Got Snapchat recently and want your opinion on it.
Some things I like: public snaps that can keep you up to date and more aware of the world around you.
Things I don’t like: 24/7 friend locations, from the fact that anyone knows where you are and that Snapchat will sell your location data to advertisers.
Would also like to know more about etiquette on the app.
My opinnion is, that any comercial social media is bad for privacy.
Not just privacy, mental health too
The public snaps are absolutely not a good way to keep up with the world around you. When I still used it, it was just celebrity slop on the public snaps. If that has changed then idk.
Do not confuse any of the content you see on Snapchat as news. It is an advertisement. It is a free service and the content is highly competitive, so it must be enticing to pull you in and it has one objective: to generate revenue.
If you want news, you need to find a new platform with different incentives. Lemmy removes the profit incentive, a news website keeps the profit incentive but add transparency.
If you want to keep up with friends and they’re on Snapchat, then by all means use Snapchat, but the idea that you can use it as a platform to keep up with news is delusional.
I’ve never understood the point of it. So I can send pictures and message people? How is that different from any other messaging app I can use? 🤷
It was cool back when it was new. I stopped using it when I… I don’t know actually. One day I just uninstalled it.
Aside from all the very valid criticisms everyone else has pointed out, there’s one thing that always made it totally unusable for me… When you open the app, the very first thing it does is show your front-facing camera?? What kind of unhinged behavior is that, are they trying to ruin my day?!
I’m 15 years old and live in Europe. Almost all of my friends (and the stranger next to me on the train) use Snapchat. Personally I find it very annoying as my experience mainly consist of getting spammed with meaningless, completely irrelevant and utterly boring selfies by anyone I happen to add. And then, just to make things worse people find it inpolite not to answer with another selfie. And then it’s the chats that kinda work but the UI looks clutterd and half baked. Also messages disappear after a while which is utterly annoying.
At least it would be kinda easy to find people on Snapchat (there’s no reason to ask around for someone’s number) if it wasn’t for the fact that people use the most random pseudonyms imaginable so it’s a pain just to know who is who, and almost impossible to pin down new people.
Also I don’t give it location sharing permission, that shit is creepy as fuck, I don’t want everyone that I kind of vaguely know to know where I am all the time
It’s funny how Snapchat was huge in Europe like a decade ago, this was before it even introduced chat feature or stories, it was only disappearing photos, then it died, then 3 or 5 years ago Americans picked it up as the foremost alternative to SMS/iMessage, and at the moment the European Gen-Z is getting into Snapchat again, or so I believe judging by the sample of 2 (two) cousins I have
I had no idea people still used it, it sort of just died after Instagram came out with stories or whatever. Most people I know just prefer text messaging now since no one can agree vs fb messenger apple messenger what’s app or signal
I never understood the appeal. I watched it explode in popularity among the people around me, my family and friends. And the whole time I was like, “so it’s a messaging app that automatically deletes your conversations?”
But TBF I’ve never understood the appeal of any social media.
I think the main appeal is that it would auto-delete the nudes you send to someone you don’t quite trust. I’m too sober to contemplate why you’d send nudes to someone you don’t quite trust, but I know it’s a thing.
Of course, once it’s on someone else’s device, Snapchat can’t really guarantee they haven’t kept a copy. From what I’ve read about the implementation, it doesn’t even try very hard. The fact that you can’t trust the client is basic network security.
It also didn’t delete conversations. It kept everything on its servers and only removed visibility for users.
I dont know anyone who uses it as a routine way to text. A couple commenters said it’s popular for some people that way, though, so maybe it is. I guess it allows for more natural conversation if you are talking like you aren’t making a permanent record.
If you don’t use it, it doesn’t seem that useful, but it actually offers a pretty good utility. There are a lot of situations where you want to show something to someone, but you don’t want/need to permanently have a picture of it in your phone. Just looking at a text conversation with a friend who doesn’t have it, I see pictures we’ve sent back and forth with screenshots of restaurant reservation times and movie show times that have already passed. There’s things they’ve seen at the store that they wanted to know if they should buy for me. That kind of stuff doesn’t need to be permanently stored on my phone, but it is. Yeah, both of us could go in and delete those pictures, but realistically, we won’t.
It’s all extra true for video.
When it was first becoming popular in my area, several of my friends who liked it would try to use it to actually make plans, which was infuriating
Oh, no no no. It only deletes the pics and conversations from the phones! They’re still stored on their server (according to their EULA), no need to worry! wink
Jsyk you can disable the location stuff, but they do scan everything for “WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDRENNN” purposes which means it could just as easily be scanned for [ARBITRARY_NATIONAL_SECURITY_REASON] or whatever else they want so not sure it’s a very privacy friendly solution.
Their support also sucks ass - they bombed me with like 100+ emails the one day because their system must’ve glitched out. Never have gotten a real person before, it’s almost always a bot with a human name and the cam girl bot farms come through every now and then spamming you with friend adds
Proprietary centralized corporate mass surveillance and propaganda platform, like the rest of them. Trash garbage, avoid at all costs.
I have snapchat and I only use the chat feature hence why I haven’t given it location, microphone, or even camera permission. That’s right, Snapchat with no snaps, so all that’s left is chats. At that point, it’s basically Whatsapp for zoomers meets tiktok or something along those lines (depending on which features you use).
Snapchat scans all of your messages for CSAM, which might sound like a good idea, but it’s just an excuse for mass surveillance. I’d avoid Snapchat.
From the bottom of my heart - I hate it.
For some reason it caught on as the go-to messaging app for casual conversations for folks my generation (in my country at least).
Deleted my account roughly a year ago.
I just use it to chat with friends. I like that the conversations disappear. I don’t give it location permission and I don’t use any of the other stuff it has. Honestly I don’t even know what else is on there.
Everyone I know that uses Snapchat only uses it to take pictures with filters, and save them to the gallery.
I really don’t care about it, and I don’t think I ever will.
