7 ms·

Is Snapchat only used for sexting? We asked 5,000 people to find out

62 points by ckelly 14y ago

prawks 14y ago
Interesting relevant article: http://blog.garrytan.com/tenth-grade-tech-trends-my-survey-data-says-s http://blog.garrytan.com/tenth-grade-tech-trends-my-survey-d... And its HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5027306 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5027306 I performed a few Google searches on Snapchat. I was very surprised to see the fanaticism around it being used by young people for Sexting alone. The above article paints a much different picture.
- posabsolute 14y ago
  people also lie, when you just sent a sex picture and they ask you if you juste sent that, I'm incline to think you will say you didn't. Personally i don't trust their stats, it's lower than the average for text messages, which really does not make any sense to me.
  - ckelly 14y ago
    OP here. Thanks for the feedback. We also asked respondents about sexting over text messaging, and got a similar rate (26%) to other studies about sexting[1]. Of course, as we note, this is entirely self-reported behavior and not observed behavior. [1]http://cbsloc.al/Nv7WPR http://cbsloc.al/Nv7WPR
    - DannyBee 14y ago
      "We did a survey where we asked 1000 respondents about whether they lied in survey responses. 100% answered 'no'"
      - ghshephard 14y ago
        Well, that actually might be the case. More interesting would be if they answered, "yes"
    - juiceandjuice 14y ago
      The male/female ratio of sexting is interesting.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
cooperadymas 14y ago
It seems to reason that people who use SnapChat for sexting are doing so to hide the fact that they're sexting, so they might be less likely to admit to it (even on an anonymous survey). Someone who uses text messaging may feel less compelled to hide it at all. This would be especially true for kids (under 18) since you also ask the age on the survey. Not sure how big a role this might actually play in the results.
- ckelly 14y ago
  OP here. Thanks for the feedback. We only surveyed respondents 18+ for this survey. We agree kids under 18 would have been more likely to lie about this type of behavior.
  - taylorbuley 14y ago
    I've read of a technique where for self-reported statistics you mix in a non-pertinent question with a known probability, using Bayes to extract the original prior probability. For example, instead of asking kids "do you smoke pot?" you ask that of 80% of people and the other 20% get "do you own a dog?"; the surveyor has no idea which question was asked but knows the overall population of dog owners. Does this technique have a name that you know of and did you consider it?
    - benmanns 14y ago
      I know of a method in which you give each respondent a coin and ask them to flip it in secret. If the coin lands heads, answer "Yes," if not, answer honestly. Then, if you ask a question like "Have you sexted?" or "Do you use drugs?", you may get survey results that look like 60% yes and 40% no. You subtract 50% from the yes count to account for the coin toss and get accurate overall results, but the participants have plausible deniability. However, I can't remember the name of it, nor the article I read about it, and Google isn't helping.
      - halter73 14y ago
        Interesting. I imagine this method would be particularly helpful for non-anonymized surveys. Obviously, this would only be helpful if you don't have a good idea of how many people would lie in the first place. It also depends on the assumption that people won't lie given this plausible deniability. The biggest problem I see is that this could only increase the variance of your survey results. The way I see it you have three binomial distributions base on three random variables: 1. The number of people who would answer yes to the survey question if they were honest. 2. The number of people who lied. (This is clearly not independent to the first random variable) 3. The number of people who flipped heads. (This clearly is independent) The problem is that coin flipping has the highest possible variance of any binomial distribution for any given sample size. So even if the variance created by people lying is completely eliminated, it would be more than counteracted by the variance introduced by the coin flipping. I still really like this method since the increased variance is a moot point if giving people plausible deniability is the best way to normalize for lying. And you can always increase your confidence in the resulting proportion by increasing your sample size. It would be interesting to run anonymized and non-anonymized surveys with the coin flip and without to try to determine how much anonymization reduces lying on various survey questions. One nitpick: You should subtract 50% from the yes count and then multiply by two. So in your example, you would expect that 20% of those surveyed truly sexted or use drugs.
marvin 14y ago
No way I'm trusting this informal survey unless they have a plausible, data-backed explanation for the supposed huge gender disparity in sexting. The only halfway plausible explanation is that the 3.4% of men who are gay or bi all sext with each other. In other words, a large number of the respondents lied and the data is invalid. That said, anecdotal evidence (the people I talk do every day) strongly indicates that people are in fact occasionally using Snapchat for other things than sexting
- sp332 14y ago
  Possibly the men are all sexting with the same women.
- justinsteele 14y ago
  I actually found that piece the funniest, and anecdotally after living with 4 women, I expected it. A case I see is a mixture of more Bi/Gay men sexting each other (than Bi/Lesbian women), plus a lot of men either attempting to sex with women (who do not sext back) or sexting with the same smaller subset of women.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- awenger 14y ago
  That's one of the first things that we (I'm a Survata co-founder) noted in seeing the data too. I see a few possible explanations: (1) A woman who sexts could have multiple sexting partners. In the extreme, you could have every man in the world sext with one woman, making the male sexting prevalence 100% and the female near 0. (2) While we defined sexting as "sending or receiving", some respondents may interpret the question as primarily about sending. There could be a gender bias in the sending vs receiving of sexts. (3) As you point out, the data is reported behavior and not observed behavior. Reported behavior often is a good proxy for observed behavior, but it is not perfect. And there are known to be effects where certain demographics answer questions dishonestly for conscious or unconscious reasons. Perhaps women are less willing to admit to sexting behavior.
- nollidge 14y ago
Alex3917 14y ago
The methodology of the survey is somewhat weak. Snapchat has only been popular for about a year, whereas sexting has been common for 5+ years now. Not only does this mean that users have had a much longer time to sext via SMS than snapchat, but because it's a self-reported survey it's even worse; users are much more likely to admit to something the longer ago it happened in the past, which skews the data even further. It would have been much better to ask users whether they had sexted within the past six months or whatever.
- awenger 14y ago
  Survata co-founder here. Good point. We had the same thought and did consider running a survey variant with the fixed 6 mo time frame. And we may just give it a try to see how the results are affected. Even with the current wording, I find the SMS comparison useful. It demonstrates that people are willing to admit to sexting in the anonymous Survata survey format. I like your hypothesis about greater willingness to admit to "bad behavior" in the distant past than in the recent past. My intuition is that anonymity weakens that effect, but we'll have to measure to know for certain.
  - Alex3917 14y ago
    "I like your hypothesis about greater willingness to admit to "bad behavior" in the distant past than in the recent past. My intuition is that anonymity weakens that effect, but we'll have to measure to know for certain." If you look at this report on the validity of self-reported drug use, it goes into the issue of how people are more likely to admit bad behavior that happened long ago. Anonymity probably does ameliorate the problem, but I'm guessing that it would still be significant. http://archives.drugabuse.gov/pdf/monographs/monograph167/download167.html http://archives.drugabuse.gov/pdf/monographs/monograph167/do...
    - jseliger 14y ago
      Great link—thanks for posting it—too few people cite the sources for their beliefs. In a related context, "Truth and consequences: using the bogus pipeline to examine sex differences in self-reported sexuality" discusses how "some of the sex differences in self-reports of sexuality are not due to actual sex differences in behavior, but rather to differences in reporting as a function of differential normative expectations for men and women": http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Truth+and+consequences%3a+using+the+bogus+pipeline+to+examine+sex...-a0101530208 http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Truth+and+consequences%3a+usin... .
TillE 14y ago
> Frequently cited uses were to “send funny pictures to my friends” or “make silly faces for my friends” or “send jokes to my friends.” I don't mean to be a grumpy old man, but this seems even more pointless than usual. If it's not being used for sexual photos, then it's surely a fad that's going to die in a few months. All that other crap can be done via normal messaging; there's precious little reason to use Snapchat except that it's (briefly, for now) the popular new thing.
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  The medium changes the way that you use it. Twitter works differently than a blog, due to the 140 character limitation. Similarly, Snapchat encourages a certain kind of conversation, due to the disappearing photos, and ability to draw on them.
- crazygringo 14y ago
  I dunno. I haven't used it, but honestly, “make silly faces for my friends” seems a lot more plausible to me. There's a lot of stuff -- really dirty/nasty jokes, really ugly faces, and I'm sure you can use your imagination -- that you would bring up in personal conversation but not really want to have an SMS or email recording of. Hell, I worked in an office where a particularly nasty-minded (in the most entertaining way) coworker of mine would send/forward me e-mails of all sorts, then come over and make sure I would delete them afterward. Sexting is just a very small portion of all the kinds of messages people don't really want saved.
- mmakunas 14y ago
  You're missing the point. People are realizing that it's probably not a good idea to have every pic you ever take be out there for the world to see. But they still want to share them with certain people. They (rightfully) don't trust other people to delete them (or lose there phone, etc.) and they don't trust the privacy settings of facebook and the like. Given that, having a mechanism for sending a pic and (almost) guaranteeing it is deleted is a compelling use case. Snapchat could certainly fail, but I think the general use case will be enduring.
- untog 14y ago
lawnchair_larry 14y ago
Survata is a YC company that uses those spammy "survey walls", forcing users to answer a survey to get content they want. This data is garbage.
- ckelly 14y ago
  Survata co-founder here. Thanks for your comment. We're constantly testing the accuracy of our network, and building technology to screen out respondents who are lying to us. To date, the results are good. For example, when we ask respondents "Which time zone are you in?" or "Who is the president of the United State" we see around 97% accuracy. We see this as evidence of quality data.
  - tomprince 14y ago
    Although, questions with non-personally identifiable data or more likely to get honest answers.
moconnor 14y ago
Nice to see the old maxim still holds true: "Every title phrased as a question can be answered with: no."
siculars 14y ago
Not only. I just started using it a few weeks ago and I can say it has legitimate uses outside of sexting. The ability to write on an image or draw on it is quite useful.
MikeKusold 14y ago
I've received ~10 snapchats a day for the past month, and I have never received a sexting photo via snapchat. Instead my friends send pictures of: food, landscapes, people they are with, pets, etc... Basically the point of Snapshot is to share mundane photos without the other person being able to share with their friends all the boring photos you send them throughout the day.
azundo 14y ago
In terms of the comparison with SMS, this survey also seems to miss that sexting via text (words) is very different than sexting via snapchat (pictures). I'm sure a much higher percentage of the population is more comfortable with the former than latter, which doesn't make the comparison all that surprising.
rburhum 14y ago
Can somebody explain to me what is stopping someone from hitting the power + home button simultaneously and creating a photo of whatever is in the screen effectively working around the "self destruct" nature of Snapchat?
- svachalek 14y ago
  I believe it detects the action and rats you out although it can't actually stop it. I don't use the app but there was a story recently on some people figuring out a way to evade detection.
mijustin 14y ago
It's common wisdom that Snapchat appeals particularly to those under the age of 18. This study focused only on "respondents aged 18 to 29". What people (read: the media) really want to know is "are teens sexting with Snapchat?" Naturally, it's harder to get survey results for that demographic.
ianstallings 14y ago
Wow, a lot of denial on this particular topic. Let's be real. Even facebook is used a lot for hookups. All mediums will have sex on them because we are sexual by nature. So of course this medium will be exploited fully and denied in public because it's a sensitive topic. Why dwell? Who cares? Are we such prudes? And come on, just asking them? Go ask the guys in the head shop what kind of pipes they are selling. Tobacco pipes of course. But we didn't just fall off the turnip truck.
keefe 14y ago
imho there is something here with a neural correlate related to gambling, e.g. I send my mom/boss/teacher a funny face picture or I send my crush a love note with an expiration date and I can cash in on the thrill with a low chance of the risk of exposure

62 points by ckelly 14y ago

Interesting relevant article: http://blog.garrytan.com/tenth-grade-tech-trends-my-survey-data-says-s http://blog.garrytan.com/tenth-grade-tech-trends-my-survey-d... And its HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5027306 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5027306 I performed a few Google searches on Snapchat. I was very surprised to see the fanaticism around it being used by young people for Sexting alone. The above article paints a much different picture.

posabsolute 14y ago
people also lie, when you just sent a sex picture and they ask you if you juste sent that, I'm incline to think you will say you didn't. Personally i don't trust their stats, it's lower than the average for text messages, which really does not make any sense to me.
- ckelly 14y ago
  OP here. Thanks for the feedback. We also asked respondents about sexting over text messaging, and got a similar rate (26%) to other studies about sexting[1]. Of course, as we note, this is entirely self-reported behavior and not observed behavior. [1]http://cbsloc.al/Nv7WPR http://cbsloc.al/Nv7WPR
  - DannyBee 14y ago
    "We did a survey where we asked 1000 respondents about whether they lied in survey responses. 100% answered 'no'"
    - ghshephard 14y ago
      Well, that actually might be the case. More interesting would be if they answered, "yes"
  - juiceandjuice 14y ago
    The male/female ratio of sexting is interesting.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

cooperadymas 14y ago

It seems to reason that people who use SnapChat for sexting are doing so to hide the fact that they're sexting, so they might be less likely to admit to it (even on an anonymous survey). Someone who uses text messaging may feel less compelled to hide it at all. This would be especially true for kids (under 18) since you also ask the age on the survey. Not sure how big a role this might actually play in the results.

ckelly 14y ago
OP here. Thanks for the feedback. We only surveyed respondents 18+ for this survey. We agree kids under 18 would have been more likely to lie about this type of behavior.
- taylorbuley 14y ago
  I've read of a technique where for self-reported statistics you mix in a non-pertinent question with a known probability, using Bayes to extract the original prior probability. For example, instead of asking kids "do you smoke pot?" you ask that of 80% of people and the other 20% get "do you own a dog?"; the surveyor has no idea which question was asked but knows the overall population of dog owners. Does this technique have a name that you know of and did you consider it?
  - benmanns 14y ago
    I know of a method in which you give each respondent a coin and ask them to flip it in secret. If the coin lands heads, answer "Yes," if not, answer honestly. Then, if you ask a question like "Have you sexted?" or "Do you use drugs?", you may get survey results that look like 60% yes and 40% no. You subtract 50% from the yes count to account for the coin toss and get accurate overall results, but the participants have plausible deniability. However, I can't remember the name of it, nor the article I read about it, and Google isn't helping.
    - halter73 14y ago
      Interesting. I imagine this method would be particularly helpful for non-anonymized surveys. Obviously, this would only be helpful if you don't have a good idea of how many people would lie in the first place. It also depends on the assumption that people won't lie given this plausible deniability. The biggest problem I see is that this could only increase the variance of your survey results. The way I see it you have three binomial distributions base on three random variables: 1. The number of people who would answer yes to the survey question if they were honest. 2. The number of people who lied. (This is clearly not independent to the first random variable) 3. The number of people who flipped heads. (This clearly is independent) The problem is that coin flipping has the highest possible variance of any binomial distribution for any given sample size. So even if the variance created by people lying is completely eliminated, it would be more than counteracted by the variance introduced by the coin flipping. I still really like this method since the increased variance is a moot point if giving people plausible deniability is the best way to normalize for lying. And you can always increase your confidence in the resulting proportion by increasing your sample size. It would be interesting to run anonymized and non-anonymized surveys with the coin flip and without to try to determine how much anonymization reduces lying on various survey questions. One nitpick: You should subtract 50% from the yes count and then multiply by two. So in your example, you would expect that 20% of those surveyed truly sexted or use drugs.

marvin 14y ago

No way I'm trusting this informal survey unless they have a plausible, data-backed explanation for the supposed huge gender disparity in sexting. The only halfway plausible explanation is that the 3.4% of men who are gay or bi all sext with each other. In other words, a large number of the respondents lied and the data is invalid. That said, anecdotal evidence (the people I talk do every day) strongly indicates that people are in fact occasionally using Snapchat for other things than sexting

sp332 14y ago
Possibly the men are all sexting with the same women.
justinsteele 14y ago
I actually found that piece the funniest, and anecdotally after living with 4 women, I expected it. A case I see is a mixture of more Bi/Gay men sexting each other (than Bi/Lesbian women), plus a lot of men either attempting to sex with women (who do not sext back) or sexting with the same smaller subset of women.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
awenger 14y ago
That's one of the first things that we (I'm a Survata co-founder) noted in seeing the data too. I see a few possible explanations: (1) A woman who sexts could have multiple sexting partners. In the extreme, you could have every man in the world sext with one woman, making the male sexting prevalence 100% and the female near 0. (2) While we defined sexting as "sending or receiving", some respondents may interpret the question as primarily about sending. There could be a gender bias in the sending vs receiving of sexts. (3) As you point out, the data is reported behavior and not observed behavior. Reported behavior often is a good proxy for observed behavior, but it is not perfect. And there are known to be effects where certain demographics answer questions dishonestly for conscious or unconscious reasons. Perhaps women are less willing to admit to sexting behavior.
nollidge 14y ago

Alex3917 14y ago

The methodology of the survey is somewhat weak. Snapchat has only been popular for about a year, whereas sexting has been common for 5+ years now. Not only does this mean that users have had a much longer time to sext via SMS than snapchat, but because it's a self-reported survey it's even worse; users are much more likely to admit to something the longer ago it happened in the past, which skews the data even further. It would have been much better to ask users whether they had sexted within the past six months or whatever.

awenger 14y ago
Survata co-founder here. Good point. We had the same thought and did consider running a survey variant with the fixed 6 mo time frame. And we may just give it a try to see how the results are affected. Even with the current wording, I find the SMS comparison useful. It demonstrates that people are willing to admit to sexting in the anonymous Survata survey format. I like your hypothesis about greater willingness to admit to "bad behavior" in the distant past than in the recent past. My intuition is that anonymity weakens that effect, but we'll have to measure to know for certain.
- Alex3917 14y ago
  "I like your hypothesis about greater willingness to admit to "bad behavior" in the distant past than in the recent past. My intuition is that anonymity weakens that effect, but we'll have to measure to know for certain." If you look at this report on the validity of self-reported drug use, it goes into the issue of how people are more likely to admit bad behavior that happened long ago. Anonymity probably does ameliorate the problem, but I'm guessing that it would still be significant. http://archives.drugabuse.gov/pdf/monographs/monograph167/download167.html http://archives.drugabuse.gov/pdf/monographs/monograph167/do...
  - jseliger 14y ago
    Great link—thanks for posting it—too few people cite the sources for their beliefs. In a related context, "Truth and consequences: using the bogus pipeline to examine sex differences in self-reported sexuality" discusses how "some of the sex differences in self-reports of sexuality are not due to actual sex differences in behavior, but rather to differences in reporting as a function of differential normative expectations for men and women": http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Truth+and+consequences%3a+using+the+bogus+pipeline+to+examine+sex...-a0101530208 http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Truth+and+consequences%3a+usin... .

TillE 14y ago

> Frequently cited uses were to “send funny pictures to my friends” or “make silly faces for my friends” or “send jokes to my friends.” I don't mean to be a grumpy old man, but this seems even more pointless than usual. If it's not being used for sexual photos, then it's surely a fad that's going to die in a few months. All that other crap can be done via normal messaging; there's precious little reason to use Snapchat except that it's (briefly, for now) the popular new thing.

steveklabnik 14y ago
The medium changes the way that you use it. Twitter works differently than a blog, due to the 140 character limitation. Similarly, Snapchat encourages a certain kind of conversation, due to the disappearing photos, and ability to draw on them.
crazygringo 14y ago
I dunno. I haven't used it, but honestly, “make silly faces for my friends” seems a lot more plausible to me. There's a lot of stuff -- really dirty/nasty jokes, really ugly faces, and I'm sure you can use your imagination -- that you would bring up in personal conversation but not really want to have an SMS or email recording of. Hell, I worked in an office where a particularly nasty-minded (in the most entertaining way) coworker of mine would send/forward me e-mails of all sorts, then come over and make sure I would delete them afterward. Sexting is just a very small portion of all the kinds of messages people don't really want saved.
mmakunas 14y ago
You're missing the point. People are realizing that it's probably not a good idea to have every pic you ever take be out there for the world to see. But they still want to share them with certain people. They (rightfully) don't trust other people to delete them (or lose there phone, etc.) and they don't trust the privacy settings of facebook and the like. Given that, having a mechanism for sending a pic and (almost) guaranteeing it is deleted is a compelling use case. Snapchat could certainly fail, but I think the general use case will be enduring.
untog 14y ago

lawnchair_larry 14y ago

Survata is a YC company that uses those spammy "survey walls", forcing users to answer a survey to get content they want. This data is garbage.

ckelly 14y ago
Survata co-founder here. Thanks for your comment. We're constantly testing the accuracy of our network, and building technology to screen out respondents who are lying to us. To date, the results are good. For example, when we ask respondents "Which time zone are you in?" or "Who is the president of the United State" we see around 97% accuracy. We see this as evidence of quality data.
- tomprince 14y ago
  Although, questions with non-personally identifiable data or more likely to get honest answers.

moconnor 14y ago

Nice to see the old maxim still holds true: "Every title phrased as a question can be answered with: no."

siculars 14y ago

Not only. I just started using it a few weeks ago and I can say it has legitimate uses outside of sexting. The ability to write on an image or draw on it is quite useful.

MikeKusold 14y ago

I've received ~10 snapchats a day for the past month, and I have never received a sexting photo via snapchat. Instead my friends send pictures of: food, landscapes, people they are with, pets, etc... Basically the point of Snapshot is to share mundane photos without the other person being able to share with their friends all the boring photos you send them throughout the day.

azundo 14y ago

In terms of the comparison with SMS, this survey also seems to miss that sexting via text (words) is very different than sexting via snapchat (pictures). I'm sure a much higher percentage of the population is more comfortable with the former than latter, which doesn't make the comparison all that surprising.

rburhum 14y ago

Can somebody explain to me what is stopping someone from hitting the power + home button simultaneously and creating a photo of whatever is in the screen effectively working around the "self destruct" nature of Snapchat?

svachalek 14y ago
I believe it detects the action and rats you out although it can't actually stop it. I don't use the app but there was a story recently on some people figuring out a way to evade detection.

mijustin 14y ago

It's common wisdom that Snapchat appeals particularly to those under the age of 18. This study focused only on "respondents aged 18 to 29". What people (read: the media) really want to know is "are teens sexting with Snapchat?" Naturally, it's harder to get survey results for that demographic.

ianstallings 14y ago

Wow, a lot of denial on this particular topic. Let's be real. Even facebook is used a lot for hookups. All mediums will have sex on them because we are sexual by nature. So of course this medium will be exploited fully and denied in public because it's a sensitive topic. Why dwell? Who cares? Are we such prudes? And come on, just asking them? Go ask the guys in the head shop what kind of pipes they are selling. Tobacco pipes of course. But we didn't just fall off the turnip truck.

keefe 14y ago

imho there is something here with a neural correlate related to gambling, e.g. I send my mom/boss/teacher a funny face picture or I send my crush a love note with an expiration date and I can cash in on the thrill with a low chance of the risk of exposure