That's like saying the problem with water is that it makes you less thirsty.
Snap's shtick is that it's not Facebook, that your parents aren't on it, that your creepy uncle's friend who came to the bbq last 4th of July is NOT there and that Snap is not going to geo-recommend you add him as a friend...that's the point and the main reason it got so popular so quick.
How you monetize that? Dunno, but it will sure make your app popular.
While bridging the diversity tech gap, this is another gap that needs to be addressed; the tech-displaced gap (which is the same tbh, and is only going to get wider as time goes on).
Don't want to get too political here, but this "middle-america" vs. "liberal minorities" class war is nothing but a fabrication of the media and the elites to get these two disenfranchised groups to battle amongst themselves- they're the same side of coin.
At 25 I went back to school for programming and it was hard and I only was able to do it because of the support of my parents. For a 55 y/o coal miner with a family to support, rent to pay, etc. I can't even begin to imagine how they would go about "learning to code"- as if they don't have these responsibilities.
Though children are the future, these people are the present, and if we don't find ways to help them (whether it's free community college, bootcamps, or internship placements), they're going to get desperate (e.g. vote Trump), and the future is going to pay dearly for it.
The odd thing about this whole thing is that, in my opinion, SnapChat exists in a different realm than Facebook. Facebook is just this thing that almost everyone has and maintains for social reasons that allows you to connect, for whatever reason, to almost anyone you can think of.
SnapChat is this quirky interesting app for people you know and actively want to share things with. You all see each other's stories and have chats that disappear and don't mean anything, in fact a lot times the messages disappear by accident and that's the fun of it, it's an ongoing dumb chat for friends.
I actually find it interesting that SnapChat doesn't push you to connect with other people by e-mail or other oddball algos, it's mostly just through phone number- your uncle's friend can't "friend request" you. It's one of the few apps where if I want to connect with you, I gotta really want to connect with you and if I don't, good luck finding me!
Facebook is a phonebook. It serves a different market, the way LinkedIn serves a different market. The way Twitter serves a different market
Facebook can copy all the features of SnapChat, infact, great! I hope SnapChat can get some royalties for the idea, but I'll reckon a large subset of FB users don't have SnapChat, nor want to even bother messing around with its "confusing" UI. It's nice that this subset can have these new "toys".
SC users aren't going to abandon it for FB though, it's still just THAT vanilla social site where, literally, everyone and your mom is on.
Really appreciate your self awareness. I come from a lower-middle class family. I sleep on a couch in a small crowded house with a 3y/o niece constantly screaming at the top of her lungs.
The libraries near me are all really just rec-centers, my uni is a 70min bus ride away, so having a place to just "study" is incredibly difficult.
I still manage, but I can only imagine what having one's own roon must be like and the time saved from travelling to and from school...such is life.
Thanks for the reply, puts into words a lot of what I've been thinking about lately.
I wish I had an answer for you. To ease distraction you might want to try "brown noise." I use my mynoise.net (I'm not affiliated- I probably found it in a thread here on HN.) I also have some "nature" mp3s like ocean waves crashing and rainfall and such. It's remarkable how well it gets me in "the zone."
One word of caution: don't turn up the volume to drown out the background noise. You only need to be able to hear the brown noise, not overwhelm everything else. I did that and my hearing was off for a day and a half. I think that because the sound energy is distributed more evenly throughout the spectrum you're getting more intensity on your eardrum than you think.
My bus ride was an hour, riding a bike brought it down to half that [a], plus I got free fitness gains. Of course you trade the time gained for sweatiness etc. I don't know if that's an option for you, but just putting it out there.
[a] I only generalise because it's true for almost any chosen route in my town: bus time = 2x bike time = 4x driving time.
That's how most class-action settlements work. My dad works construction and the company he worked for were holding over-time pay from the workers in the millions. My pop got like $50.
They also attached a list with the payouts for the other people on the suit and at the top of the list in the millions were the lawyers :/
I was with you until you said "there's no reason for the average sarah...unless...homework"
I was the average Sarah, a lot of the people I went to public school with were the below than average sarah and it's the elitist math attitude that's being talked about here that turns kids off from that.
It wasn't until years later, after a career in concept art, then vfx and now programming that I realize..."hey the Fibonacci sequence isn't just some parlor trick for 'math types', it's a thing we can look at to study recursion and integrate in our code to make actual products".
Products that the average sarah uses and maybe even loves and would be supremely interested in learning about but doesn't because she's not a "math person".
I also lament the fact I didn't get into maths and see the beauty of it until years later when it was really too late to get into it at any professional level just because I was always implicitly told I was never meant to be a "math person".
Maybe I'm not, but if we could get more kids into maths, even if they're not geniuses, I think society as a whole and they themselves would greatly benefit from that.
It's not elitist to dismiss polynomial factoring, though, just dismissive. I really can't think of any reason to care about the deeper points of polynomial factorization (anything other than repeated trial division), so maybe it's just ignorance on my part.
Stats? Now there's math you can use and is useful in understanding our world! And yet schools prefer to teach calculus in high school over however much stats you can teach without calculus. No one uses the integration bag of tricks in daily life, but everyone gets lied to with numbers.
Same thing happened to me. I picked up math at 25 after not having done a single math related thing in almost 10 years. I picked it up after realizing that a lot of the things that I do on daily basis are heavily related to concepts such as triangular numbers and other sequences. My life would have been completely different had my teachers communicated math in better ways than simply saying here is an equation, solve!
Not like you can sit at a public library's computer all day. You get timed about an hour a session and can only do three sessions a day and of course, if it there's a wait list, you have to wait.
Also, many libraries nowadays have been turned into "after school" centers where there's a whole load of talking on the kids section of the library.
There is a "quiet" zone, but people still whisper and really just straight out talk and you can very much hear the kids down the hall yelling and what not.
Unless you live in a huge metro area with a very large library (even then, the computer limit is still there) and instead of loud kids you get loud bums who are told every 10 minutes to be quiet by the guard...a library isn't really a great place to "sit down and gain skills across a variety of professions".
The only kinds of library where that romantic environment exists is at Universities, which many can only be accessed if you're a student there.
I suppose, generally, but I go to a state university, you do need to swipe your active student ID card to enter the library through a turnstile. I've also attended many hackathons at other unis where turnstiles exist as well and you can't enter unless you're a student there.
I mostly remember because of the pain it was to get clearance from security at those unis to be able to get out of the hackathon (at their libraries) and get back in; had to leave ID and take my visitor badge with me.
I'm sure many state unis are open to residents of that state, but I know not all. To be honest, I prefer it to be that way for the same reason "actual" public libraries just aren't conducive for actually studying something that takes a lot concentration.
They were older, but were they hired as "older", straight out of school or a career change? I feel like if they were older, they were probably senior programmers at other companies and just moved to google for the money/glory.
This. I got a BFA straight out of high school on a full-ride. Thought things were gonna work out great for me in the movies, but life happens.
I then went back to school as an "older student" at 25 and holy cow is it hard! Most Unis don't want you (literally), getting any kind of scholarship beyond a loan is out of the question, most of these "opportunities" are usually offered for people in high school or just starting college...
I mean, it's great for them. However, just thinking about the US' current economic problems where automation and trade are shutting down blue-collar jobs and these people don't have any other skills but would like to maybe try something in tech but can't...it's no wonder shit's hitting the fan right now.
You basically have to pick a school that has an older-than-average program. This is actually a problem in the Native American community because many students enter college later in life. It is not uncommon for students to start at 30 after a stint in the military or just working for some years after high school. Often they also have a family for added difficulty.
Tribal community colleges and some of the regional universities are aware of this lifecycle and make adjustments. UND at one point had a program that was "basic training" for college with a structured set of classes that were general requirements and support around them.
I commend you for putting in the effort, but our colleges are not helpful to older students and that actually makes life difficult for certain minority groups. I find their lack of inclusion a bit hypocritical.
Snap's shtick is that it's not Facebook, that your parents aren't on it, that your creepy uncle's friend who came to the bbq last 4th of July is NOT there and that Snap is not going to geo-recommend you add him as a friend...that's the point and the main reason it got so popular so quick.
How you monetize that? Dunno, but it will sure make your app popular.