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Comment by newfocogi | Hacker News Reader

I just asked several friends, all millennials, if they thought snapchat use was declining among their friend groups (semi disparate), and all said no and were surprised I asked. Obviously a biased sample, but just another data point.

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As a millenial myself, I've seen Snapchat usage stay roughly the same, but I've seen an explosion in Instagram usage. So IMO it's really just that Snapchat is stagnating relative to Instagram, and stagnation is death for a social network.

I'm convinced the death of Snapchat will be its failure to expand to new international markets like South America. Insta, FaceBook, WhatsApp, etc (all FB owned) have exploded and maintained themselves overseas. Meanwhile, a year ago reports came up that Evan Spiegel of Snapchat said that his app is not for poor countries like India.

That hubris is dangerous. I can't wait for the company to go under.

India is fairly unique in how bad the cell phone internet is. Snapchat is a video & image heavy app even compared to instagram or facebook, which is why the app design doesn't work well. Get rid of the media richness and your back to facebook.

When I visited my family in the Philippines, I was asking my younger relatives what social networks/apps they used. When I asked about Snapchat, they said nobody really used it. It made sense in the way how data plans are structured over there, along with how Facebook's Internet.org has really gained a lot of usage in the country in their partnership with the carriers.

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