blue_bells
Joined 9 years ago
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Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
This is a really positive development for Snap -- one of their biggest challenges is that while Facebook, WeChat, WhatsApp, LINE, and other social networking apps have been gobbling the newly international user-base, Snap has really stalled, with user growth of only about 10% in the last year in "Rest of world" (non-Asia/Europe). [1] Hopefully Tencent can help them get back on track
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/one-chart-shows-snapchats-use...
In particular, it seems like two big factors were:
- Having influencers (e.g., Paul Graham) onboard, which gets their followers
- Auto-populating content (fake users) and generating the illusion of activity so that it doesn't feel like one is entering an empty forum
Getting friends to use a service also makes a lot of sense for social networks that incubate in small communities (e.g., Facebook), but are a bit harder to pull off for these diffuse communities like Hacker News.