I will never understand the desire to radically change an interface on any product <10 years old. Especially Snap's, as I don't remember anyone complaining about the interface. Instead, why not make your app use less battery power and improve the camera's functionality? Those types of improvement are universally appreciated, yet the least likely to be implemented.
> Especially Snap's, as I don't remember anyone complaining about the interface.
Surely you’re joking? I make software for a living and I was utterly and completely lost in Snapchat. Easily the most confusing software I’ve used in a long time.
I think he’s referring to Snapchat’s initial UI around 2013. This was the best UI - one single list of all your sent & received snaps and that’s it. No stories, no “discover”, no bullshit. Just double tap on any contact you want to send a snap to and you’re good to go.
There was also this lovely feature where you could see anyone’s “best friends” (aka who’s banging who).
As someone who’s Snapchat’s target market I greatly miss all of that. After they ruined the app I deleted my account and never looked back.
Indeed. Similar to how young people will read books while their parents barely finish the sensational short articles in a newspaper. They seem to be more willing to figure things out, especially combined with their tribal actions like going to great lengths to make sure that everything they wear is black, or has a certain logo on it, or that they only listen to particular music. If a particular social app has a gate, then it can be all the better for them. [1]
Not to say that making your app unnecessarily annoying is grounds for success! There were probably 500 apps on the very same day as Snapchat launched that you never heard about.
[1] No peer reviewed study or anything. Just, you know, kids.
Very good points. That idea of creating something for kids that others are not/not willing to figure out, is really fascinating. Probably happens most of the time unintentionally.
Snap, and also Twitter, are in a bit of a bind. They can't change anything without alienating some of their most passionate users, but if they change nothing they will stagnate and cede all of the possible benefits of innovation to their competitors. A company that lets its competitors come up with all the new ideas is probably not going to survive very long.
It's understandable that Snap wanted to improve its design. On principle there is nothing wrong with that, but that's not what they actually did because the CEO ignored a lot of warnings that the changes were not improvements.
> A company that lets its competitors come up with all the new ideas is probably not going to survive very long.
They can just acquire those companies, which is the strategy used by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other giants that are moving faster than startups now by deploying capital faster and better than ever before.
They can't easily afford to splurge on the best acquisitions at this point. Instagram cost $1 billion. YouTube cost $1.65 billion.
Snapchat is heading toward bankruptcy or a forced sale if they don't dramatically cut costs. They're down to $1.4b in cash (from $2b three quarters prior). They can't safely buy an Instagram at this point. Pretty soon they're going to be the $1-$2 billion acquisition.
Twitter is in much better financial condition of course, although a $1-$2 billion acquisition is still a huge chunk of change for their business ($6b in cash, ~$300m-$400m per year in profit). Twitter's problem is that their cash is precious, because their business doesn't generate a ton of it (they've been persistently hauling billions of cash around from their past funding days). That cash is a big safety buffer that they can't easily replace if they burn it. They can use their market cap of course, and shareholders will only tolerate so much of that at their size and given their non-growth context. Twitter needs to figure out what it wants to do before the market 'realizes' what they're actually worth (zero growth gets you an optimistic ~20 PE * $350m profit = $7 billion; a further 2/3 drop from here); it's similar to the old Yahoo scenario pre Alibaba (no growth, the market temporarily giving you an abnormally high valuation, a trapped product).
The giants are seemingly moving fast because they have comically obscene amounts of cash pouring in and can't figure out what to do with it (other than share buybacks ala Facebook, or other capital return programs; in Google's case, they're just piling it up or buying real estate). So they spray it all around. A billion dollar acquisition mistake is meaningless if you're Microsoft and generating ~$40b in operating income (next four quarters). For Snapchat, it'd be fatal.
Google's net tangible assets are up to $149 billion now. They're starting to look more like a financial company than a tech company. Like a private equity company that happens to own a lucrative search engine monopoly and a media company (YouTube). JP Morgan's net tangible assets by contrast are $182b and Bank of America is $170b.
Sure, but I'm talking about buy competitors before they get to the 1B acq price, otherwise they're already close to Snap's size.
Agree with the rest. It's both interesting and troubling that the giants have so much cashflow that they continue consuming new companies for a long time without worry. All companies die eventually but we're in a whole new world with 1T market caps.
Instagram had 30 million monthly active users when they were acquired. Roughly 1/10th the size of Snapchat today. It was the growth curve that caught Facebook's attention of course.
YouTube was a bleeding disaster of a business when Google scooped them up, for a price that was universally mocked as outrageously high. I'm skeptical even Twitter with their $6b in cash could absorb that type of mess and see it through.
The problem you run into, in trying to buy interesting competitors, is they're not for sale for cheap if they're actually any good. That's the specific reason Instagram went for what was considered a very high price. When growth looks that good, the VCs will fund you indefinitely, so the acquirer has to pay a massive premium. In the post Flickr era you can't buy Instagrams for $50m.
Might be in Google's best interests to keep Snapchat running, for the simple fact that Snapchat is Google's largest customer (>50% of App Engine annual revenue) of App Engine.
Twitter is a fundamentally 'narrow' product. A global chatroom for the 'in' crowd, no matter which in crowd that is. Yes, it's searchable, and historical, but fundamentally 99.9% of Twitter's functionality only exists if you're on it today, constantly.
I don't see how you can ever make it valuable in its current form to people who don't need to see this tweet or this thread before anyone else does. Hashtags are fundamentally, unalterably, different from usenet groups or message boards or even facebook groups. Content is less permanent, but not in an arguably "good" way as Snapchat's is.
Make it so that you can only change one or two characters, and make every edited tweet have a prominent button to see the original tweet. Maybe make it so that you can’t change links, images, or other media.
"What an amazing pitch!" becomes "what an amazing witch!" (or worse). Well-known users would hate it because they'd be mocked for stepping into the troll trap.
HN also has a stricter set of community guidelines (which aren't in themselves all that strict to start with), more heavily moderated, and a generally well-educated, mature-minded user base that is generally appreciative of these two elements.
Yep, way fewer users. And what spam accounts exist get squashed pretty quickly. If HN ever releases statistics on the number of users, I'm sure they have more dignity than to include spam and bot accounts — which is, I'm sure, the majority of Twitter accounts.
All of snapchat's changes felt like a game transitioning from paid to free to play. similar levels of confusion and forum visits required to navigate the UX changes and how i would now "pay" by viewing ads to view the content i had before.
> Instead, why not make your app use less battery power and improve the camera's functionality? Those types of improvement are universally appreciated, yet the least likely to be implemented.
That requires hiring one or two really good developers and product managers and letting them polish the product. You can get a great product that way, but not a billion-plus valuation.
If you want your valuation to grow, you need to hire thousands of really bad programmers and hundreds of very bad managers, endlessly churning out "updates" and "redesigns" and "refactorings".
Nobody ever got to be a billion-plus company by keeping headcount and expenses low.
