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I come across a photo of a woman holding a surfboard on a beach. ‘Could I curl up in bed with you and watch TV? Could we travel together? Will you make me laugh on my darkest days? Will you be forgiving of my cellulite?’ I ask her photo.
Her bio says, ‘I went to Paris for lunch once and I regret nothing.’ I love her instantly. Though I am also intimidated by her. Perhaps she will be my new extrovert guide.
The app works like all the others: you swipe right on the people you want to meet (people with pets, people eating tacos) and swipe left on the people you’d rather skip (people at Glastonbury). I start off tentatively, trying to give attention to each woman, but soon become a callous lothario from swiping fatigue. Snapchat filters that transform you into cute animals in every photo? Next! Interests include spirituality and mindfulness? Next! Only kissy selfies? Next!
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Jessica Pan (Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come: An Introvert's Year of Living Dangerously)
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It was a wake-up call to me to learn that Airbnb was by no means unique: Instagram started as a location-based social network called Burbn (which had an optional photo feature). It attracted a core group of users and more than $500,000 in funding. And yet the founders realized that its users were flocking to only one part of the app—the photos and filters. They had a meeting, which one of the founders recounts like this: “We sat down and said, ‘What are we going to work on next? How are we going to evolve this product into something millions of people will want to use? What is the one thing that makes this product unique and interesting?’”7 The service soon retooled to become Instagram as we know it: a mobile app for posting photos with filters. The result? One hundred thousand users within a week of relaunching. Within eighteen months, the founders sold Instagram to Facebook for $1 billion. I know that seems simple, that the marketing lesson from Instragram is that they made a product that was just awesome. But that’s good news for you—it means there’s no secret sauce, and the second your product gets to be that awesome, you can see similar results. Just look at Snapchat, which essentially followed the same playbook by innovating in the mobile photo app space, blew up with young people, and skyrocketed to a $3.5-billion-dollar valuation with next-to-no marketing.
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Ryan Holiday (Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising)
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From claims of Twitter’s racist trolling that drives people from its platform to charges that Airbnb’s owners openly discriminate against African Americans who rent their homes to racial profiling at Apple stores in Australia and Snapchat’s racist filters, there is no shortage of projects to take on in sophisticated ways by people far more qualified than untrained computer engineers, whom, through no fault of their own, are underexposed to the critical thinking and learning about history and culture afforded by the social sciences and humanities in most colleges of engineering nationwide. The lack of a diverse and critically minded workforce on issues of race and gender in Silicon Valley impacts its intellectual output.
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Safiya Umoja Noble (Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism)
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My Father mapped out the perfect blueprint for how to treat a woman. He caters hand and foot to my Mother. Even showers that love onto my sister. He never had to tell me how to treat my woman because his actions spoke louder. Did I cling to my woman? Absolutely. Being up under soft melanin skin pleased me. You want to read a book? Cool, what story we reading? Wanna go shopping? Take my card if you promise to model everything for me. Those females at work bothering you? Let’s get animated in the mirror and act like we about to tag team. Your period on? Baby, want me to rub your belly? You need me to get those diaper looking pads with the wings? How about some lemon ginger tea? What are your dreams? You want to sell weave? Let’s catch a flight to China or India and figure out how we can become wholesalers. You wanna make cute Snapchat filter videos? What filter do you want? Are they not liking your pics? Fine. I’ll blast you all over my page. Your Mother threatening to kick you out. Where you wanna move? Better yet, move in with me. Just focus on school and building your brand. I got everything else. You got finals coming up. Pick a tutor. Heck, can I pay for the answers to the quiz? You think those stretch marks make you unattractive? Come here and let me show you how much I appreciate your stripes of glitter. Do you want to go to Dr. Miami? Absolutely not. We going to the gym. Gym grown not silicone. We are working out together. Go ahead and hashtag us as #baegoals #coupleswhoworkouttogetherstaytogether. You want to switch the hair and get a tapered cut? Let me call my barber and see when we can go. Stressing and worrying? You keep hearing whispers while you’re sleeping? Nah bae, that’s not a ghost. That’s me praying for you.
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Chelsea Maria (For You I Will (Chaos of Love #1))
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- How do you like my new photo with dog filter in snapchat? - Oh, this was a filter? I should say you don’t even need a dog filter, dude!
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Donald Shaw (+300 Best Jokes: Dirty One-Liners and Funny Short Stories Collection (Donald's Humor Factory Book 2))
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Is there a Snapchat filter for ‘I’ve just been given a death sentence, please come to my funeral’?
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Nick Spalding (Checking Out)
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Facebook has already appropriated (that is, stolen) other Snapchat ideas, including Quick Updates, Stories, selfie filters, and one-hour messages. The trend will only continue—unless the government gets in the way.
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Scott Galloway (The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google)
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From claims of Twitter's racist trolling that drives people from its platform to charges that Airbnb's owners openly discriminate against African Americans who rent their homes to racial profiling at Apples stores in Australia and Snapchat's racist filters, there is no shortage of projects to take on in sophisticated ways by people far more qualified than untrained computer engineers, whom, through no fault of their own, are underexposed to critical thinking and learning about history and culture afforded by the social sciences and humanities in most colleges nationwide. The lack of a diverse and critically minded workforce on issues of race and gender in Silicon Valley impacts its intellectual output.
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Safiya Umoja Noble (Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism)
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All technologically-enhanced realities are, de facto, XR. It can be a digital overlay placed over what we can see and experience in the physical world (a simple Snapchat filter, for example), VR roller coasters, or Pokémon GO. Whenever we're not (only) dealing with the physical world, we're in the metaverse.
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Simone Puorto
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Each of those relationships ended because the love I gave was considered too hard… too suffocating. My father mapped out the perfect blueprint for how to treat a woman. He caters hand and foot to my mother. Even showers that love onto my sister. He never had to tell me how to treat my woman because his actions spoke louder. Did I cling to my woman? Absolutely. Being up under soft melanin skin pleased me. You want to read a book. Cool, what story we reading? Wanna go shopping? Take my card if you promise to model everything for me. Those heffas at work bothering you? Let’s get animated in the mirror and act like we about to tag team. Your period on? Baby, want me to rub your belly? You need me to get those diaper looking pads with the wings? How about some lemon ginger tea? What are your dreams? You want to sell weave? Let’s catch a flight to China or India and figure out how we can become wholesalers. You wanna make cute snapchat filter videos? What filter do you want? Are they not liking your pics? Fine. I’ll blast you all over my page. Your mother threatening to kick you out. Where you wanna move? Better yet, move in with me. Just focus on school and building your brand. I got everything else. You got finals coming up. Pick a tutor. Heck, can I pay for the answers to the quiz? You think those stretch marks make you unattractive? Come here and let me show you how much I appreciate your stripes of glitter. Do you want to go to Dr. Miami? Absolutely not. We going to the gym. Gym grown not silicone. We are working out together. Go ahead and hashtag us as #baegoals #coupleswhoworkouttogetherstaytogether. You want to switch the hair and get a tapered cut? Let me call my barber and see when we can go. Stressing and worrying? You keep hearing whispers while your sleeping? Nah bae, that’s not a ghost. That’s me praying for you. There are no stipulations with me. I gave it all. I had to. It was a part of my DNA. I needed to give the love I had in me unconditionally.
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Chelsea Maria (For You I Will (In Secrets We Trust Book 1))
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Teens said—and researchers appeared to accept—that certain features of Instagram could aggravate mental health issues in ways beyond its social media peers. Snapchat had a focus on silly filters and communication with friends, while TikTok was devoted to performance. Instagram, though? It revolved around bodies and lifestyle. The company disowned these findings after they were made public, calling the researchers’ apparent conclusion that Instagram could harm users with preexisting insecurities unreliable.
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Jeff Horwitz (Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets)
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Snapchat has a lot less social pressure attached to it compared to every other popular social media network out there. This is what makes it so addicting and liberating. If I don’t get any likes on my Instagram photo or Facebook post within 15 minutes you can sure bet I'll delete it. Snapchat isn't like that at all and really focuses on creating the Story of a day in your life, not some filtered/altered/handpicked highlight. It’s the real you.
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Anonymous
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The first few days felt quite surreal for gone was that filtered world of perfect angles made up of peoples’ best moments and selves. Gone was the wormhole that one jumped into at the sign of any awkward silence or pause in conversation.
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Aysha Taryam
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Similarly, I couldn’t have planned that one day I would be sitting with Stephen and playing around on Snapchat, and then happen across this square-face filter. I literally laughed when I saw myself, turned to Stephen and said, “I think my battery is dead. Can I use your dick?” “AW SICK, Laura! That’s sick!” I couldn’t have planned him being genuinely appalled in the most hilarious way.
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Laura Clery (Idiot: Life Stories from the Creator of Help Helen Smash)
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For Facebook, the acquisition was crucial. While people were escaping the watchful eye of their governments, they were unwittingly giving Facebook competitive intelligence. Once Facebook purchased the VPN company, they could look at all the traffic flowing through the service and extrapolate data from it. They knew not only the names of the apps people were playing with, but also how long they spent using them, and the names of the app screens they spent time on—and so, for example, could know if Snapchat Stories was taking off versus some other Snapchat feature. It helped them see which competitors were on the rise before the press did.
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Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
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she’s not answering your texts because she and Sloane are busy trying out all the Snapchat filters.
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Lucy Score (Things We Hide from the Light (Knockemout, #2))