I was teaching a lesson on cryptography to a bunch of twelve year olds this morning, and with reference to https, I asked how many had used Facebook before school - no hands, how about Instagram - no hands, how about Snapchat - half the class put their hands up. It's definitely the most popular network amongst teens in my (UK) school.
Have teens ever been an important demographic for Facebook though? It started only for college students - it wasn't until three or four years later they opened it up to everyone. [And more broadly - do we use popularity among teens to measure success for anything that isn't specifically targeted primarily at teens (e.g. a company like Abercrombie & Fitch)?]
Teenagers in high school usually see their friends every day (more so than college - where you're less likely to have all or many of the same classes as your friends), there probably isn't as much desire to use a social network to keep up with what your friends/acquaintances are doing since you're experiencing it with them. After college you're more likely going weeks or months between seeing even your closest friends or family so Facebook is probably a bit more useful/exciting when your older.
But teenagers today are college students of tomorrow, and if you believe OP, the college students of tommorow may associate Facebook with years of negative impressions that they acquired throughout high school.
That's a huge barrier for Facebook to overcome, especially when a 'cooler' competitor can expand its feature set to meet the students' long-distance relationship needs without any of the stigma that they associate with Facebook.
Alternatively, rather than imprinting into a particular social network (Facebook bad, Twitter obscure, Instagram relevant) it could be that these teens will simply migrate to a different toolset when their needs change rather than expecting a tool to be used to photoblog their party lifestyle of college years to also work as a tool to keep up with post-college life. Facebook changed over time to basically follow a particular demographic (those whose age mirrored the founder) but most of the others are built for specific purposes and have a lot more inertia behind them. Maybe being first is what let Facebook change and re-define itself, but so far none of the others seem to have changed much from the day they were launched in terms of how people actually use them (and FB itself has had numerous failures in attempts to spin off mini-pivots as individual apps.)
Yes I thought the same thing when I read his article. My teenagers are 14 - 15. I am on Instagram. The biggest difference I see is they made the transition to SnapChat discussed in this article 12 months ago. It sounds like the author sees that happening now but with the younger ones they seem to have made the move over nearly a year ago. It's funny as I follow a few of them on Instagram and it just dried up to now only doing 1 or 2 pictures per week and they're closer to the "staged" sanitized FB ones he discusses.
Fair but I was suggesting that Facebook is really only useful if you have friends but when you or your friends can't signup or their parents won't allow them to signup (in my case), there's not much reason to use Facebook.
It is kind of like not needing LinkedIn until you're in college.
No? In one case, you click a button and/or check a box to confirm you are of a certain age to see porn, in the other you enter a wrong number into a specific field during account creation.
In then end, people desire something (access to content and/or interaction), and all that prevents them from having it is being completely truthful in one spot about a question that really doesn't seem that important.
>> "It's definitely the most popular network amongst teens in my (UK) school."
I'm not sure I'd put to much weight on that. From my personal use and what I've seen people seem to spend longer periods of time on Facebook. Whereas Snapchat requires seconds at a time. When you're asking who used something before school you have to remember these kids likely got out of bed, didn't have time to shower and ran to the bus :) I'd love it if you had also asked about what they did after school the previous day. Of course my evidence isn't very robust either but I don't think you can draw your conclusion from that survey.
I'm about the same age as the poster and he's captured my age groups' experience of social media, including Snapchat, perfectly. Snapchat really is that big a deal.
Except these are all just anecdotes. I'm in the same age group and Snapchat use has definitely fallen off considerably on my college campus and some of my high school friends' campuses as well.
The only thing that would prove any of this is real data, which seems to be lacking in every claim....
Re: "These are all just anecdotes" - yes, he made it very clear in the beginning of his essay:
"This article will not use any studies, data, sources, etc. This is because you can easily get that from any other technology news website and analyze from there. I’m here to provide a different view based off of my life in this “highly coveted” age bracket. That being said, I'm not an expert at this by a long shot and I'm sure there will be data that disproves some of the points I make, but this is just what I've noticed."
Yeah, except that is basically saying his analysis is worthless, in my honest opinion. Combine this with the fact that he is clearly biased towards Snapchat (just look at his personal Twitter and blog), yet doesn't disclose that fact, and you get a bad article that is taken way more seriously than it should be.
Its similar to that fake radar app that claims it detects police radar from your smartphone then at the bottom of the description says "Does not work".
edit: (To explain, I don't think the author was malicious or really at fault. I think everyone trying to draw sweeping conclusions about our generation based on this article are ignoring the "Does Not Work" warning, when it comes to the fact that there is zero sources/data behind this....)
I only know a handful of people (myself included) that believe Snapchat does delete your photos. Everyone else I know believes that Snapchat has some secret database somewhere with all of your photos on it.
I don't think there is a lot of positive bias when he states that, "Everyone he knows believes that Snapchat has a secret database somewhere with all of your photos on it."
I'm not sure where your negative criticism is coming from. This is a single, very well written, anecdote. He EXPLICITLY states that there is almost certainly general data that will disprove everything he says. He makes it super, super clear that this is just a single individuals experience. If anything, he goes overboard in the opening paragraphs trying to disclaim everything he is about to write. Everyone else (including you) is free to write up their own stories, and from those many, many stories, we get a good picture of social media from the teenagers perspective. After all, the plural of anecdote is data.
The title clearly says "A Teenagers View on Media". It's not a little disclaimer at the bottom of the page that says "This is only my view". It's right in the title and opening paragraph.
Right, but I think it serves the same purpose. People willingly ignore it.
Either way, the original poster I responded to with the anecdote wasn't even the author of the article, but someone on here who provided another anecdote, but didn't give the same such warning or any indication that they knew what they were saying wasn't an actual relevant argument....
Well, I wouldn't say "worthless". If you're looking for a macro view of usage, sure, but again it's unfair to expect that from a piece that starts by flatly stating that's not what it provides.
What it does provide is a very clear sense as to how all of these different services end up playing very complimentary roles in an individual's life. Even if the particular services involved have a popularity that waxes or wanes, the broader picture formed by the complex decision making that resolves people's thoughts and feelings into one network or another remains fascinating. And that aspect of social media seems like it's here to stay.
So sure, this perspective may be worthless to you, but most smart people are sophisticated enough to realize that others have perspectives different from theirs. A person designing or developing social networks, for instance, would have to think about the stuff in this post very carefully if they had any hope of getting their own product into the mix. Yes, they would need the macro view too, but in the absence of the direct personal perspective (which is the perspective held by literally every single one of their prospective users), their efforts are guaranteed to fail.
Short version: if you're going to call something "worthless" be sure to include the essential qualifier "to me". Otherwise you just seem ridiculously self centered.
You've repeated this many times so it must really have struck a nerve with you but it's not like this is a recommendation for SnapChat. He thinks it's the most used and he states so, I really don't see a problem with that even if he is best friends with the CEO.
A few people in the comments are also saying they've seen a drop off in Snapchat usage at their schools, but that hasn't been reflected in the app's ranking in the app store. Snapchat has maintained a top 10 rank for the last year.
Something I noticed growing up, even when I was a teen, was stuff like "what teens think today" seemed bullshity and something certain adults wanted to hear, which often never reflected my experiences. In this case, the HN-friendly Facebook bashing. Now as a middle-aged adult, its obvious its questionable writing. Its either PR of some kind or a half-assed article by someone with a teenage daughter and a deadline.
A proper survey or data about app store habits say a lot more than a questionable testimonial. Yet somehow, this little sub-genre of reporting still exists. Its like there's this constant adult neurosis about what teenagers and college students think, especially if your paycheck stems from the spending habits of that demographic. This neurosis lets us overlook a lot of things, the same way people looking for spiritual answers will sometimes flock to a known conman, cult, or abusive religion.
Funny how a lot of us were bright young kids, like you, but have become milquetoast adults falling for the same old tricks. Sounds like you're on the right path though. Don't become us.
This. I mean, I can understand obsessing about the teen / YA demographic if that's who you're selling to, but the idea that what they do represents some ground-shaking historical shift, and not just a (fairly well-understood) phase in normal human lives is just ridiculous.
For me, one of the most interesting things about this piece was the total bafflement with Twitter. Not that they didn't like it, they just didn't get it. At the same time, concerns about professional life were largely restricted to "Who will be the first to hire me and will my social life be used against me?"
In other words, the way that a lot of Twitter users treat the service as a huge and never-ending professional conference (with frequent flurries from actual conferences) is totally lost on people too young to have reached this stage in their working lives.
My takeaway from this is not "Kids don't use Twitter, Twitter must be doomed". It's that Twitter is for grownups (mostly), and that it's normal for people to age out of some networks and into others, just like they age into and out of music, cars, clothes, jobs, neighborhoods, and pretty much every other aspect of cultural life.
I'm an adult and I don't understand Twitter either.
It's not that there's anything wrong with the basic idea - it's just that Twitter, the company, constantly wants to make it into something it isn't. And invariably fails at that.
I now use it for my geeky posts, and occasionally, rarely, to check my feed for interesting tweets from the masters of the startup scene.
I don't understand how someone can not "get" twitter but use instagram. Aren't they basically the same thing except instagram is pictures and twitter is text? That's what I thought, but I never used either.
This may be true at an emotional level, but there is a fairly unambiguous criteria for adulthood, which comes when you are able to sustain your life and perhaps the life of a family.
Then again, by that criterion a 40-year-old who loses his job and can't find another one is suddenly not an adult anymore, which doesn't really seem to match what most people want the term to mean.
Sorry I deleted my comment. I felt it might have been perceived as a little harsh or quick to judgement. Funny, I guess the author did get one thing right, most of our generation is quick to delete anything that may be controversial for fear it'll be enshrined on the Internet forever....
It's not uncommon for journalists to cultivate relationships with insider sources. In this case, Snapchat has a history of thinking very deeply about the future of social media: for example, one of their earliest and most influential hires is a sociologist and social media theorist.
https://twitter.com/thatswattsup/status/546018511902867456
> Can't wait to visit my friends at @Snapchat again tomorrow :D
https://twitter.com/thatswattsup/status/545326840940740608
> Loved hanging out with @evanspiegel yesterday, he's one of the nicest and more genuine guys I've met. Thanks for having me @Snapchat!
...influencer? Hope not :(