
Why I’m leaving Snapchat and so are all your friends - taigeair
https://medium.com/charged-tech/why-im-leaving-snapchat-and-so-are-all-your-friends-dd241f0cd14#.3vldpxq7n
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mi100hael
_> Snapchat is the darling of technology: for years, we’ve fawned over the
company for being innovative, using daring interfaces and out of the ordinary
tactics to get people to pay it._

We have? I've always thought it was a pretty basic photo messaging app that
initially rose to popularity due to disappearing nudes and has since rode that
wave with vapid filters.

~~~
tdb7893
I use it to keep friends and family updated on interesting things I'm doing.
It fills the niche of sharing interesting stuff in my life that Facebook used
to fill.

~~~
tzakrajs
But you can put moustaches on your pets!

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Analemma_
My own experience tallies with this quite closely. I think we passed peak
Snapchat last year, and that Snap knows it, hence the IPO.

Which is depressing if you think about it, because it means Facebook's
strategy of "buy them, and if they won't sell, clone them and crush them" is
working really well. That's not how I want the world to work, but that's the
truth.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
So a badly engineered app that is a UX nightmare and has a general
discoverability problem seems to be losing to a high quality app that has huge
network effects backing it and that took the only USP Snapchat had
(disappearing pics) and implemented it in a much better manner.

And somehow this is a bad thing because hating on FB is fashionable in these
parts.

~~~
ymse
I recently introduced two friends to Signal (because they couldn't get me on
Snapchat). Later I caught one party sending a "snap" to the other and asked
why not use Signal instead, and the reply was something about ease of use.

It turns out, sending a one-off picture with Signal is one click _less_ than
Snapchat. Also, normal people don't care about privacy.

