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Does Snapchat's CEO Need to Go?
- NN88 13y agoits funny how when things go wrong in private companies, how quickly the general public thinks they can weigh in on how someone needs to stay with that entity. Imagine building something and losing your influence over it to the rest of the world.
- mhurron 13y agoIf you put yourself out there, you probably should expect people to start forming opinions about you. People are very quick to punish others, this shouldn't be surprising.
- ugexe 13y agoIf we are it's product, then yes it should be expected you can lose control over it.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago> Imagine building something and losing your influence over it to the rest of the world. Happens a lot more often than you'd think.
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- 001sky 13y agoWhere does media punditry get off on making absolutist calls for heads to "roll"? I mean, imaging if random non-experts had a journalist fired for every failed-prediction or embarrasingly wrong policy analysis penned in an op-ed? There would be no journalists left !
- enraged_camel 13y agoAccuracy is not the point. It's sensationalist and it gets clicks, which generate money for the website. Why would you fire your most profitable content generators (i.e. journalists)? That would be insane.
- twelvedigits 13y agoJournalists provide an important check on politicians and business leaders. Not every journalist is intelligent, but to dismiss journalism as "media punditry" writ large is a gross overstatement. Specific to this case, I consider Dan Primack to be an informed technology/finance writer whose opinions are well-researched and who is highly plugged-in to the tech sector (which is a sign that others trust his judgment).
- RokStdy 13y agoUm.. That's sort of their job? Why the outrage here? It's not like the story actually calls for Snapchat's CEO's head to really be severed. That might be offensive. I think the author's point is a good one. If CEO is really so obtuse he should go. If he is being coached to act this way then his coach should be fired[1]. Pretty straight forward business journalism. It's not like the business journalist went on a long diatribe about API security. That would be out of place. [1]Unless your argument is that in order to criticize a business leader's actions you must outline each of the myriad possible corrective steps between "Do Nothing" and "Terminate".
- nostromo 13y agoOn one hand you have a CEO that responded slowly to a fairly mild privacy exploit. On the other hand, he created an apparently billion+ dollar company almost overnight. So, I'm going to guess that SnapChat should keep its CEO.
- RokStdy 13y agoThat is a totally fair point, and you might be right. But I cannot understand the low-grade media backlash here. That was my point. It seems like writing an article with the thesis that "whoever is planning crisis management at Snapchat is horrible an needs to go" isn't wildly beyond the pale.
- kahirsch 13y agoOn the third hand, he's turned down two offers of three to four billion dollars. Perhaps he should be fired for that!
- adventured 13y agoAny idea how many disagreeable (and absolutist) things are published or broadcast every day in radio, newspapers, magazines, tabloids, and online? Why should media punditry be bound to any requirement as to what they express, external to their boss / editor? They don't get off anywhere in fact, they don't require your permission, as fortunately we still have a mostly intact free press and freedom of speech.
- spamizbad 13y agoFor a meritocracy to work there must be consequences for both good and bad actions. A pundit's merit is judged by their page views; not by their correctness. Their salary is based off their readership. If their readership wants to be fed convenient lies that reenforce their world view that's their perogative.
- rokhayakebe 13y agoI recently heard Sarah Lacy say they ensure their writers do not know the pageview count.
- Crito 13y agoPresumably they still reward good performance though, so writers are still incentivized to attempt to get good pageviews, even if they cannot know the exact numbers themselves (and they can probably get reasonable estimates by watching mentions in social media)
- boomzilla 13y agoPage view is just a proxy for reader engagement. There are other, better metrics that measure engagement.
- joelrunyon 13y agoSuch as?
- foobarqux 13y agoWhat better measure is there for selling ads than the number of ads you sell?
- dreamfactory 13y agodemographics and dwell time
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- anigbrowl 13y agoThoughtful, nuanced commentary doesn't get as many eyeballs. This is part of the problem from journalist's personal brands becoming part of the news story. When I was growing up I had no idea what any of the people who wrote for the newspaper looked like, or what their names were for all but the very largest stories.
- kyro 13y agoJournalists for the most part are attention-whoring nobodies with no expertise in any particular subject, who hide behind overly aggressive and opinionated words. Watch pundits on any news channel, or read any massively circulated news source and it's pretty clear to confirm what I'm saying. They jiggle their jowls with such empty emotion and intensity. May be harsh, but I think it's pretty accurate.
- jxf 13y agoEquating "journalists" with "pundits" is completely wrong. Sarah Palin, James Carville, et cetera are pundits (among other things), not journalists.
- hbags 13y agoPunditry is not journalism. Journalism is not punditry. That said, I find it morally repugnant that 001sky seems to want to quash the right of either to engage in public speech, simply because said speech calls some entrepreneur's credentials into question. It's fine for any person (be they a research-oriented journalist or a bloviating pundit) to raise these sorts of questions, even if I think their position is weak and a tad ridiculous. If you, as an entrepreneur, are too weak to handle public scrutiny (including scrutiny from people who are quite unlike yourself), then you should find another line of work.
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- kyro 13y agoPunditry != journalism, you're right. But I think what I said applies to most in both categories.
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- mbloom1915 13y agoapology? these are two kids from Stanford who made a fun project and it just so happen to take off. Give them a break, their team of less than 5 people could careless what the public thinks!
- minimaxir 13y agoSnapchat isn't a "project" anymore. It's a business.
- icedog 13y agoIt's a business that doesn't have any business.
- jaredsohn 13y agoWhat you say is true. The important aspect is that the "project" has millions of dollars in investment and employees. Thus, they are accountable to investors and employees who may care about what the public thinks.
- 3am 13y agoDid you read the WSJ Andreesen interview that's on the frontpage (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7007332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7007332)? He gave a plausible and coherent explanation of Snapchat's strategy (spoiler: Tencent of the West). I think that Tencent's valuation is stretched and I think Snapchat is unlikely to succeed even if that is actually their goal... but it was interesting, anyway. edit: hey, w1ntermute, thank you for that interesting response. Cognitively I think my brain wants a tidy explanation for them turning down the $3B, otherwise I can't make any sense of it whatsoever.
- w1ntermute 13y ago> He gave a plausible and coherent explanation of Snapchat's strategy No, he doesn't. All he did was demonstrate his utter lack of understanding of East Asia. East Asian cultures are high-context, meaning that when Tencent released non-messenger services (that could actually turn a profit), users were much more likely to use them because they were already familiar with the company and its existing messaging service. But this strategy does not work well in the low-context cultures of the West, where people are more comfortable with giving new companies and products a chance. Snapchat cannot expand into other verticals with the ease that Tencent did.
- johnrob 13y agoWhat's the big deal? In the age of surveillance, all data is public.
- enraged_camel 13y agoEven without surveillance, I have always assumed that if I am putting something on the Internet, it is public.
- twelvedigits 13y agoThe majority of Snapchat's userbase is young, often in their teens, and most likely not an engineer, software developer, or technologist. I highly doubt they think the same way. I'd also caution against employing such a cavalier attitude toward your users if you're building something that isn't 100% for the tech crowd.
- iluvuspartacus 13y agoTell that to the wife (possibly husband) hiding from her (his) deranged spouse. Data breaches can have very serious consequences for individuals.
- electic 13y agoIf you have this issue in your life, using any service is a bad idea. This includes Facebook, Pinterest, anything. When you interact with services you create data and in many ways data exhaust that can be used to locate you or reveal things about your interests, traits, etc.
- octatone2 13y agoThey simply need to own up to a poor implementation of a useful feature and take protecting user data more seriously.
- onedev 13y agoHah, good one... When is the last time a company owned up to their mistakes and fixed them like that?
- aubreyjohnson 13y agoSorry is an emotion and this is a business. I don't care about how Snapchat "feels," I care about what they've done to fix the security issues and how successful that effort is.
- mathattack 13y agoIf someone doesn't accept the blame, perhaps they're less likely to make sure the problem doesn't repeat.
- thenmar 13y agoIt's a little strange how much vitriol that article contains. It's as if the author is just itching for someone to finally put one of those 20-something entrepreneurs who didn't have to climb the corporate ladder for decades in his place.
- jusben1369 13y agoSo the more interesting article here is "Do people even care any more?" Is Snapchat's CEO making an educated guess that his users are on the cutting edge of SN users and are already sharing a boat load of information and just don't care that much about the breach? Whenever FB makes any privacy changes there's usually a huge uproar. But not many of those complaining are high schoolers or college kids. Maybe they know their user base better than we think.
- j2labs 13y agoIt might be because the CEO is basically the same age as his users.
- bertil 13y agoIt makes sense: I have seen many security professionals complain on the principle, but not one user publicly state they are going to abandon SnapChat for that. These are roughly the generation that threatened to leave when Facebook rearranged buttons. I'm not sure I got the extend of the issue, but: there is now an accessible database of phone numbers to SnapChat handles, right? I get how large scale hackers might use it (but presumably already have); or how a large marketing operation could use that to associate phones numbers that they have with handles, that are presumably unusable for the moment, unless SnapChat users would accept an friend invitation from a branded account. However, the kind of spying that worries most SnapChat users should be from close relatives (parents, teachers, exes, cf. danah boyd’s research), people who already have your phone number, and already have seen your handle appear when they installed SnapChat, and were already denied access. That breach doesn’t change that. The social discovery feature functioning as it is was the issue, and that was already widely accepted.
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- just_stop 13y agoDo HN commenters need to get over their obsession with headlines?
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- iLoch 13y agoTake a deal and jump ship boys, your idea won't be worth anything in 6 months when the next big thing comes out.
- uladzislau 13y agoProbably it's too late already.
- jimsilverman 13y agoi'm shocked by the comments here. it was a massive and anticipated security flaw. the CEO's reaction was not to fix it, not to apologize, but to arrogantly lie about the severity of the threat. less than a week after the CEO deemed the attack theoretical, it happened. the CEO's reaction was not to fix it, not to apologize, but to offer an opt-out after the damage had been done. not sure why snapchat is getting a free pass on this, but it's horrifying.
- jkelsey 13y agoI'm not attempting to defend Snapchat here, but it's probably because their primary user base is compromised of teenagers and college kids. I think it's fair to say that people don't value their privacy as much until they get older and experience the world for what it is.
- jimsilverman 13y agoare you an NSA agent?
- rspeer 13y agoThat was a non sequitur, and basically HN's equivalent of a Reddit meme. Stop that.
- octatone2 13y agoI think there is a generation who simply care not of privacy.
- Crito 13y agoIs that really true? Why are people using Snapchat then, instead of SMS or even twitter? It seems to me that the entire premise of Snapchat is that their users care about privacy (even if they are rather naive or uninformed about how privacy works).
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- metaphorm 13y agoanybody remember tamagotchi? beanie babies? pogs? snapchat is the pogs of 2013. its already 2014. clock is ticking.
- baldajan 13y agoAsking for a person's head every time a mistake is made isn't something a mature person would do. Maybe Dan Primack (the writer) should be fired and replaced by an "adult" that won't make those claims... Now doesn't that sound ridiculous?
- adamsrog 13y agoWhy is the author so focused on an apology? Does a forced apology really solve anything? If I were a Snapchat user, I'd primarily be interested in what they're doing to prevent anything of the sort from happening in the future.
- aryastark 13y agoYou would assume CNNMoney would be more concerned with the CEO's lack of a business plan rather than his lack of apology. Let's get our priorities straight here. I mean, if you're not making money, do you really have a business? Does any of this even matter? If a tree falls in the forest... It takes a certain type of person to use Snapchat. A person that believes in unicorns. That is, someone that believes you can erase things you send over the internet. I suppose if you believe in that absurdity, then you may also believe in whatever nonsense the CEO might tell you about their enhanced security that will prevent this type of breach from ever occurring again. Or you could just stop using the damn thing. Vote with your wallet, er, eyeballs.
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- kyberias 13y agoDoes Fortune's Dan Primack need to go?
- dreamfactory 13y agoSeems the journalist and a lot of commenters here are saying that a service like this needs to be regulated so that there are consequences for negligence or carelessness. There's probably something in that, but in the absence of a regulatory framework for social media systems, snapchat surely has no liability or requirement around data security (beyond existing regulations).