Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. That's very interesting. Okay the other thing that, from a product point-of-view, I really associate with Snapchat is obviously persistence or lack thereof. The ephemeral nature and the norms around this have shifted a lot even over the course of my lifetime. I remember when I started using the internet, the norm, I don't know if you remember this, was that you did not use your real name on the internet. The internet's a scary place, and it would be dangerous for you to have your real name out there. Then we got okay with that. Then there was the era where everything got posted in perpetuity through social networks and everything else. Then we realized, "Huh, maybe everything being posted in perpetuity is not a great idea." I feel like people are still trying to figure this stuff out. I'm curious again, what you think the long-term equilibrium is of, do you want a central store of all the photos you've ever taken in your camera roll? Do you want everything to be ephemeral? If things are ephemeral, maybe you really wish you'd kind of kept that birthday Snap from a while ago. What is the long-term equilibrium here? Just online in terms of how people reason about data? Do we need more fine-grained control between a one-off disappearing message and kept forever? Maybe we need new product inventions. I think my general thesis would be that it will probably mirror the way that we've been living for thousands of years, which is the vast majority of life is ephemeral. Then you save the things that are important. You don't write down every thought you have. You certainly don't record every conversation you have, although we're recording this one. I think for me, that's likely how things will evolve over time with technology. Certainly what we've seen with Snapchat. When we said, "Hey, it doesn't make sense that everyone's recording everything forever in terms of our conversations." in fact, that has an impact on the way people express themselves and share with one another. That sounded crazy at the time because literally everything was saved forever. We were talking about things like the importance of privacy, and the relationship between privacy and self-expression back in 2012. People were like, "What are you talking about?" This was at the time when everyone was saying, "We're going to be… Everything's going to be open and connected. We're going to share everything about yourself with everybody." That's just not how humans have lived for thousands and thousands of years. I think what's very likely looking forward is what's already happened. Which is the vast majority of communication products you use now have retention settings that delete your conversations unless you want to save them. I think that's true for Snapchat in terms of making Snaps as well. You may just want to send something that's silly to your friend, but if it's an important memory or if it's our two-year-old running around doing something cute, I'll just save it. I think people are going to interact with technology the same way they interact with the world, which is, save the things that are important and discard the rest. Yes, yes. Interesting. Where do messaging apps go?…

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