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Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled
- stevewodil 8y agoFull article: https://outline.com/SztunV https://outline.com/SztunV
- mohi13 8y agonot working..showing almost empty page
- stevewodil 8y agoWorking for me. Do you have JS disabled or something weird?
- humphreybc 8y agoThis is nice and it gets past the paywall. Thank you.
- odonnellryan 8y agoSnapchat is really bad at doing the one thing I want it to do well: take pictures. It takes awful pictures most of the time. Applies some kind of super-harsh filter that I don't get with my camera?
- ClassyJacket 8y agoThey deliberately give you a bad quality photo and I don't know why. Snapchat takes a screenshot. It doesn't use the camera API on your phone as it should. So it doesn't get any of the processing which is integral to taking good photos on phones. Apple should reject it from the App Store for doing this, but for some reason they let them do it, as well as Instagram and Facebook.
- verall 8y agoWell it's almost certainly going to be faster (thumb to save latency) to run the camera in video mode and then snatch a frame when the user hits the button than the normal preview-stillshot way the phone takes pics natively. Cell phone OEMs differentiate with camera quality and so some run some pretty heavy post processing to make images come out okay. Snap probably cares more about quickly taking picture and the filters.
- lostgame 8y agoBut, quite frankly, using the native API’s has not been that difficult for me as a solo coder who is writing an iOS video camera app on the side. If they have so many resources, a decision like this is baffling.
- colanderman 8y agoFaster as in, faster to take pictures. Not faster to code. The native camera app on my phone is horrendously slow to take a picture; Snap is instantaneous.
- rconti 8y agoI wasn't under the impression that the difference of 1s in latency was a major problem for the Snap userbase. Do I misunderstand the product?
- Crosseye_Jack 8y agoIirc the issue comes down to Android. Until very recently there was not real uniform api for accessing the camera between Android versions and the tweaks hardware vendors make. Basically it was much easier to screenshot the live preview then access the raw camera data. This changed a couple of versions a go and if you used SnapChat on the pixel 2 it used the new APIs instead of taking a screenshot. But I can’t comment persoanally on the quality of snapchats pictures as I’ve never used it.
- colanderman 8y agoThey deliberately take screenshots of the camera preview so that what you see is exactly what you get. Given the horrendous (i.e. several second) lag of the shutter button on many smartphones, this makes a lot of sense for an app designed to capture fleeting moments (especially since they won't be viewed for more than a few seconds).
- rmason 8y agoReally wonder if articles like these are produced by people shorting the stock. I think the guy is a genius but he made a very bad mistake with the redesign and is clearly paying for it. There were some very interesting people producing content for entrepreneurs on there but they're all gone for now. I've gone from daily to monthly use. But I keep checking in because I'm really convinced that they can still pull a rabbit out of the hat.
- yroc92 8y ago> Really wonder if articles like these are produced by people shorting the stock. Everything is about money, so I always assume that to be the case for all these kinds of articles. Regardless, I’m pretty sure snap will be gone in a couple years. No way they can stand up to Facebook imo.
- bigfartchili 8y agoThis feels like what happened to digg. Reddit did their redesign right. Many people hated it and they gave the option to go to the old reddit immediately after the new version was released.
- hinata 8y agoAnd they made it so smooth, too - just replace www with old! Considering, too, their incredible API, I have a lot of respect for the Reddit developers.
- Intermernet 8y agoNot on mobile. I don't want to install the app, and the mobile site is basically a bunch of dark patterns piled on deliberately broken functionality. It's amazingly, and consciously terrible.
- mi_lk 8y agoThis. They really hate their non-app mobile users. Understandable but disappointed.
- EvilTerran 8y agoI use the old mobile site, it's fantastically light-weight: https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com You can change the subdomain to "i" on any reddit page, or access the same version by adding ".compact" to the end of the regular URL (which can be more convenient, thanks to the ".com" button on mobile keyboards): https://www.reddit.com/.compact https://www.reddit.com/.compact, https://www.reddit.com/r/CatsStandingUp/comments/7bcm79/cat/.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/CatsStandingUp/comments/7bcm79/cat/..., etc
- icelancer 8y agoYeah the reddit redesign is horrific. Thankfully, they keep old.reddit.com up and will maintain it indefinitely, which I'll use... also indefinitely.
- rokhayakebe 8y agoThis may be a good time to buy Snap. I remember FB being worth $33B some time after going public.
- adventured 8y ago$294 million operating loss on $297 million in revenue for their latest quarter. Snap's operating picture is an accountant's nightmare. By the time Facebook was five years old, fiscal 2009, they generated a $229m profit on $777m in sales. They turned profitable in the second half of their fourth year. Why? Relative financial discipline. Snap has taken the opposite approach, wild financial irresponsibility (no doubt encouraged by the fairly bubbly funding environment they got to enjoy). By the time Facebook went public, they had been profitable for over three years. They generated a $1b profit on $3.7b in sales in 2011, the year prior to the IPO. The situation could hardly be any more different from Snap at IPO or today.
- bob_theslob646 8y agoWhile I agree with your statement, I think you are giving "financial discipline" way too much weight. As you probably know Facebook( Instagram) did copy " stories" from Snapchat. When your competitor effectively steals your secret sauce, what do you do? I believe that is why they went with their radical UI design change.( In order to retain users, which backfired) I am not justifying the cash burn that snap had, just saying that competitors definitely were a factor in them not being financial disciplined. Another major negative was from the get go with that their shares listed are non voting which was a major turn off to wall street which got them blackballed from being included in the SP500.(Has nothing to do with running a company or financial discipline, but definitely a negative when large institutions cannot invest in you because of strict bylaws.)
- sonnyblarney 8y agoYeah I'm not sure it's an issue of 'discipline' rather than simple product fundamentals.
- turndown 8y agoI will never understand the desire to radically change an interface on any product <10 years old. Especially Snap's, as I don't remember anyone complaining about the interface. Instead, why not make your app use less battery power and improve the camera's functionality? Those types of improvement are universally appreciated, yet the least likely to be implemented.
- toasterlovin 8y ago> Especially Snap's, as I don't remember anyone complaining about the interface. Surely you’re joking? I make software for a living and I was utterly and completely lost in Snapchat. Easily the most confusing software I’ve used in a long time.
- troquerre 8y agoYou were not snaps target user
- Klover 8y agoIndeed. Similar to how young people will read books while their parents barely finish the sensational short articles in a newspaper. They seem to be more willing to figure things out, especially combined with their tribal actions like going to great lengths to make sure that everything they wear is black, or has a certain logo on it, or that they only listen to particular music. If a particular social app has a gate, then it can be all the better for them. [1] Not to say that making your app unnecessarily annoying is grounds for success! There were probably 500 apps on the very same day as Snapchat launched that you never heard about. [1] No peer reviewed study or anything. Just, you know, kids.
- 1337biz 8y agoVery good points. That idea of creating something for kids that others are not/not willing to figure out, is really fascinating. Probably happens most of the time unintentionally.
- twblalock 8y agoHere's the money quote: > Nearly all senior executives who worked with him before the IPO are gone, and more than 10 senior employees have departed in the past year. If you want to retain good people, you need to give them real input and control. Senior managers were trying to prevent a disaster and Spiegel did not listen to them -- but even if every decision he made had turned out to be correct, his leadership style still would have alienated many of them to the point they would have wanted to leave. These are successful people who have no problem finding other opportunities.
- e9 8y agoI don’t think he wanted to retain them. Pretty sure his logic was that the company is grown up and it needs new leadership.
- vikingcaffiene 8y agoSpeigal is yet another disciple of the Steve Jobs school of management. The idea that if you are an asshole to everyone and care a lot about fonts, you’ll repeat the success of Apple. It’s a toxic notion of startup culture and it needs to die.
- simongr3dal 8y agoBut on some level it worked for Steve Jobs, arguably it worked two times. What are the differences that made it work out for Jobs, but didn’t make it work out for Evan Spiegel to the same degree?
- scarejunba 8y agoJobs was right more often and despite everything, people still wanted to work with him. I guess the answer is “you can be an asshole if you’re a once-in-a-generation product developer with charisma”. Otherwise, stick to the tried and tested ways of using a team as a lever. Perhaps in twenty years we will hear about “awful conditions at Tesla but I knew we were changing the world” or some such.
- ksec 8y agoHow about “You can be an asshole if you’re a once-in-many-generations product genius with charisma”. I have yet to see a SINGLE sign of Evan any where close to Steve Jobs quality. Evan may be good, but he is not a genius like Steve. The only one praising are his VC which during Pre IPO era were constantly spamming twitter about how good his Keynote and unseen since Steve passed away.
- scarejunba 8y agoYeah, I’m fine with that. Essentially, Steve Jobs was exceptional so everyone tolerated exceptionally shitty behaviour from him. If you’re not exceptional, nothing useful is going to come of acting the same way.
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- jazzyk 8y agoMr. Spiegel, you are no Steve Jobs.