Snapchat Petition Attracts One Million Signatures (bbc.com) 51
One million people have signed a petition calling on Snapchat to roll back its latest redesign. From a report: The changes were intended to separate interactions with friends from branded content -- including that of celebrities and influencers. Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel wrote in a blog post that he believed blurring the two had contributed to the rise of fake news. However, thousands of Snapchat users say that the new layout is hard to use. Nic Rumsey, who set up the petition, wrote that some are using Virtual Private Network (VPN) apps -- which use servers abroad to mask the location of a device -- in order to access the older version of the platform: "That's how annoying this update has become," he said. "Many 'new features' are useless or defeat the original purposes Snapchat has had for the past years." The petition, posted on the change.org website, is one of several appealing to Snapchat to revert to its previous state.
Protocols not apps! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Apparently, the GP is part of the hip crowd. Stealing marketshare from somebody else en masse is what happens right before a social network dies. Recall the life cycle of social networks (and communications networks in general):
Facebook losing significant marketshare to Snapchat marks the transition fr
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Unfortunately, in the modern smartphone world, this is far easier said than done. Many products depend on back-end infrastructure integration that cannot be so easily opened up (e.g. push services, API tokens, etc.). Also, many products depend on expected behaviors of other apps using the product, and open implementations can easily violate these expectations (or be way behind in supporting any protocol changes).
No free lunch (Score:2)
When you have a single implementation of a protocol, some people are always going to hate it. When you have an open protocol with multiple client implementations, you can choose the UI that you like
And then you get flame wars about which UI is best and added costs to handle them all plus a lot of reinventing the figurative wheel. There are drawbacks no matter what approach you use. I think in general I agree with you that the open protocol approach is better for most circumstances. Unfortunately it's not necessarily better for specific parties. For a circumstance like this I doubt Snapchat finds much profit in the protocol approach. Their house, their rules I guess.
If there's only one implementation, particularly if it's closed source, then you're at the whims of whoever is responsible for it.
Very true but in fairness not a
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I completely agree with you - the web as we know it wouldn't exist if HTTP, SMTP, and TCP/IP were some vertical thing that only one company could produce.
The problem is twofold: First off, protocols don't make anyone money. I sincerely doubt the teams who wrote SIP or SSH are millionaires, even though their protocols make the world go round. Even the altruistic folks willing to write such a protocol need to pay the bills.
Second, making an open protocol and then trying to make money off a first party impleme
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It's worth noting FB chat was originally just another XMPP (Jabber) server. Then they added a nonstandard feature or two, to encourage people to move to the FB interface for FB chat. Then they changed the underlying protocol once enough of their user based was on it so you cannot use any old Jabber client.
Any protocol where a specific client takes over enough power (IE6 HTML in 1996, or Chrome HTML5 2018) can extend a protocol to lock out competitors. Even if the protocol doesn't technically allow extens
Re: Get over it (Score:1)
Snap was fully aware that this backlash would come. Many people are going to fight any change. They had announced the coming change and warned investors that existing users would complain but it is something they feel they need to do to continue to grow.
Unless this hits revenue too much either by lack of user base growth or reduced ad income the change won't be fully reversed.
Re:Get over it (Score:5, Insightful)
The Microsoft Office ribbon still sucks.
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Yes, it was. It was more organized and logical and took up less real estate. Change to improve something is good. Change for the sake of change and newness isn't.
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The menus were predictable. That's the least to be expected.
but but but (Score:1, Insightful)
What is Snapchat? (Score:1)
Re:Chatting (Score:4, Funny)
Oooh, communicating in metaphor like this might rise to "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra". Count me in.
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Outside the USA (Score:2)
Currently deployed, so my phone wont adopt the new version. I really wonder how bad this can be if so many people hate it. I'm still running the old version and getting updates regularly to it.
Do one for Hulu too, while you're at it (Score:2)
I resubbed to Hulu again on my Roku a while back and their new UI is almost unusable. Do the people that approve these new UI's even use their own services? There is no way that they do, or they would know they're taking a huge step backwards.
Let's start with the basics, kids: An upgrade should offer an *improvement* in the user experience. Otherwise it's a downgrade.
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I resubbed to Hulu again on my Roku a while back and their new UI is almost unusable. Do the people that approve these new UI's even use their own services? There is no way that they do, or they would know they're taking a huge step backwards.
Let's start with the basics, kids: An upgrade should offer an *improvement* in the user experience. Otherwise it's a downgrade.
I sure didn't approve of it; it was the reason I cancelled my subscription to them. That and the new interface didn't remember my favorites or where I was in the episodes when I did find them again.
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Ugh, Hulu's interface change is even _worse_ than this one! It is order of magnitude more difficult to navigate in it now...I'm heavily considering canceling my account bc of it.
update (Score:2)
people always hate change right? even if it's positive... well not this time. the update actually isn't intuitive.
the original goal was to make paid content separate from your friend's content, however they actually made it worse. If you go to the discover tab, you get one screen where both types are mixed together. If you tap on a friend's snap, it will switch next to a paid content's snaps.
If you to to the chat tab, you do get only your friend's contents, but the sorting is erratic. if you have lots of co
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people always hate change right? even if it's positive... well not this time. the update actually isn't intuitive.
Well, I mean, to be fair, Snapchat's UI was never intuitive. There were no UI indicators as to whether to tap or swipe or hold, there are virtually no context menus, no 'back' buttons, and very little consistency for tasks in various swipe directions.
The UX designers went for 'trendy minimalism' rather than allowing users with existing understanding of UI paradigms to leverage them. It's easily the worst UI I've worked with, and I configure Sonicwalls for a living.
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The UX designers went for 'trendy minimalism' rather than allowing users with existing understanding of UI paradigms to leverage them. It's easily the worst UI I've worked with, and I configure Sonicwalls for a living.
Perhaps I'm assuming more intelligence than is warranted, but I just assumed the UX designers went for "parent proof", and succeeded. Kids use Snapchat specifically because their parents don't.
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Perhaps I'm assuming more intelligence than is warranted, but I just assumed the UX designers went for "parent proof", and succeeded. Kids use Snapchat specifically because their parents don't.
It's a possibility, but I think Snapchat is inherently more parent-proof because of its anti-retention functions. Trading naughty pics and pejorative comments is far easier if you can keep your phone away from the 'rents for 24 hours; can't get in trouble for what they can't find, and even if they do find it, it limits the fallout vs. a since-forever Whatsapp thread. Additionally, I'd assume that the majority of parents aren't going to want to spend time on a social network that requires constant checking i
In other news.. (Score:5, Funny)
Waaaiiit.... (Score:1)
Please sign my letter to the petition signers (Score:2)
Dear insufferably-stupid fuckwits whose obviously-stupid choices create the network effects that retard all progress and make everything worse for everyone,
You all chose your app before your protocol. If you had chosen an open documented protocol and then chosen from the competing (and interoperable) implementations of that protocol, then you would have the UI that you want. You would be using an app that would be designed to serve you instead of whoever wrote it. You would not be locked in. You would be a
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I do wish this simplistic "you're not the customer you're the product" meme would die. The cowscan't choose to leave, the app users can.
On another note every update breaks someone's workflow. Insert xkcd.
paper (Score:2)
Snapchat is an extremely crappy platform (Score:2)
Suck it (Score:2)
There is no turning back.
Face it. WE ARE SNAPCHAT, and this is the future.
For those of you 14-year olds that want the old snapchat back, we will re-issue it, using the prior protocols, but we will not be using the snapchat name. Henceforth, if you wish to retain the old UI and previous functionality, simply install Snappy McSnapface and everything old is new again. Happy Snapping, says Snappy McSnapface.
Fueled by the need of continuous improvement (Score:2)
The problem is that at some point your product is gonna be pretty good and adding more things usually makes it worse. The undelying problem is that the users are not the customers they're just the product and so what they want is a secondary concern.