Introducing the new Snapchat

https://www.snap.com/en-US/news/post/introducing-the-new-snapchat/

by hacker_user • 9 years ago

259 202 9 years ago

snap.com

jkoschei• 9 years ago

The new Friends page to the left of the camera...
The new Discover page to the right of the camera...

This reads like the manual to an early-90s text adventure.

revx• 9 years ago

Go Friends

karmelapple• 9 years ago

As strange as Snapchat's UI is versus the standard mobile OS's UI guidelines, there's no denying their unorthodox UI has been wildly successful. There's definitely things to learn from their strategy.

m3rc4• 9 years ago

Really? Every friend of mine complains about the UI. Just yesterday a group of friends (early 20's) were commiserating over how nothing in Snapchat made any sense and just doing something as simple as getting to your friends list was difficult and unintuitive, requiring a couple false starts where you use the wrong swipe and end up somewhere you didn't mean to.

ganlaw• 9 years ago

I don't think it has been successful for on-boarding new users. They are overwhelmed and don't know how to use the app.

squeaky-clean4• 9 years ago

I only heard him say "Never swipe to the page on the right".

SlyShy• 9 years ago

This seems like a solid response to Instagram eating their market share, as Instagram suffers from exactly the problem described (of course, as intended because Facebook's entire business model thrives on it).

mcny2• 9 years ago

I absolutely abhor and detest the way Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter mess with my timeline. At least give me an option to sort everything in a reverse chronological order -- no "tweets I may have missed" -- by default. I hope the left friends screen will not have this mess.

perfectstorm2• 9 years ago

For Twitter you can flip a switch to go back to chronological order (at least on Android). The settings is called `Show me the best tweets first`.

eganist2• 9 years ago

The anti-social-media stance they're taking is probably well informed given their target audience is growing a substantial aversion to oversharing on the long-lived-net and would rather overshare on the ephemeral-net.

Their stock isn't necessarily enjoying it as much as they'd probably hoped. I might speculatively buy in if it seems like it's not a Digg v4

bousaid• 9 years ago

I just bought some - I’m considering snap another case of what Facebook went through. Very well informed about their user, lots of talent working for them, tons of users. However, I think their success will need to come from tailored paid content (also read, they need to collect more data on their users).

Note: this is not investment advice.

eganist2• 9 years ago

Agreed.

Just to add clarity to my earlier post: I did pull the trigger and take a long position in snap. We'll see how it goes; I've still essentially written off the principal as a loss, but if there's an inflection point, I suspect it'll be here.

(likewise none of my commentary here is investment advice)

orliesaurus• 9 years ago

They realized that instagram's biggest enemy is the amount of advertising and fake-accounts there is pushed into your stream of photos and are using it to their advantage! clever :)

distantsounds8• 9 years ago

Android's Camera API has existed for _literally years_ to take high-quality photos and these guys are still just taking a screenshot of the viewfinder and calling it a day. It's been like this forever and Snap has refused to fix this. I have yet to come across any other app on Android that utilizes the camera this way. The photos are complete garbage.

And here they are, trying to add more 'features' into an app where its main feature has been inherently broken since inception.

edit: this post kinda blew up. to see a real side-by-side comparison, https://imgur.com/a/wuaZi

lnx01• 9 years ago

I cannot wrap my head around why it was even implemented like this in the first place. Were they too lazy to look up the Camera API implemetation? Was it a hacky workaround to avoid some retriction in Android?

dannyw• 9 years ago

It could be for a variety of reasons;

1. Compatibility with old devices or API levels 2. Performance optimisation for the filters 3. Lack of priority for the Android app

On my iPhone, Snapchat definitely uses the full fledged APIs and even uses OIS or the image processor to pick/merge the best frame out of the video stream (a lot of blurry photos I take are unblurred), so I’m not sure why the Android experience is allegedly so lacklustre

staticelf• 9 years ago

lol is this true? Proof? If this is the case that's most likely why my phone took so shitty snaps when I had android.

yojex• 9 years ago

Snapchat takes beautiful photos on iOS. Some people I know even prefer to use it to the native camera. I wonder why this is different for Android? Does anyone have an insight here?

eightysixfour• 9 years ago

It sure doesn’t for me, it takes the worst photos of any app I use by a long shot. It is fine for ephemeral stuff but nothing I want to save ever turns out well. (This includes from my 6S and my 8+)

zwerdlds• 9 years ago

Just a hunch, but I'm guessing the call to capture a screenshot is restricted by Apple, forcing them to do it the 'correct' way.

icholy• 9 years ago

People prefer to use it because it shows you the mirrored picture which you're more used to seeing.

qpalz2• 9 years ago

It has a built in low-light photo mode on iOS that I use over the stock camera app all the time. In full light you can't even tell the difference between stock and snapchat photos.

mcny2• 9 years ago

And here they are, trying to add more 'features' into an app where its main feature has been inherently broken since inception.

I am an Android user as well (I own a Nexus 4, 5, 6, and the 2013 wifi version of 7) and I welcome this feature. I think they will fix the Android way of doing things at some point. In fact, if I had the choice of entirely disabling the new swipe right vs a beautiful camera API experience I'd pick the former. I don't care about the Kardashians and I don't want them on my snapchat. If that means I have to live with a crappy camera, I am ok (mostly because my friends are all on iPhone and I mostly watch snaps rather than post them)

m3rc4• 9 years ago

Sorry what? Why would making the app actually take photos mean you have to see the Kardashians?

ijafri• 9 years ago

I wonder if it has to do with pic size and bandwidth.. since they never seemed to focus on Android. Due to a lot of low end devices .. and meaning no value for advertisers ... ?? Also they ain't Instagram .. or Flickr.. it was disappearing pics ... Meant to last few seconds,.. right ?? Or I got this wrong?

jrowley• 9 years ago

They can last for 24 hours sometimes or forever in the “memories” section.

therealmarv2• 9 years ago

omg they are really doing this? A shame!

tartuffe783• 9 years ago

As a near daily snapchat user, and someone who has developed an Android app that use's the camera, I prefer it this way. I'm not using SnapChat to take super high quality pictures, but to share moments quickly. The WYSIWYG works well for that, and a lot of Android devices are super slow to take pictures.

Dealing with Camera 1 vs Camera 2 Android APIs, and device specific issues is a mess, I don't blame them for taking the easier route. The iOS camera system is a lot easier to develop against, so I blame Android for this rather than Snapchat.

distantsounds8• 9 years ago

So you prefer gimping your photo quality because you're too lazy to learn how the API works, and assume that your users are OK with this as well?

squeaky-clean4• 9 years ago

It screws over higher-end devices though. One of the reasons I bought an LG G3 was the "laser auto focus" whatever, which actually did make it insanely fast to take an in-focus photo. It was way slower with Snapchat, and I couldn't focus on anything closer than about 3 feet.

I kind of blame Android too, as a dev I know how crappy the camera APIs can be. But as a user, it stands that only Snapchat takes crappy photos because it doesn't use the standard API, everything else works fine. (Okay actually Facebook Messenger does this too, but oddly the main Facebook app does it right).

piquadrat• 9 years ago

Taking the easy route was OK when they were a scrappy startup, but now that they are a multi-billion public company, I honestly don't see why they can't hire a couple of qualified Android devs to fix this.

stefanpie• 9 years ago

Why not implement both and have the screencap method for devices with device specific issues or at leat have an option to use both.

stickydink• 9 years ago

I worked on an app that we needed to take a live video stream, run that through OpenCV, but also quickly take high-res photos while that's running.

On Android I really had trouble in getting the preview stream to line up with the photographs. I needed to keep the preview resolution low enough that devices could process it and present to the screen in real time. But not all devices have the same preview and photograph resolutions.

I found there were inconsistencies between the way the image was cropped (on the OS/hardware level) between different resolutions.

You can take a preview stream at resolution X, and it would appear full frame. Then you would take a photograph at resolution Y, and despite being the same aspect ratio, it would be cropped differently. The results varied between devices, with some matching the crop, some vertically, some horizontally, and (as far as I could tell) there was no way to identify programmatically how the camera was doing the cropping. It seemed to be being done at a level much lower than I could access.

In the end we just had to compromise on a resolution in the middle and use it for both preview and photo.

It may not be the reason, and maybe there's a way around this, the project was a year or two since now. Implementing the same thing on iOS I didn't run into the issue.

econner• 9 years ago

My impression was that they did this because it made taking a picture faster than using the camera and they specifically did not want to encourage high quality photos. They wanted quick personal moments where you don't care so much how you look or capturing the perfect lighting or whatever.

xspade• 9 years ago

I always thought this was to ensure you get a photo of what you're seeing in the moment; not something after a delay which is what was happening with older phones. Essentially it's a fast and dirty way for the photos to be WYSIWYG and avoid camera lag.

kinkrtyavimoodh2• 9 years ago

As much as I love to hate on Snapchat, there's probably no reason to use the Camera API for high quality pictures given Snapchat's use case. And if your nudes were going to be leaked would you rather they were blurred or high-res?

distantsounds8• 9 years ago

as a social network whose main feature is taking photos, why wouldn't you want that to be in the best quality possible?

didibus• 9 years ago

I always liked that, because what you see is what you get, and it's much faster.

bhauer• 9 years ago

The apparent delight in low-quality photography that pervades both Snapchat and Instagram are among the reasons I don't bother using either. Earlier photography applications and platforms such as Flickr celebrated high-quality camera equipment and the resulting photographs. Intentional dramatic down-sampling and filters that add vintage discoloration have never resonated with my senses.

kccqzy• 9 years ago

Instagram is a very diverse place, much more so than Snapchat. If you follow the right people, you will basically only see high-quality photos (likely taken from high-end camera equipment too!), but if you just follow your “friends” et al you are gonna be disappointed.

maxfurman• 9 years ago

I'm fine with the picture quality (they are ephemeral after all) but I'm not fine with how the Android app is slow, clunky, battery-destroying mess.

Example: If I get a plaintext chat message through snapchat, and I tap the notification to open it, do I go straight to the chat thread? No, I'm dropped at the camera, which has to start streaming and download all the new filters and god knows what else until it allows me to swipe left to get to chats, then tap the specific thread to see the new message.

odonnellryan• 9 years ago

Yeah. Android app has sucked for a while now. Can't quickly snap something interesting. What's the point?

marcusjt• 9 years ago

Thanks, I've done my bit in return by citing your comparison URL in my (relevantly critical) review of the app on the Play Store.

rcheu• 9 years ago

The Android Camera API is notoriously bad, and the Camera1/Camera2 switch isn't helping either. I would guess the main reason they do the screenshot approach is that it's actually faster than asking Android to take a photo and produces a photo that exactly matches what the user expected.

wingerlang• 9 years ago

I wonder why they made the video like they did. Essentially filming a filming session. Like behind the scenes styled.

For a unique spin on it?

sarreph• 9 years ago

Next update's gonna be the filming of the filming of a filming session.

So meta.

mackwerk• 9 years ago

Probably to make it feel like the video is being filmed through Snapchat :)

rwc• 9 years ago

The same reason there are illustrations that appear on screen and there's music in the background. Fundamentally, it's a boring topic (we moved our menus around). So they spiced it up with some things that create interest.

roesel• 9 years ago

The high-pitch noise in the background was what I noticed the most. I have nothing against the "behind the scenes" style, but at least don't hurt my ears.

grenoire• 9 years ago

Wait, what's even different? Serious question.

smcl• 9 years ago

I guess that under the hood there are modes the camera can operate in - lower-res "video" mode and a high-res "still" mode. When you're looking at the viewfinder it's kind of a video - so it'll be lower res and presumably will skip some corrections involved when a still is taken.

Edit: oops I thought this was in reply to a comment where someone complained that the photo was taken from a screenshot of the viewfinder instead of using the camera functionality. Been a long day :-)

rjpr• 9 years ago

Where are you getting this from? Unless I missed something all they're doing is moving around the menus a bit.

dom96• 9 years ago

I'm also wondering this. I don't use snapchat much, but from what the video showed in the article the "new snapchat" sounds exactly like the current snapchat. What am I missing here?

johnwheeler• 9 years ago

Sounds like the old snapchat

therealmarv2• 9 years ago

Is this thing still a total bandwidth hog and downloading all snaps in alphabetical order instead the videos I want to see? This app was unusable in countries with low bandwidth like e.g. the Philippines. This is why Instagram wins... Instagram is really really great engineering and testing. I would even say it's one of the best optimized mobile apps out there.

vlunkr• 9 years ago

My experience with Instagram has not been that great. Videos don't play reliably, and when they do, it's a gamble if the audio will work or not.

gnodar• 9 years ago

Go to settings->manage and toggle Travel Mode on.

Shalomboy• 9 years ago

Seconding this. Took snapchat to Sulawesi and had no issues.

dmart• 9 years ago

This is a nice, pro-consumer move, although I wonder if they will lose advertising revenue as a result. One would have to imagine that one of their big sells to Discover advertisers would be that their content is shoved in your face whenever you try to view friends' Stories.

anant903• 9 years ago

Teenagers, and for that matter, everyone yearns for smaller private spaces where they can share whatever they want with their closest friends — without any reservations of judgement from their parents, grandmas or uncles. I used to love Instagram, until Facebook decided to make it Facebook v2 by making my entire "friend" list follow me there as well. That means that until I invest a lot of time hiding my story from everyone but my closest friends (and of course no one has time for that), I'll just refrain from posting some of my true self there.

On the other hand, the tight knit and private nature of the Snapchat network is going to keep it more attractive to me. At least for me, the amount of time spent in an app is more correlated with the depth of my relationships with other nodes on that network, and not just with the size of my audience.

I’ve loved Snap as a company for a long time, and I like their pitch of using innovation as a moat: they have consistently innovated every year since their founding (Ephemerality, Stories, AR filters, Memories, Spectacles (although this has largely been a failure)), have a core set of users who really really love them, and are now playing to their strengths by positioning themselves well as the private space for you and your closest friends.

finnh• 9 years ago

This is a great post to read in comparison with iambateman's [0]. You prefer Snapchat because it is a space where you are safe to be yourself, without worrying about parents/uncles/etc seeing you. But iambateman's point is that making videos for our friends is a performative event, and thus drives one to (a) be different from your actual self (more funny/interesting/alive) or, at the very least, to (b) act as you see yourself reflected in their eyes - to be that version of yourself that they expect to see. To go all philosophy 101 on it, this is more-or-less the basic question of existentialism, with Snapchat acting as a multiplier for temptations to inauthenticity.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15807728

Apocryphon• 9 years ago

And yet another angle- maybe the urge to perform can be a way in which the medium encourages creativity, not unlike the dearly departed Vine.

anant903• 9 years ago

I totally see iambateman's point, and agree with it. As far as inauthenticity goes, I would say that it pervades all aspects of our lives, including real-life interactions, which we can assume to be most authentic, yet at some level inauthentic (almost everyone changes themselves a bit depending on who they're talking to).

On this spectrum, the Snapchat experience is a lot more authentic and closer to real-life interactions than Instagram/Facebook, which are a lot worse multipliers of inauthenticity.

spike0212• 9 years ago

Not sure I understand what you mean.

You can set your Instagram to private and even if friends from Facebook see that you have an account there they can't just view your content. They'd need to send a follow request to do that.

IG can easily still be a private space. I don't accept everyone who's on my friends list from Facebook.

e: Also, while it's potentially more work there's nothing stopping you from having multiple accounts on Instagram. The UI is actually pretty simple when it comes to swapping between more than one as needed.

kaycebasques2• 9 years ago

Snap lets you send stories (or whatever they're called) to specific groups of people, yes?

That's a huge differentiator, in my book. It provides a simple interface for sharing experiences with specific people. Not really any different than a group SMS or other form of group chat, really. But a very different experience from Instagram, for sure.

anant903• 9 years ago

You're absolutely correct. I'm not arguing whether it's possible to use Instagram like one would use Snapchat — it is, and my points won't make any sense from that POV.

I was laying down my observations on what's the default, and hence seemingly most common behavior for the given network. All snapchat accounts are private by default (yes, you can make stories public like on Instagram). All Instagram accounts are public by default (yes, you can make it private) The power of default has a significant role to play in how people think about and use a particular network. This is even more true for the people who are not very tech savvy, which is the majority.

Again, not arguing if Instagram is better than Snapchat, or vice versa. Instagram probably will win the majority of the market, and will have an order of magnitude, if not more, users, engagement and revenue. Will Snapchat become irrelevant and die? I'd say it's too early to make that call.

Simon_says2• 9 years ago

The best advice is to not put anything into electronic form that you wouldn't want your everyone you know (along with prosecuting attorneys) to read about in detail in the newspaper. Facebook may promise something is private, but all it takes is the smallest software bug and their promises are ashes.

vernie2• 9 years ago

Fortunately nobody reads the newspaper anymore.

iambateman2• 9 years ago

Evan of Snapchat talks about “performing for your friends” as a strange “side effect” of Snapchat. But the instinct to perform is native to the Snapchat medium.

I think this is a problem.

I went to a concert a few weeks ago. The people beside me would stand still for 10 minutes and then someone would pull out Snapchat. The whole group would turn around, flash a smile and start dancing for the camera. 9 seconds later, they were back to watching the concert.

Performance is a cultural virus that affects our happiness and creates a kind of perfect self-consciousness. It’s “instant replay” for all of life. And just like in American Football, when instant replay arrives, we start to (1) glorify the spectacular, (2) hyper-analyze every angle and (3) expect more moments worthy of instant replay.

Snapchat pushes us to create more of those “replay worthy” moments. We narrate our lives according to the expectations of our “fans.” I hear 8-year-old kids yell “do it for the likes.” They are quietly subverting their self while sublimating the value of the crowd. How do I have an identity when I consistently invite other people - often strangers - to affirm my experiences?

Those concert-goers felt the need to misrepresent their experience of the concert. The 8-year-olds adjusted their behavior to optimize for likes. When I was on Snapchat, I loved seeing myself in other people’s stories. It made me feel popular. I, too, adjusted my behavior to appear more likeable on camera.

Adjusting Snapchat’s interface will do nothing to address the intrinsic ways that Snapchat reorients our relationships around performance.

Perhaps this is obvious, but family and friends should love me the way I am. Not some imaginary version of me. And Snapchat nudges me to fake it.

jakoblorz• 9 years ago

Even if, technically, you can't do it for the likes on Snapchat, I completely agree with your point.

token_throwaway• 9 years ago

That's a pretty dramatic take. Social media use in general probably declines with age, and although I'm not sure how you'd quantify it, I bet that using social media primarily as a form of social proofing declines even quicker with age. All young people "perform" because their self-awareness is on extra high alert and their personalities are half-baked. This has been true since the dawn of high schools.

forgottenpass• 9 years ago

That's a pretty dramatic take.

It's just "the medium is the message" applied to Snapchat.

Buttes2• 9 years ago

I know middle aged people who do the same thing, their "performances" are appropriate for their age. Pictures of expensive vacations, manicured gardens and so on. Same phenomenon.

gallerdude• 9 years ago

I don’t know, isn’t this the same as all social media? I remember reading something along the lines that playing golf is posted on Facebook twice as much as doing the dishes, yet people spend 5x more time doing the dishes.

And if we step back from social media, what about regular pictures? They’re supposed to take candid moments of the real world, but even if we’re having a bad day, we smile and act happy for pictures.

I agree that a divide between reality and ideal is happening here, just that it isn’t really new.

gmu32• 9 years ago

Not only do I think its true of all social media, I think it's less true of Snapchat because the medium has less of a memory.

What social media do people think is more candid?

semi-extrinsic• 9 years ago

playing golf is posted on Facebook twice as much as doing the dishes, yet people spend 5x more time doing the dishes

By that metric traditional newspapers are much worse - the ratio of stories on golf versus on dishwashing is much greater than 5x.

Govannon• 9 years ago

what about regular pictures? They’re supposed to take candid moments of the real world

I'm not sure that is an accurate representation of photography as a medium, nor has it ever been.

VirgilShelton• 9 years ago

Obviously you’ve never played golf

sah2ed• 9 years ago

playing golf is posted on Facebook twice as much as doing the dishes, yet people spend 5x more time doing the dishes.

That would be by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in this NYT article.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/06/opinion/sunday/dont-let-f...

0wl3x• 9 years ago

This is a great encapsulation of exactly why I put down snapchat a few years ago. It's rather scary how people can get pulled into this feedback loop and how hard social media users can work to keep of a facade of performance. Thanks for giving a noun to the sentiment I've had for a few years.

personlurking2• 9 years ago

Those concert-goers felt the need to misrepresent their experience of the concert.

I felt the same sense of misrepresentation browsing Instagram recently, where the photo no longer represents the experience, but rather it is the experience (if one can call a posed and doctored product an experience).

One problem with this is the behavioral reinforcement it creates. If dopamine is released enough times when a certain action is performed, it would seem there's a point where your brain is essentially making you continue to reproduce that action. And these services aren't primarily targeting adults, which is concerning as well.

kaycebasques2• 9 years ago

I think HN is quick to overlook the potential positives of this dynamic, so I'll play devil's advocate here.

Maybe the Instagram experience is how people actually want to behave? And it gives them a chance to express that ideal self. In other words, it's like the phone is a magic wand, and when it's pointed at them, it's suddenly socially-acceptable to break out of their shell and act silly.

Obviously it's weird that it only happens when the phone is pointed at them. But maybe, over time, this "behavioral reinforcement" will give them the courage to act like that all of the time (if that's how they want to be), rather than only when the phone is out.

In other words, the key notion that I challenge is this claim that HN is fit to judge Instagram as a misrepresentation of reality. How can we claim that the moments when the phone is away is more real than the moments when they are out? They both happened, therefore they're both real. And there's this unquestioned assumption that just because people behave a certain way when the phone is away, that's how they truly want to behave, when it may as well be just the opposite.

staplers• 9 years ago

  They are quietly subverting their self while sublimating the value of the crowd. How do I have an identity when I consistently invite other people - often strangers - to affirm my experiences?

This realization led me to delete most of my social media accounts. Rejecting constant validation and ever-present social commentary opened my life to the quiet details. It led to a mental growth spurt which elevated my career and relationship with family and friends.

hmhrex• 9 years ago

This is a great way of explaining this. I've been without social media for about 1.5 months now. I've noticed the urge to capture an experience for social a few times, even though I've spoken against it in the past. I'm actually happier without it.

tedmiston4• 9 years ago

This is why I keep a (digital) journal.

Preserving a memory there in a few sentences or a quick photo that I just save for myself fulfills the desire for me.

austincheney• 9 years ago

I went to a concert a few weeks ago. The people beside me would stand still for 10 minutes and then someone would pull out Snapchat. The whole group would turn around, flash a smile and start dancing for the camera. 9 seconds later, they were back to watching the concert.

Out of curiosity are you and your friends younger than 25? I don't know of anybody in my age demographic that would behave like that.

Kroniker• 9 years ago

I'm in that age bracket and go to concerts with people in the age bracket. Never seen this behavior in my life. Not even at a shoegaze show!

smogcutter• 9 years ago

See also: places and "experiences" (including major contemporary art) meant to be a background for instagram and snapchat https://www.theringer.com/tech/2017/8/9/16110424/instagram-p... (don't let the Ringer url fool you, very good article)

thebaer2• 9 years ago

How do I have an identity when I consistently invite other people - often strangers - to affirm my experiences?

This sums it up so perfectly. It precisely explains what I've always failed to when people ask, "why didn't you take pictures of that? or share them on Facebook?" I was just overseas for several weeks and I was able to fully absorb the entire experience because I wasn't worried about what anyone else in the world thought of what I was experiencing at the moment.

I do think there can be a middle-ground with social media if it's designed thoughtfully, with this perspective in mind. I wrote a little about it recently [0], specifically on how Mastodon shouldn't have ported over the favorite/like functionality from Twitter, because functions like that do hijack our brains to use these tools for the subconscious reward, rather than to truly improve our lives in some way.

With prevalent awareness of the issue, thoughtful design, and a change in financial incentives for platform makers I think we can come away from this crazy time of intrusive, subconscious-altering social media with just the good parts.

[0] https://write.as/matt/mastodon-social-favorites

Buttes2• 9 years ago

Is it easy for mastodon operators to disable?

tedmiston4• 9 years ago

The like / +1 is a useful signal though. What if it were visible in the UI but didn't trigger notifications or alerts?

tim333• 9 years ago

People have smiled for the camera since we've had cameras. It's not really a new social media phenomena.

eachro• 9 years ago

That is a fair point. Back maybe 20 or 30 years ago, the average person would bring their camera on vacations and that was probably the extent of it. But it's a bit different now that most people carry a camera in their pocket so these moments of "fake" display are much more common.

antod• 9 years ago

Not in all the really old photos I've seen. Lots of stern serious looks there. Smiles came later.

jacobolus• 9 years ago

This is not true. When cameras are first introduced to most societies, people don't smile for them. Often they even very intentionally stop smiling and adopt a serious/formal expression. Always smiling for the camera is a learned cultural behavior reinforced through pervasive social pressure, which took many decades to form and which was helped along by the heavy use of photography for advertising/propaganda where showing smiles increased sales, not a natural or predestined result.

coding123• 9 years ago

I think this is more a problem of society in general. From my personal perspective everyone I have ever met is faking it 99% of the time. The only time people are real is when they are taking a shit and wiping it up before going back out there. I don't think people want a video of that on social media. Its a question of scale yes, but its the same property.

wu-ikkyu• 9 years ago

This McLuhan quote seems quite relevant and prescient to this thread:

Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere.

-Marshall McLuhan, From Cliché to Archetype, 1970

8ytecoder• 9 years ago

Snapchat is inherently ephemeral - nothing lasts for more than 24 hours. Compare that to instagram/FB where the feed lives forever. The concept of stories does give people some freedom in sharing things a bit more spontaneous. In addition, they don't have a like button or comments. The only "metric" is people who "viewed" your story. The difference was stark when I first used Snapchat. I believe things have changed now. More people have moved to instagram stories and Snapchat is a lot more "filtered" than it used to be.

IMHO I think they tried to make people share spontaneously instead of a curated feed. Instagram and FB forced a change.

sizzle• 9 years ago

Thank you for sharing your perspective, it has described what I have been unable to articulate for quite some time now.

criddell• 9 years ago

Adjusting Snapchat’s interface will do nothing to address the intrinsic ways that Snapchat reorients our relationships around performance.

Do you think this is something Snapchat should even care about? How is Snapchat nudging you? Is it more insidious than somebody saying "say cheese!" before snapping a photo?

kbuchanan• 9 years ago

It's human nature to crave feedback. Heck, I avoid social media platforms, but that doesn't mean I don't compulsively check to see what HN readers think of my comments. But it's abnormal to orient your life around likes, and antithetical to a path of happiness. So, yeah, I agree wholeheartedly.

iambateman2• 9 years ago

Honestly, I got a good number of upvotes for OP and came here to see how many upvotes there were. I guess Fake Internet Points are powerful in all forms. ;)

cam_l• 9 years ago

this could also be understood as the inherent shortcomings of photography as a medium to capture your recollection of the experience of an event.

or in another way, photography exposes the difficulty of translating your recollection to a third party. when I show you a grainy photo of some bright lights and blurred, sweaty people, I remember a great concert with friends.. but you just see the grainy photo.

though I agree with what you are saying, I think this is just the mass adoption of the imagification (both actual and meta) of life that began with portraiture back in the middle ages. why rail against snapchat when we already live in a world of fake family portraits?

billfeng• 9 years ago

I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to be liked by others or wanting affirmation, or even performing for your friends. We are social creatures and we live in groups and communities so of course we want to be liked by others. The problem is where it leads you. There are also loads of artists and creatives who didn't realize how amazing their works are until one day they decided to post it onto the internet and many strangers were amazed by what they made. Their fan base then goes on to encourage and affirm what the artists do and because of that they were able to reach new heights and break limits they never would have been able to on their own.

I think the real question is, who are you without this medium? Are you still the same person? The artist who was encouraged by the responses of strangers can continue to do his or her work without the medium. The affirmation has helped them but it's not something they rely on.

In contrast if you find yourself craving it so much that without it you are anxious and suffering, then you have a problem. If the concert kids you mentioned were enjoying the concerts anyways, dancing and cheering all the way through on snapchat or not, then it wouldn't be worrying at all.

This is really the same for anything that's potentially addictive. Can you live without it? Do you goto lengths that are otherwise uncomfortable to you to acquire it?

Yes, snapchat has made it easier for us to fake ourselves, but only in the same way the internet has made it easier for us to look at pornography, and the industrial revolution has made it easier for us to have access to alcohol and cigarettes. I think in time this will pass too, just like all the other harmful things we could indulge in, as people have self-control and are smart enough to eventually realize that being our authentic selves bring about the most happiness.

ImSkeptical• 9 years ago

I disagree on two points.

First, people shouldn't love you for who you are. That assumption is in popular culture but it's really pernicious if you examine it. I don't love my mother because she's my mother. I love my mother because she's nice to me, she cares about me, she sacrificed for me, she wants me to do well, etc. If my mother acted like a robot, or worse, was abusive or exploitative, I wouldn't love her. That's true for everyone I do love, and I think it should be true of all love (possible exception for one's own children). If you expect people to love you regardless of what you do or how you act, that's demanding a lot from people for no reason.

Second, consider the group of people at the concert. Going to a concert is fun, even if you're just kind of standing around watching. The problem is, when taking a photo, you can't convey visually the fun of being there - so you exaggerate the visual aspect, you look happy, so you can take a picture that represents what you're actually experiencing. I grant that it could be the case that people are cynically trying to create a fantasy life for Snapchat to seem popular or whatever, but my experience with such things is just that you're trying to convey your experience with images. Going to this concert is fun, so look fun so we can snap shot it!

Over Thanksgiving I took pictures of my mother, my sister, and my sister's daughter doing the same thing. On the one hand, two of the pictures were staged (I asked two of them to come here and do this so I could take their picture). On the other hand, it captured the similarity that I could see between the three of them. The picture is authentic in the same way that the Snapchat picture is - it had to be created artificially to capture something authentic.

tylerhou• 9 years ago

First, people shouldn't love you for who you are. That assumption is in popular culture but it's really pernicious if you examine it.

You're making a mostly semantical argument. When you say that "you don't love your mother because she's your mother", you're saying that you don't love your mother strictly based on the fact that she was the woman who bore you (`with respect to her identity`). You then say that you love your mother because she acts `how she acts`.

In my experience, when people say they want to be loved for who they are, they mean that they don't want to have to act differently than how they would naturally act in order to be liked or popular. In essence, `who someone is` is commonly interpreted to be a superset of `how someone acts` in union with other sets (like `who someone is with respect to their identity`). Thus most people would understand "be who you are" not only to mean "be who you are strictly `with respect to your identity`" but also "be who you are with respect to `how you act`". You're missing the latter in the definition in of who your mother is.

Your second point is valid. In my experience it is difficult to maintain physically a peak level of excitement for a whole event.

noobermin2• 9 years ago

Another commenter replied to your first point and I hold their sentiment.

Regarding your second point, there is a spectrum here between "recreating authentic experience" and closer to "making something that isn't real" for likes. An extreme example is that I live in a hipster neighborhood with a bunch of European inspired architecture (in the midwestern USA). I once saw two people hold up their small puppy they had on a leash up to autumn leaves in a plant in order to take a picture, around shoulder level with outstretched arms. The dog was clearly in distress, but they continued for one or two times while the dog was whimpering and trying to get down.

The dog was not "experiencing the autumn leaves." Instead, I'm guessing this was closer to "I've seen these sorts of posts in ig, and it's popular, so I'm going to try to recreate it for likes." Why else would someone do that?

So that's an extreme towards GP's point while you seem to be on a spectrum towards another area where it's more like amplification over manufacture.

barrkel• 9 years ago

I think there isn't as much to "you" as you think there is. What you think of as your identity in any given context is largely determined by previous interactions in that context. The person you are when you're with your parents, vs with your childhood friends, vs college friends, vs old work colleagues - these are all different versions of you, and they're all authentic, despite being different - and yes, they also trigger the performative.

It's most obvious when you listen to someone phone home, where people from home have a different accent from where they live. Their accent will start switching back. They'll start reacting to social and conversational cues in remembered ways, rather than current ways. A facet of identity is keyed to its culture. (I think this is why FB is so disturbing; I stopped using it in 2010 or so. It just creates context cross-talk.)

I agree with you on the distorting effects of the camera, causing people to exaggerate to communicate a specific story. I don't see it so much as misrepresentation, though. People have sent misleading postcards of holidays to friends and relatives for decades, before photographing everything was feasible, never mind video snippets. It's more about constructing a social object that acts as a kind of structural element for a narrative one wants to write in the shared cultural space of the viewers. And Snap certainly encourages it, probably to excess.

On my first significant holiday abroad, I didn't take any photos, because I wanted to stay in the moment, and not be concerned about creating narratives. The experience stays within me as a series of scenes without order, almost like a remembered dream. I could say that it's part of me, my identity. But since I can't share it with anyone, it's impoverished. Shared experiences are bonding in a way that unshared experiences aren't. The shared narrative creates a shared mini-culture, where members belong. Being through a tough spot with someone can be the seed of a deep friendship, and the shared narrative is a big part of why. Whether the narrative is authentic or not isn't actually the point.

ouid• 9 years ago

You say your gripe is with snapchat, but what you've described is the loose amalgamation of everything in the category called web 2.0.

auganov• 9 years ago

Culture is performance. Pondering on the artifice of social relations is timeless.

The interesting part is what happens once enough people become aware of it. A total glamour killer. Every day there seems to be so much talk about dangers of social. Would be an interesting strategy for Snapchat to amplify this conversation and position itself as an alternative.

_pmf_• 9 years ago

New Snapchat - same complete lack of a business model.

dbbk3• 9 years ago

Snap has multiple revenue streams, what are you talking about?

ljk• 9 years ago

serious question, other than the glasses that no one is buying, the ads where google and facebook take up most of the space, what do they have?

kalub92• 9 years ago

Sooooo it's exactly the same?

dirtyfrenchman• 9 years ago

Ok... so the app looks the same as it has for the past year? Not sure what's new here.

_arvin• 9 years ago

Introducing the new Snapchat: "Nothing's changed, except everything."

V-eHGsd_2• 9 years ago

I'm certainly not in snap's demo, but

You can think of it as a more sophisticated Best Friends algorithm that makes it easier to find the friends you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them.

I can't for the life of me understand why I'd need something like this to help me find my existing friends when I want to talk to them.

askafriend2• 9 years ago

This is for mobile. The goal is quick access to the people you talk to often without having to search.

This passes the "subway test". You're walking out of a busy subway station and want to quickly take an action on the go - how fast can you get it done on a tiny mobile screen with so-so connectivity?

On desktop, this is less of a problem when you have all the time, connectivity, and physical dexterity in the world to perform searches rapidly.

V-eHGsd_2• 9 years ago

The default text message app has done this forever though, right? same with my phone contacts if I want to be a luddite and actually _call_ someone

ChanningAllen• 9 years ago

Good move. It seems like a pro-consumer move that is also, and for that reason, a savvy business move. Snap and Instagram as far as I can tell are are largely used by young people who don't like the noise, visibility, and clutter of Facebook. So this is an effective way for them to further distinguish themselves.

kahlonel• 9 years ago

There's going to be a nice little bump in their share prices. Not sure how long that will last though.

8x8squares• 9 years ago

There is an interesting article by Dan Kaplan on "Why Snapchat is Losing To Facebook And The Strategy It Can Use To Win" [1]. It is an amazing read for anyone interested.

In the post, the author outlines a strategy which Snap can use to regain its relevance and importance in the social space. The author mentions how Snap can rebrand itself as a "self-expression company" that respects users' humanity.

Interesting to see Snap taking steps in this direction.

[1] https://exponents.co/snap-facebook-key-competitive-strategy/

bllguo• 9 years ago

Definitely interesting. It's an especially strong proposition these days, when cybersecurity and privacy are so heavily emphasized. My main concern is that I am not convinced that this route can be monetized. Wish the author fleshed this out further.

perfectstorm2• 9 years ago

They still haven't moved to the `newer` (not new anymore. been here for 3yrs now) permission modals on Android. The moment I hit the Install button on Google Play it prompts me to give blanket access to 11 different APIs. No way I'm gonna let them have it.

Every app that I have on my Android device has been updated to this granular permission modal and for Facebook I manually turned off permissions after they started using the Storage permission to access my camera roll to display a carousel of photos that I've taken recently on my timeline.

cercatrova• 9 years ago

Nice, now I never need to swipe right. Wonder how they'll make money now.

losermachine• 9 years ago

This is weak

richardknop• 9 years ago

Just a personal anecdote but I have tried installing Snapchat app on my iPhone about a year ago or so. I have spent about 20 minutes tapping and swiping around the app to try to figure out how to use it. I couldn't get how it works and was so frustrated that I have uninstalled it.

In addition to UI being most confusing and impossible for me to figure out, it was also super slow on a mobile network in Asia where I was at the time, near unresponsive.

If I, as 25-30 years old tech person cannot figure out how to use your mobile app, you got a problem. I completely understand why the user base growth has completely flatlined. I assume there are a lot of people similar to me.

I am very bearish on Snap.

jedc• 9 years ago

If you go looking for the Snapchat S-1 SEC filing, it essentially has a user guide for the app inside. (So that potential investors could figure out what the hell it was all about.)

Paraesthetic• 9 years ago

Will it fix their declining user base though?

ungzd• 9 years ago

How innovative! Older chat "apps": ICQ, IRC, talkd, WinPopup always separated "Publishers and Creators" and my friends! Furthermore, there was separate device for consuming "Publishers and Creators" called "TV".

Introducing the new Snapchat

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