
Show HN: Programmatically sent 42k snapchats, created a social contest - jsingh
http://ranker.io/
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eridius
So basically, you spammed 42k users, and tricked them into sending what they
thought were ephemeral pictures but were instead permanently saved and
displayed publicly on your website. And now you're bragging about it.

~~~
vivpan
We tell users in our snap that their response will be posted online.

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eridius
Ok I suppose that's better than nothing, but you're still violating the most
fundamental aspect of snapchat, and I guarantee you that a good chunk of your
pictures came from people who didn't realize that you were actually saving
their pictures.

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BinRoo
Check out our about page. We will remove images ASAP if the user requests it.

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atwebb
You have to know about it to request removal. That doesn't fix the issue of
user's not understanding that you're changing the expected behavior. I'd
assume you meant it would be posted online and then removed shortly after.

You know exactly what you're being called out on.

~~~
nedwin
"We tell users in our snap that their response will be posted online."

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samsnelling
Not to be rude... but are you sure people fully understand this? Snapchats are
supposed to be seen at most 10 seconds. Snapchat frequently has little bugs
where the snap doesn't show up for it's full amount of time.

I hate to say this because I genuinely like the idea... but this website seems
shady to me. They are bragging about reverse engineering an API, and IMO, at
best, spamming users with a 10 sec disclaimer saying their photo will be
posted online.

Overall: Nice site. Congrats on the technical side. But I really don't think I
can condone this.

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zachgersh
I don't understand how any of these items could be okay with snapchat:

1\. You are keeping chats that are meant to be ephemeral 2\. You are acting as
a snapchat client to create an API where there should not be one. 3\. You are
basically spamming users on snapchat to get them to add you.

~~~
z0a
I agree. From Snapchat's TOS, "you agree to not: 1) Use any data mining or
extraction methods in relation to the Services; 2) Interfere with or hinder
the operation of the Services or any other individual's use of the Services in
any way; 3) Inflict or impose any perverse or excessive burden on the Services
in any way; 4) Compromise the security of the Services; 5) Use the Services
for any purpose that is illegal, beyond the scope of their intended use, or
otherwise prohibited in these Terms; 6) Utilize the Services to transmit spam,
viruses, bugs or any material that could be considered threatening or unlawful
in any way."

I think quite a few of those terms have been violated.

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asr2bd
Snapchat was really asking for this to happen, with exposing usernames
publicly at snapchat.com/<username> and showing subsequent top friends. What
was the rationale of doing that vs keeping it all inside the app?

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kmicklas
So this is that obnoxious friend request I got...

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shawnreilly
It is Hackathon Culture after all; Do something because you can, or just to
see what is possible. Unfortunately, you guys are getting lots of negative
pushback here. Sometimes, it's not what the Tech does, but how you leverage
the Tech, and how you Package your Product. Is this a "just for fun" project,
or do you guys plan on going all the way? If the intention here is to
build/release a real product, I can see a few potential issues with this
approach, some of which are already covered here. Perhaps if you used a
different approach, and solved a different problem (Same Tech, Different
Product) you might have more positive feedback. In fact, I can think of a
great 'Pivot' possibility here using the Tech you've built to provide a
different Type of Service that I can see customers happily using, and paying
for. If this sounds interesting, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter,
@shawnkreilly

Good Job on the Tech!!

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sejje
You broke "back" functionality with alt+left arrow.

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sherwin
Something about this just strikes me as arrogant. Please enlighten me if I
misunderstood ...

"How does it work?

We communicate with Snapchat's servers and pretend to be their mobile app.
This gives us access to everything that you can do through the mobile app. For
example, we can send messages, view (and save) messages, create new
accounts..."

That's a detail that's not relevant at all to their "users" (the people
sending in snapchats). It sounds like they're bragging about their
circumvention of Snapchat's lack of an API.

I don't want to diminish the technical accomplishment here -- reverse an
engineering an API and writing a Snapchat bot is impressive. But, as other
posters have pointed out, they're likely violating the Snapchat terms and
misleading their "users."

~~~
MichaelGG
Is it impressive? Unless Snapchat put a lot of work into making the binaries
prevent RE (which, in ios is probably unlikely due to runtime restrictions),
it's probably fairly straightforward.

On another note, the only way an app dev could really prevent this is if
mobile devices had some sort of TPM or other remote attestation feature.

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LateNightAlumni
I think this is a neat idea. Looking forward to more! It's creative website
scraping, which is what developers did before APIs were mainstream (in case
you were living in a cave). The posters here are just butt hurt they didn't
think of this idea first. Haters gonna hate.

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mosselman
I don't get it. What is this? Could you explain this a bit better so I know
why it is so special?

~~~
BinRoo
Hi, I'm part of the Ranker.io team.

We basically built something on top of Snapchat, which is a relatively-new
social photo sharing app with no API for developers. So we made our own APIs
and made Ranker.io work :)

~~~
timtamboy63
Still doesn't make much sense. Everyone knows what Snapchat is - how are you
grabbing the images?

~~~
vivpan
We communicate with Snapchat's servers and pretend to be their mobile app.
This gives us access to everything that you can do through the mobile app. For
example, we can send messages, view (and save) messages, create new
accounts...

~~~
pdog
Why do you think this is OK? Data mining and extraction are clearly a
violation of their terms.

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jsingh
For API Hack Day in San Francisco
([https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/api-hackday-
sf-2013/...](https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/api-hackday-
sf-2013/hacks/ranker)), we created ranker.io
([http://ranker.io](http://ranker.io)).

A bot named 'epicchallenge' programmatically sends a snapchat video about a
"smile" contest to a huge (42k) list of users. Then we programmatically get
their responses and have people vote on them.

~~~
DanBC
How do you get the 42k list of users?

Looks like a fun idea!

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dmazin
Yeah, I received spam from you twice. It was really annoying.

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z0a
How did you go about sending/receiving all those snapchats programmatically?

~~~
vivpan
Hi! I'm part of the Ranker.io team. We use the same endpoints that the Android
and iOS apps do.

~~~
z0a
Is there an official API or was it just reverse engineered?

~~~
vivpan
There's no official API :)

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caublestone
Really interesting solution to creating an API that doesn't exist yet. Cool
project!

~~~
johncoogan
I love this type of hacking on undocumented APIs. Does anyone know if it's
possible to bend or break the technical rules of SnapChat through this type of
direct API access? It would be interesting to try and post a 20 second
video... or send someone Lord of the Rings. :-)

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mcnemesis
The modern version of misfits are already crafting the brothels of tomorrow -
check how this porn site disguises itself amidst today's ignorance of
psychology.

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ada1981
Aren't snap chats supposed to self destruct? This is really cool.If you think
it would be useful, I'd be happy to offer all your users a free custom credit
card skin from CreditCovers.com with their photo on it if you'd like. ($10
retail value each) - I assume they all wouldn't redeem it but we could budget
~$100k of product for you for this or another promotion. Anthony @
CreditCovers.com if you want to talk.

~~~
ada1981
-4 because offering to give someone something to their users for free is evil. Right.

