value

110 points by pdog 9y ago

farrelljohn 9y ago
This whole recent update to Snapchat has been horrible in almost every way. Haven't heard a single good thing from the people I know who use it. My question is how does an update that is almost universally hated by the user base get through to production? Does Snapchat not have any user feedback in their design or is it simply "How can we make more money"? Seems to me Snapchat forgot the most important thing about a products profitability: the customers.
- jbob2000 9y ago
  The lesson for Snapchat, and really any new software company, is that design updates need to roll out slowly. You cannot drop a boat load of changes on users. Facebook learned this early on when they introduced the new wall and news feed. Now they allow you to preview design changes before they get fully rolled out. The design changes aren't necessarily bad, it still looks and operates fine. Snapchat just made the rookie mistake of changing everything at once before anyone could orient themselves around the changes.
  - noblethrasher 9y ago
    eBay is a famous case study of this: https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    It’s typical tech hubris. For a consumer product, changes that are convenient to product development are almost always shitty for the customer.
    - noobermin 9y ago
      The issue here is assuming that the users of said sites are their customers. They are not. When you are selling beef, do you worry about how the cows feel about it?
      - _r_o_y_ 9y ago
        You do if it affects the way the beef sells.
        noobermin 9y ago
        Right. Was going to add that ammendum, but didn't get around to it. The point is users are ancillary, not the primary means of revenue. Whenever there is that mismatch, you'll have issues like this.
      - the-pigeon 9y ago
        You might not but you should. If you don't care about the welfare of your cows they will not grow as large and you'll have less product to sell. Putting that in more literal terms, if you damage the user experience you will damage user engagement and your ad revenue is going to fall. There's certainly tricks to treat the cows poorly and still profit for a while but this sort of behavior has killed many companies.
      - Spooky23 9y ago
        Like I said, tech hubris. If you don't feed the cow, you won't be selling too much beef. To use an animal aphorism used in the context of Wall St, "Bulls run, pigs get slaughtered."
  - radicalbyte 9y ago
    Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all did this. They're all spammy and terribly broken crapholes which I now barely use. If there were viable alternatives I'd eliminate that barely.
- quasse 9y ago
  I'm possibly starting to age out of the target market, but Snapchat has done a great job of getting me move to Instagram stories for my "social media" type content (vs. individual targeted stuff, which Snapchat still works all right for).
- ilamont 9y ago
  Some years ago Hootsuite changed the way a feature called "social picker" worked. It was a major change, and many power users (people managing multiple accounts or brand accounts) pointed out that it made their work a lot harder and more prone to error. Hootsuite's response: blaming users' "fear of change" for the reaction (1). Later someone from the company apologized, and said that "extensive user testing" had been done, but they clearly missed an important segment of the market. 1. https://in30minutes.com/hootsuite-takes-the-low-road-blames-complaints-on-fear-of-change/ https://in30minutes.com/hootsuite-takes-the-low-road-blames-...
  - nerfhammer 9y ago
    Thing is, some segment of users will always go nuts whenever you change anything. If you're in charge of product development it's hard to take any particular moment of outrage too seriously.
    - nakedrobot2 9y ago
      Yes, this is very true. Can anyone name an update or design of software that was applauded by the majority of users? I can't.
      - torstenvl 9y ago
        Windows '95 over Windows 3.11 Mac OS X Tiger over Mac OS X Panther Windows 7 over Windows Vista
        addicted 9y ago
        Until about Snow Leopard pretty much every Mac OS X update was almost universally considered much better than the ones before (though the truism that you avoid a new Mac OS X update on a primary computer till 10.x.1 still held).
    - cornholio 9y ago
      If you are in product development, the lesson is that any change has a cost and impact to your users, so you need to make sure that the benefits outweigh the cost and plan for resistance. That's entirely different from "they will complain no mater what you do so you should ignore them".
- empath75 9y ago
  Digg died basically overnight after a redesign. It happens.
  - officemonkey 9y ago
    There was also a rapidly-maturing Reddit waiting in the wings. If you have a moat, you can weather the storm after a design snafu. If you don't? @Jack, you dead.
    - antisthenes 9y ago
      Makes one wonder if Reddit has a moat. I liked their conservative design so far, but there seem to be cracks appearing the form of 'mobilization' of the user profile page for example. Seems to be the trend of the last 5 years of making the desktop experience broken/annoying in some way or form and the mobile experience - ad-ridden and designed for momentary rather than deep engagement.
      - criley2 9y ago
        I think Reddit still has a moat. There have been attempts to do something else, such as voat, but those generally become either A) more akin to subreddits than reddit (like this very site) or B) ideological havens for groups not welcome on reddit. In voat's case, when reddit begin banning overt racism from white supremacists and calls for violence, as well as communities dedicated to hating fat people or women, those radicalized users all fled to voat. That toxic core userbase makes the site untenable for the masses who are repulsed by such naked racism, prejudice and other evil content. So I don't really see anyone waiting in the reddit wings. The ones that were there before are still there (SA, fark, /.), and the ones that follow aren't poised to be the same thing.
        empath75 9y ago
        Reddit doesn’t have a moat, IMO, because they don’t have a social graph. It’s like Facebook for strangers. Someone could wipe them out over night because users don’t really have any connection to each other.
- aaronbrethorst 9y ago
  My question is how does an update that is almost universally hated by the user base get through to production? Evan Spiegel is convinced that he's the second coming of Steve Jobs. http://www.businessinsider.com/what-its-like-to-work-at-snapchat-2016-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/what-its-like-to-work-at-snap...
- rob-olmos 9y ago
  I'm also suspicious of the amount of testing that's being done. More than once the app was posting a completely black pic for every snap, lasting at least a couple days. I stopped using it after this last time it started doing that again.
- eyeareque 9y ago
  I use the app daily and I have to say while the new version is different and a bit rough, i still like where they are headed. With some tweaks I believe it will be better than the old and more confusing design
- mayneack 9y ago
  I really enjoy the update. I've posted this before, but I like the focus on my friends, the isolation of the branded content, and the ability to mute specific people's stories. I hope people get used to it rather than rolling it back or killing the app.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  1 - Company makes innovative product with crappy UI (Vine/Snapchat) 2 - Instagram copies the idea and improved the interface 3 - Company becomes irrelevant 4 - Rinse/repeat
- patmcc 9y ago
  >>My question is how does an update that is almost universally hated by the user base get through to production? I think a lot of us are jealous of your work history right now - the answer to that question is almost always "the person who can fire me/signs my paycheck thought it was a good idea".
- justboxing 9y ago
  > Does Snapchat not have any user feedback in their design Apparently they don't even solicit feedback from their own inhouse employees, so I doubt they solicit it from control groups / influential users > Compared to the "dogfooding" tradition in many tech companies, where employees try out their products before releasing them to the public, most Snap employees don't know when a new product is coming — regardless if it would affect their team's long-term metrics or goals. When the company launched Lenses, its famous filters that morph people's faces, most employees learned about it for the first time on the company blog post announcing it to the world. Source: OP.
- parliament32 9y ago
  Being in the beta program, I've been dealing with the redesign for a few months now. I've mostly forgotten what the major changes were, but: I'm happy that the advertising "Discover" crap is put away on its own page, and I hate how hard it is to view my friends' stories now. What do you dislike about it?
- pdkl95 9y ago
  > Does Snapchat not have any user feedback This is the most important lesson for any service that depends on a community of users for survival: involve them in the update process, or you will scare them away. Even if the new version is objectively better (which is rare), unexpected changes cause confusion and anger. I encourage anybody involved in making this kind of service to watch this[1] talk from NOTACON by Joe Peacock of fark.com about their experience deploying a surprise redesign, then compounding the anger with their infamous reply: > You'll get over it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI
WellDressed 9y ago
Reminds me of the backlash Digg received back in the day. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/31/digg-redesign-revolt https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/31/digg-...
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  Yes, this is an important lesson about redesigns. I saw a couple people brush off the Snapchat redesign angst with, "Meh, people will get over it", usually with links to the (admittedly accurate) Oatmeal comic about Facebook layout changes [0]. And while that's certainly the case sometimes, don't count on it as a general rule: Digg demonstrated conclusively that a poorly-received redesign can torpedo the entire company. Proceed with caution. [0]: http://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter/facebook_layout http://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter/facebook_layout
bdluna 9y ago
Have to agree, the recent update is a head-scratcher. They made user stories considerably more confusing to use, and these same user stories are what made Snapchat successful and exciting to begin with. I really think they should work to bring back the daily city/event stories too. For those that don't remember, they used to aggregate the biggest events and city stories on a daily basis and provide those front and center. Was a really unique way to experience a city across the world from where you are! They've since gotten rid of this, and moved it into a hidden "SnapMap" feature which is easily missed by many users.
- taoistextremist 9y ago
  >I really think they should work to bring back the daily city/event stories too. I remember this showing me how great some places are across the world that I never thought of, when they were daily (or was it weekly?) a different city/country. At the risk of sounding ignorant, I remember learning just how modern and developed Namibia's urban life is from one of these.
tw1010 9y ago
"Temporarily" could be added to the headline.
oceanghost 9y ago
Snapchat is purposefully difficult to use, and completely user-hostile (notifications in particular). This is how they keep adults off their platform.
- imglorp 9y ago
  Let's go into that a little more. Are you thinking that "exclusively for kids" is the message, and that you have to appeal to the demo to keep them? Another major user hostile feature is viewing anything on Instagram: the images (main reason to be there, eh?) are hard to zoom or save. The videos have few options like speed or captions. They almost revel in "here's your fixed size picture frame, enjoy our choices".
  - cstrat 9y ago
    iOS you can now finally zoom. However you're right, saving or skipping videos are simple features which are intentionally lacking.
  - oceanghost 9y ago
    I think SC wants to appeal to young people. Young people don't want their parents around. So SC needs to find a way to discourage older folks while not appearing outright hostile. Solution? Create a somewhat frustrating user experience. For Some reason, younger people will tolerate that and older folks won't, thus you skew your demographics the direction you want. It's not that the app is impossible to figure out, it's just that it has a lot of unnecessary friction. Another way of saying this is: Adults care more about good UI/UX than younger folks. I realize there are a lot of assumptions in my argument here, but it is my best reasoning out of the situation.
    - imglorp 9y ago
      > Adults care more about good UI/UX than younger folks. I was thinking the opposite, almost. I would propose: kids care more about a fun instant experience (socializing) vs adults caring more about utility (I like this picture, can I zoom and save it?) So it might be the lack of utility that drives the ancients off the site, not the lack of Pretty UI.
ihuman 9y ago
Could someone explain to be why the new update is bad? I primarily use snapchat for my friends' stories. With the new update I no longer have to see ads under the stories, which is a positive for me.
- farrelljohn 9y ago
  One reason that I used frequently is custom group stories, for example a friend group can have their own story where everyone can post/look at. They used to be grouped in with user stories, but now are in the "discover" feed buried within the sponsored content and are extremely difficult to find easily. So much so that a few that I am a part of are almost never used anymore.
- pducks32 9y ago
  Why I don’t like it is 3 fold: 2 major and 1 minor. The first is that my friend list is 1. Person I just Snapped 2. Person I just Snapped 3. Person I haven’t talked to in forever (but just posted to their story) 4. Person I haven’t talked to in forever ... And there will be times I snap a person and go back on the friends list and their gone! Like they just don’t show up anywhere I have to search them to see if they opened my snap. Second is that I have people (like family) who I don’t snap much but still look at their stories. In the new version I actually have to search them all Individually which is awful. Third is minor but I find the friends list cluttered and difficult to process. Stories, Streaks, message notifications, scores, Bitmoji, names all cluttered into one single line item.
- misingnoglic 9y ago
  To make a long story short, I used to be able to swipe to the right and see all my friends stories, sorted by last update time. Now it's some horrible Mish most of these stories on the "friends" page, and I can't see the stories I want to see.
reaperducer 9y ago
Like any other company, it's important to diversify your revenue. Snap tied itself heavily to flash-in-the-pan pop celebrities. It should also have cultivated other types of thought leaders from other groups if it wanted to be anything other than a flash-in-the-pan, itself. If you don't think clearly, the hockey stick on the graph smacks you in the head.
adamnemecek 9y ago
This is basically celebrity news.
fnayr 9y ago
So I read the article, but I've seen claims like this before: some event correlated with a stock dive equals "proof" the event caused it, when it turns out some other news got announced like a quarterly result. Is that what's going on here?
- Nadya 9y ago
  It's poorly disguised marketing for Kylie Jenner. Look at the "influence" she holds, wiping out $1.3B from Snapchat value! Wouldn't you want her to support your {thing}? Imagine how much value it would bring your product.
  - noobermin 9y ago
    It probably isn't marketing for her as much as it's clickbait for bloomberg. I'm sure she doesn't mind the headlines regardless.
    - Nadya 9y ago
      Why not both? Getting paid to make a clickbait headline to prop someone up as an influencer. Although upon further thought - you're more likely to be right that it's just clickbait.
- bspn 9y ago
  I don't follow Snap well enough to know the cause of the dive, but they did release their first ever annual report as a public company this morning: https://investor.snap.com/financial-information/sec-filings https://investor.snap.com/financial-information/sec-filings
  - wungsten 9y ago
    That is certainly a much more likely cause of the devaluing.
  - fnayr 9y ago
    Yep that's exactly what I was expecting. Thanks.
majormajor 9y ago
An experience redesign (vs a reskin) is saying you have something new good enough to justify disrupting your user's existing routines. It's not clear to me what that new thing is in the new Snapchat UI. It seems better consolidated but less consistently sorted/organized. But for direct communication with friends, it's not really that different. If anything, the redesign feels like an attempt to protect the core feature of Snapchat - the direct communication vs the spammy broadcasting - at the cost of a temporary hit to revenue. I don't see how it would make them more money in the short run. I honestly have no idea how a celebrity would use the app, so it could easily be much worse for her, but that direct experience probably isn't relevant. Snapchat isn't Twitter. Twitter and Instagram seem to be dominated by "influencer" type stuff, which is why I practically never use them - Snapchat is better for talking to people I know. Trickier to monetize that, though. Regardless, thanks to modern metrics ("spying" if you're uncharitable) Snapchat is doubtless aware of all the changes, so we'll see if further changes come or if this was just complaining-about-change.
jacquesm 9y ago
Kylie who?
- gaius 9y ago
  There is only one Kylie (Minogue) and she is far too classy for social media shenanigans
bfrog 9y ago
Considering the stock rose nearly 50% after last earnings... It was bound to fall.
- bob_theslob646 9y ago
  Hindsight bias. It rose because of a gigantic short squeeze coupled with better than expected earnings. >Revenue: $285.7 million versus $252.9 million estimated, according to a Thomson Reuters consensus estimate.
thisisit 9y ago
> on the heels of a tweet from Kylie Jenner, who said she doesn’t open the app anymore. Whether it’s the demands of her newfound motherhood, or the recent app redesign, the testament drew similar replies from her 24.5 million followers. Wall Street analysts too, have begun to notice, citing recent user engagement trends noticed since the platform’s redesign. So if it crashes even more, can we safely say it was caused by some of the "similar replies" on this HN thread? ;)
tejasmanohar 9y ago
The causation here is weak to say the least.
- wungsten 9y ago
  Another user pointed out that Snap released their first annual earnings report since IPO this morning, which seems a far more likely cause :)
erikrothoff 9y ago
I’ve always found the rise of Snapchat a bit volatile. Their main audience is bound to lose interest and move to the next cool thing. Facebook at least has a utility, so it’s not only about where the ”cool kids are”. Like MySpace.
code_sloth 9y ago
Can someone remind me how on earth is Snap's market cap US$20 billion right now?
- Kequc 9y ago
  I don't get it either, apparently a tech companies value is tied directly to and only to the size of its user base. I could never use the app effectively so I'm happy to hear it got a redesign of any kind.
samfisher83 9y ago
If she were to short the stock and then posted a tweet is that illegal? Or the inverse if she bought the stock and posted a tweet? It seems like some of these social influencers have a lot of power.
- guitarbill 9y ago
  If Wall Street/investors are so out of touch that a vacuous tweet of a socialite can have so much effect, to me that’s a different issue entirely. Not to mention one reason this could happen is if the stock price was grossly overvalued in the first place. In general, I don’t see anything specifically illegal about this.
  - webkike 9y ago
    Kylie Jenner has 24.5 million twitter followers that presumably think somewhat similarly to her. I'm pretty sure that her thoughts on this matter are indicative of a larger trend that an investor would be wary to ignore.
    - guitarbill 9y ago
      A trend is more than one person, and as the article states her situation has recently changed. This is all a sign of pure laziness/hype/greed, instead of doing some actual market research before you make investment decisions. In any case, I’m not sure how much of her “thought” went into that tweet.
  - protomyth 9y ago
    a vacuous tweet of a socialite How do you arrive at calling Kyle Jenner vacuous? She has an audience and has been quite successful at monetizing. If she is vacuous then Snapchat and lot of other startups should be described the same way. Given the sales of her cosmetic line, a Wall Street investor would do well to listen to her when she thinks a service is over.
    - guitarbill 9y ago
TeeWEE 9y ago
Its not this tweet that wiped out the market value, its the fact that less people are using snapchat..
racer-v 9y ago
Crazy that we still use apps instead of protocols for feeds and video. What's the closest thing to an open substitute? I've been looking at Gajim for XMPP + video chat https://gajim.org/ https://gajim.org/
makecheck 9y ago
At this point it’s hard to think of a major app or OS that hasn’t done something to royally screw over its users with unwanted updates that changed everything for the worse. There needs to be a mechanism for making certain user guarantees, especially once money has been exchanged. And arguably since “time is money”, if you have invested a certain amount of time in something that’s then been messed up by the provider, you should receive similar guarantees because you’ve essentially “paid” a lot for it. One of the problems is that it’s just too easy for companies to radically revamp things freely. Open-source used to sort of defend against this with the forking option. Too many modern devices are now locked-down to the point where open-source isn’t feasible for much of the software you’re likely to need. Another problem is that too many updates are able to lump the bad with the good. Perhaps we need a way to force entities to develop their software features in such a way that at least two independent classes of updates are feasible: for example, allowing users to skip stupid UI revamps without becoming completely unable to receive other bug fixes.
eksemplar 9y ago
Trump tweets about taxing European solar and stock in Vestas (wind power) drops 35% in two days, despite the company ringing in contract after contract... Now a different reality tv star crashes $1.3 billion worth of value with a tweet about not using a platform? Stock is quite frankly getting dumber than CryptoCurrency.
- mrguyorama 9y ago
  Important to remember that it's often the same people speculating in both fields. Don't forget that next time some absurd scam coin gets a million dollar market cap
- OfficerGuac 9y ago
  Cryptocurrency has always been catching up rather than ahead of the game in the speculation stupidity arena. I always have a good time when I read /r/wallstreetbets (even though they're pretty self-aware, it can still be hilarious).
mtgx 9y ago
Maybe a lesson to be learned for companies here: ignore the "small vocal minority" at your own peril.
z3t4 9y ago
Replace Snap with something else. For example: "In One Tweet, Kylie Jenner Wiped Out $1.3B of Microsoft's Market Value" to see how ridiculous it can get, then think about why is that.
technofiend 9y ago
>on the heels of a tweet from Kylie Jenner, who said she doesn’t open the app anymore Ouch. Sounds like she should have been a beta tester of the revamped site. In other words "don't bite the hand that tweets you." I'll let myself out.
jcslzr 9y ago
if this is not proof that the stock market is a house of cards i dont know what is...

110 points by pdog 9y ago

This whole recent update to Snapchat has been horrible in almost every way. Haven't heard a single good thing from the people I know who use it. My question is how does an update that is almost universally hated by the user base get through to production? Does Snapchat not have any user feedback in their design or is it simply "How can we make more money"? Seems to me Snapchat forgot the most important thing about a products profitability: the customers.

jbob2000 9y ago
The lesson for Snapchat, and really any new software company, is that design updates need to roll out slowly. You cannot drop a boat load of changes on users. Facebook learned this early on when they introduced the new wall and news feed. Now they allow you to preview design changes before they get fully rolled out. The design changes aren't necessarily bad, it still looks and operates fine. Snapchat just made the rookie mistake of changing everything at once before anyone could orient themselves around the changes.
- noblethrasher 9y ago
  eBay is a famous case study of this: https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience
- Spooky23 9y ago
  It’s typical tech hubris. For a consumer product, changes that are convenient to product development are almost always shitty for the customer.
  - noobermin 9y ago
    The issue here is assuming that the users of said sites are their customers. They are not. When you are selling beef, do you worry about how the cows feel about it?
    - _r_o_y_ 9y ago
      You do if it affects the way the beef sells.
      - noobermin 9y ago
        Right. Was going to add that ammendum, but didn't get around to it. The point is users are ancillary, not the primary means of revenue. Whenever there is that mismatch, you'll have issues like this.
    - the-pigeon 9y ago
      You might not but you should. If you don't care about the welfare of your cows they will not grow as large and you'll have less product to sell. Putting that in more literal terms, if you damage the user experience you will damage user engagement and your ad revenue is going to fall. There's certainly tricks to treat the cows poorly and still profit for a while but this sort of behavior has killed many companies.
    - Spooky23 9y ago
      Like I said, tech hubris. If you don't feed the cow, you won't be selling too much beef. To use an animal aphorism used in the context of Wall St, "Bulls run, pigs get slaughtered."
- radicalbyte 9y ago
  Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all did this. They're all spammy and terribly broken crapholes which I now barely use. If there were viable alternatives I'd eliminate that barely.
quasse 9y ago
I'm possibly starting to age out of the target market, but Snapchat has done a great job of getting me move to Instagram stories for my "social media" type content (vs. individual targeted stuff, which Snapchat still works all right for).
ilamont 9y ago
Some years ago Hootsuite changed the way a feature called "social picker" worked. It was a major change, and many power users (people managing multiple accounts or brand accounts) pointed out that it made their work a lot harder and more prone to error. Hootsuite's response: blaming users' "fear of change" for the reaction (1). Later someone from the company apologized, and said that "extensive user testing" had been done, but they clearly missed an important segment of the market. 1. https://in30minutes.com/hootsuite-takes-the-low-road-blames-complaints-on-fear-of-change/ https://in30minutes.com/hootsuite-takes-the-low-road-blames-...
- nerfhammer 9y ago
  Thing is, some segment of users will always go nuts whenever you change anything. If you're in charge of product development it's hard to take any particular moment of outrage too seriously.
  - nakedrobot2 9y ago
    Yes, this is very true. Can anyone name an update or design of software that was applauded by the majority of users? I can't.
    - torstenvl 9y ago
      Windows '95 over Windows 3.11 Mac OS X Tiger over Mac OS X Panther Windows 7 over Windows Vista
      - addicted 9y ago
        Until about Snow Leopard pretty much every Mac OS X update was almost universally considered much better than the ones before (though the truism that you avoid a new Mac OS X update on a primary computer till 10.x.1 still held).
  - cornholio 9y ago
    If you are in product development, the lesson is that any change has a cost and impact to your users, so you need to make sure that the benefits outweigh the cost and plan for resistance. That's entirely different from "they will complain no mater what you do so you should ignore them".
empath75 9y ago
Digg died basically overnight after a redesign. It happens.
- officemonkey 9y ago
  There was also a rapidly-maturing Reddit waiting in the wings. If you have a moat, you can weather the storm after a design snafu. If you don't? @Jack, you dead.
  - antisthenes 9y ago
    Makes one wonder if Reddit has a moat. I liked their conservative design so far, but there seem to be cracks appearing the form of 'mobilization' of the user profile page for example. Seems to be the trend of the last 5 years of making the desktop experience broken/annoying in some way or form and the mobile experience - ad-ridden and designed for momentary rather than deep engagement.
    - criley2 9y ago
      I think Reddit still has a moat. There have been attempts to do something else, such as voat, but those generally become either A) more akin to subreddits than reddit (like this very site) or B) ideological havens for groups not welcome on reddit. In voat's case, when reddit begin banning overt racism from white supremacists and calls for violence, as well as communities dedicated to hating fat people or women, those radicalized users all fled to voat. That toxic core userbase makes the site untenable for the masses who are repulsed by such naked racism, prejudice and other evil content. So I don't really see anyone waiting in the reddit wings. The ones that were there before are still there (SA, fark, /.), and the ones that follow aren't poised to be the same thing.
      - empath75 9y ago
        Reddit doesn’t have a moat, IMO, because they don’t have a social graph. It’s like Facebook for strangers. Someone could wipe them out over night because users don’t really have any connection to each other.
aaronbrethorst 9y ago
My question is how does an update that is almost universally hated by the user base get through to production? Evan Spiegel is convinced that he's the second coming of Steve Jobs. http://www.businessinsider.com/what-its-like-to-work-at-snapchat-2016-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/what-its-like-to-work-at-snap...
rob-olmos 9y ago
I'm also suspicious of the amount of testing that's being done. More than once the app was posting a completely black pic for every snap, lasting at least a couple days. I stopped using it after this last time it started doing that again.
eyeareque 9y ago
I use the app daily and I have to say while the new version is different and a bit rough, i still like where they are headed. With some tweaks I believe it will be better than the old and more confusing design
mayneack 9y ago
I really enjoy the update. I've posted this before, but I like the focus on my friends, the isolation of the branded content, and the ability to mute specific people's stories. I hope people get used to it rather than rolling it back or killing the app.
raverbashing 9y ago
1 - Company makes innovative product with crappy UI (Vine/Snapchat) 2 - Instagram copies the idea and improved the interface 3 - Company becomes irrelevant 4 - Rinse/repeat
patmcc 9y ago
>>My question is how does an update that is almost universally hated by the user base get through to production? I think a lot of us are jealous of your work history right now - the answer to that question is almost always "the person who can fire me/signs my paycheck thought it was a good idea".
justboxing 9y ago
> Does Snapchat not have any user feedback in their design Apparently they don't even solicit feedback from their own inhouse employees, so I doubt they solicit it from control groups / influential users > Compared to the "dogfooding" tradition in many tech companies, where employees try out their products before releasing them to the public, most Snap employees don't know when a new product is coming — regardless if it would affect their team's long-term metrics or goals. When the company launched Lenses, its famous filters that morph people's faces, most employees learned about it for the first time on the company blog post announcing it to the world. Source: OP.
parliament32 9y ago
Being in the beta program, I've been dealing with the redesign for a few months now. I've mostly forgotten what the major changes were, but: I'm happy that the advertising "Discover" crap is put away on its own page, and I hate how hard it is to view my friends' stories now. What do you dislike about it?
pdkl95 9y ago
> Does Snapchat not have any user feedback This is the most important lesson for any service that depends on a community of users for survival: involve them in the update process, or you will scare them away. Even if the new version is objectively better (which is rare), unexpected changes cause confusion and anger. I encourage anybody involved in making this kind of service to watch this[1] talk from NOTACON by Joe Peacock of fark.com about their experience deploying a surprise redesign, then compounding the anger with their infamous reply: > You'll get over it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI

WellDressed 9y ago

Reminds me of the backlash Digg received back in the day. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/31/digg-redesign-revolt https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/31/digg-...

Analemma_ 9y ago
Yes, this is an important lesson about redesigns. I saw a couple people brush off the Snapchat redesign angst with, "Meh, people will get over it", usually with links to the (admittedly accurate) Oatmeal comic about Facebook layout changes [0]. And while that's certainly the case sometimes, don't count on it as a general rule: Digg demonstrated conclusively that a poorly-received redesign can torpedo the entire company. Proceed with caution. [0]: http://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter/facebook_layout http://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter/facebook_layout

bdluna 9y ago

Have to agree, the recent update is a head-scratcher. They made user stories considerably more confusing to use, and these same user stories are what made Snapchat successful and exciting to begin with. I really think they should work to bring back the daily city/event stories too. For those that don't remember, they used to aggregate the biggest events and city stories on a daily basis and provide those front and center. Was a really unique way to experience a city across the world from where you are! They've since gotten rid of this, and moved it into a hidden "SnapMap" feature which is easily missed by many users.

taoistextremist 9y ago
>I really think they should work to bring back the daily city/event stories too. I remember this showing me how great some places are across the world that I never thought of, when they were daily (or was it weekly?) a different city/country. At the risk of sounding ignorant, I remember learning just how modern and developed Namibia's urban life is from one of these.

tw1010 9y ago

"Temporarily" could be added to the headline.

oceanghost 9y ago

Snapchat is purposefully difficult to use, and completely user-hostile (notifications in particular). This is how they keep adults off their platform.

imglorp 9y ago
Let's go into that a little more. Are you thinking that "exclusively for kids" is the message, and that you have to appeal to the demo to keep them? Another major user hostile feature is viewing anything on Instagram: the images (main reason to be there, eh?) are hard to zoom or save. The videos have few options like speed or captions. They almost revel in "here's your fixed size picture frame, enjoy our choices".
- cstrat 9y ago
  iOS you can now finally zoom. However you're right, saving or skipping videos are simple features which are intentionally lacking.
- oceanghost 9y ago
  I think SC wants to appeal to young people. Young people don't want their parents around. So SC needs to find a way to discourage older folks while not appearing outright hostile. Solution? Create a somewhat frustrating user experience. For Some reason, younger people will tolerate that and older folks won't, thus you skew your demographics the direction you want. It's not that the app is impossible to figure out, it's just that it has a lot of unnecessary friction. Another way of saying this is: Adults care more about good UI/UX than younger folks. I realize there are a lot of assumptions in my argument here, but it is my best reasoning out of the situation.
  - imglorp 9y ago
    > Adults care more about good UI/UX than younger folks. I was thinking the opposite, almost. I would propose: kids care more about a fun instant experience (socializing) vs adults caring more about utility (I like this picture, can I zoom and save it?) So it might be the lack of utility that drives the ancients off the site, not the lack of Pretty UI.

ihuman 9y ago

Could someone explain to be why the new update is bad? I primarily use snapchat for my friends' stories. With the new update I no longer have to see ads under the stories, which is a positive for me.

farrelljohn 9y ago
One reason that I used frequently is custom group stories, for example a friend group can have their own story where everyone can post/look at. They used to be grouped in with user stories, but now are in the "discover" feed buried within the sponsored content and are extremely difficult to find easily. So much so that a few that I am a part of are almost never used anymore.
pducks32 9y ago
Why I don’t like it is 3 fold: 2 major and 1 minor. The first is that my friend list is 1. Person I just Snapped 2. Person I just Snapped 3. Person I haven’t talked to in forever (but just posted to their story) 4. Person I haven’t talked to in forever ... And there will be times I snap a person and go back on the friends list and their gone! Like they just don’t show up anywhere I have to search them to see if they opened my snap. Second is that I have people (like family) who I don’t snap much but still look at their stories. In the new version I actually have to search them all Individually which is awful. Third is minor but I find the friends list cluttered and difficult to process. Stories, Streaks, message notifications, scores, Bitmoji, names all cluttered into one single line item.
misingnoglic 9y ago
To make a long story short, I used to be able to swipe to the right and see all my friends stories, sorted by last update time. Now it's some horrible Mish most of these stories on the "friends" page, and I can't see the stories I want to see.

reaperducer 9y ago

Like any other company, it's important to diversify your revenue. Snap tied itself heavily to flash-in-the-pan pop celebrities. It should also have cultivated other types of thought leaders from other groups if it wanted to be anything other than a flash-in-the-pan, itself. If you don't think clearly, the hockey stick on the graph smacks you in the head.

adamnemecek 9y ago

This is basically celebrity news.

fnayr 9y ago

So I read the article, but I've seen claims like this before: some event correlated with a stock dive equals "proof" the event caused it, when it turns out some other news got announced like a quarterly result. Is that what's going on here?

Nadya 9y ago
It's poorly disguised marketing for Kylie Jenner. Look at the "influence" she holds, wiping out $1.3B from Snapchat value! Wouldn't you want her to support your {thing}? Imagine how much value it would bring your product.
- noobermin 9y ago
  It probably isn't marketing for her as much as it's clickbait for bloomberg. I'm sure she doesn't mind the headlines regardless.
  - Nadya 9y ago
    Why not both? Getting paid to make a clickbait headline to prop someone up as an influencer. Although upon further thought - you're more likely to be right that it's just clickbait.
bspn 9y ago
I don't follow Snap well enough to know the cause of the dive, but they did release their first ever annual report as a public company this morning: https://investor.snap.com/financial-information/sec-filings https://investor.snap.com/financial-information/sec-filings
- wungsten 9y ago
  That is certainly a much more likely cause of the devaluing.
- fnayr 9y ago
  Yep that's exactly what I was expecting. Thanks.

majormajor 9y ago

An experience redesign (vs a reskin) is saying you have something new good enough to justify disrupting your user's existing routines. It's not clear to me what that new thing is in the new Snapchat UI. It seems better consolidated but less consistently sorted/organized. But for direct communication with friends, it's not really that different. If anything, the redesign feels like an attempt to protect the core feature of Snapchat - the direct communication vs the spammy broadcasting - at the cost of a temporary hit to revenue. I don't see how it would make them more money in the short run. I honestly have no idea how a celebrity would use the app, so it could easily be much worse for her, but that direct experience probably isn't relevant. Snapchat isn't Twitter. Twitter and Instagram seem to be dominated by "influencer" type stuff, which is why I practically never use them - Snapchat is better for talking to people I know. Trickier to monetize that, though. Regardless, thanks to modern metrics ("spying" if you're uncharitable) Snapchat is doubtless aware of all the changes, so we'll see if further changes come or if this was just complaining-about-change.

jacquesm 9y ago

Kylie who?

gaius 9y ago
There is only one Kylie (Minogue) and she is far too classy for social media shenanigans

bfrog 9y ago

Considering the stock rose nearly 50% after last earnings... It was bound to fall.

bob_theslob646 9y ago
Hindsight bias. It rose because of a gigantic short squeeze coupled with better than expected earnings. >Revenue: $285.7 million versus $252.9 million estimated, according to a Thomson Reuters consensus estimate.

thisisit 9y ago

> on the heels of a tweet from Kylie Jenner, who said she doesn’t open the app anymore. Whether it’s the demands of her newfound motherhood, or the recent app redesign, the testament drew similar replies from her 24.5 million followers. Wall Street analysts too, have begun to notice, citing recent user engagement trends noticed since the platform’s redesign. So if it crashes even more, can we safely say it was caused by some of the "similar replies" on this HN thread? ;)

tejasmanohar 9y ago

The causation here is weak to say the least.

wungsten 9y ago
Another user pointed out that Snap released their first annual earnings report since IPO this morning, which seems a far more likely cause :)

erikrothoff 9y ago

I’ve always found the rise of Snapchat a bit volatile. Their main audience is bound to lose interest and move to the next cool thing. Facebook at least has a utility, so it’s not only about where the ”cool kids are”. Like MySpace.

code_sloth 9y ago

Can someone remind me how on earth is Snap's market cap US$20 billion right now?

Kequc 9y ago
I don't get it either, apparently a tech companies value is tied directly to and only to the size of its user base. I could never use the app effectively so I'm happy to hear it got a redesign of any kind.

samfisher83 9y ago

If she were to short the stock and then posted a tweet is that illegal? Or the inverse if she bought the stock and posted a tweet? It seems like some of these social influencers have a lot of power.

guitarbill 9y ago
If Wall Street/investors are so out of touch that a vacuous tweet of a socialite can have so much effect, to me that’s a different issue entirely. Not to mention one reason this could happen is if the stock price was grossly overvalued in the first place. In general, I don’t see anything specifically illegal about this.
- webkike 9y ago
  Kylie Jenner has 24.5 million twitter followers that presumably think somewhat similarly to her. I'm pretty sure that her thoughts on this matter are indicative of a larger trend that an investor would be wary to ignore.
  - guitarbill 9y ago
    A trend is more than one person, and as the article states her situation has recently changed. This is all a sign of pure laziness/hype/greed, instead of doing some actual market research before you make investment decisions. In any case, I’m not sure how much of her “thought” went into that tweet.
- protomyth 9y ago
  a vacuous tweet of a socialite How do you arrive at calling Kyle Jenner vacuous? She has an audience and has been quite successful at monetizing. If she is vacuous then Snapchat and lot of other startups should be described the same way. Given the sales of her cosmetic line, a Wall Street investor would do well to listen to her when she thinks a service is over.
  - guitarbill 9y ago

TeeWEE 9y ago

Its not this tweet that wiped out the market value, its the fact that less people are using snapchat..

racer-v 9y ago

Crazy that we still use apps instead of protocols for feeds and video. What's the closest thing to an open substitute? I've been looking at Gajim for XMPP + video chat https://gajim.org/ https://gajim.org/

makecheck 9y ago

At this point it’s hard to think of a major app or OS that hasn’t done something to royally screw over its users with unwanted updates that changed everything for the worse. There needs to be a mechanism for making certain user guarantees, especially once money has been exchanged. And arguably since “time is money”, if you have invested a certain amount of time in something that’s then been messed up by the provider, you should receive similar guarantees because you’ve essentially “paid” a lot for it. One of the problems is that it’s just too easy for companies to radically revamp things freely. Open-source used to sort of defend against this with the forking option. Too many modern devices are now locked-down to the point where open-source isn’t feasible for much of the software you’re likely to need. Another problem is that too many updates are able to lump the bad with the good. Perhaps we need a way to force entities to develop their software features in such a way that at least two independent classes of updates are feasible: for example, allowing users to skip stupid UI revamps without becoming completely unable to receive other bug fixes.

eksemplar 9y ago

Trump tweets about taxing European solar and stock in Vestas (wind power) drops 35% in two days, despite the company ringing in contract after contract... Now a different reality tv star crashes $1.3 billion worth of value with a tweet about not using a platform? Stock is quite frankly getting dumber than CryptoCurrency.

mrguyorama 9y ago
Important to remember that it's often the same people speculating in both fields. Don't forget that next time some absurd scam coin gets a million dollar market cap
OfficerGuac 9y ago
Cryptocurrency has always been catching up rather than ahead of the game in the speculation stupidity arena. I always have a good time when I read /r/wallstreetbets (even though they're pretty self-aware, it can still be hilarious).

mtgx 9y ago

Maybe a lesson to be learned for companies here: ignore the "small vocal minority" at your own peril.

z3t4 9y ago

Replace Snap with something else. For example: "In One Tweet, Kylie Jenner Wiped Out $1.3B of Microsoft's Market Value" to see how ridiculous it can get, then think about why is that.

technofiend 9y ago

>on the heels of a tweet from Kylie Jenner, who said she doesn’t open the app anymore Ouch. Sounds like she should have been a beta tester of the revamped site. In other words "don't bite the hand that tweets you." I'll let myself out.

jcslzr 9y ago

if this is not proof that the stock market is a house of cards i dont know what is...