Snapchat Tried to Separate “Social” and “Media” - And It Did Not Go Well
- Feb 21, 2018
- 3 min read
On November 29, 2017 at 6:00am EST, Snapchat announced its newest update on its website with a 60 second video and few paragraphs explaining how they would be taking their app to a new “personal” level. Committing to separate “the social from the media” and hoping to eliminate “fake news” the update would section friends’ content to one screen and “Stories from publishers, creators, and the community” to another. Snapchat’s video promised a more intuitive experience that would present the friends you wanted to connect most often with at the top of your Friends feed, and reassured users that their app would still open to the camera to invite them to create and explore.
The roll-out in America begane February 7th, and so did the backlash. Users took to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, even Snapchat’s own Story feature to express their displeasure with the update’s new interface. One critic even claimed the update was “worse than when [his] parents got divorced.” Twitter user Isaac Svobodny jumped on the bandwagon of users asking for the old Snapchat format back and rode it to social media fame, garnering almost 1.5 million retweets on his tweet of a falsified screenshot of a private message conversation with Snapchat in which the app “agreed” to change the layout back if his tweet got 50,000 retweets. This impressive number makes Svobodny’s tweet the fifth most retweeted tweet of all time and reflects many users distaste of the interface that had promised to wow.
What has this meant for those “publishers, creators” and “community” members that live on the Discover page? Well, the new update places the Discover stories that users have already opted into at the top of their feed and populates the remainder of the scroll space with suggested content from influencers, public Snapchat Stories, brands, community stories, and more. This has been most interesting for those influencer and public Story accounts that had previously been housed within users’ Friends’ stories. Now, they appear with branded content and advertisements, as opposed the familiar Friends feed. For Generation Z members who consider their YouTube community to be equivalent to the ones they have in real life, this has been an alienating move. And for the influencers themselves, they’ve seen a dip in content accessibility and viewership.
Tati Westbrook, a YouTuber known as Glam Life Guru, is one such influencer who has taken to Twitter to address her frustrations with Snapchat. She posted a tweet with screenshots of her Story views and public settings, lamenting that her Story was visible to everyone but “no one is getting them.” Another YouTuber, Mark Ferris or markyyferris on his vlog-type channel, echoed a similar complaint. He tweeted March 19 that since the update rolled out, he’s lost “over half” of his standard number of views to his public Story.
What has this meant for the app as a whole? TechCrunch reported in a piece about the controversial update that 83% of the App Store’s 1,941 reviews of the update have been negative, awarding the app a star score of two or lower. More and more content, from Tweets to Instagram Stories and even articles are cropping up with how-to’s on “downgrading” the app to its former interface.
But what, aside from users in general not loving change, could explain such a strong negative sentiment, despite the app additionally including updated typeface features, the ability to create your own Lens, and even a hugely popular update to the Bitmoji character options, the new Discover page feels like one giant “right hook” with lots of little right hooks interspersed additionally throughout the Friends page. In the book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, Gary Vaynerchuk discusses the way in which a company should be engaging with their consumer far more often through “jabs” that do not include an “ask/sell” element than “right hooks” which are the moments in which they aim for profit. The Discover page, filled with native advertising is aggressive to users, and deters them from swiping right from the camera screen at all. And furthermore, Snapchat has filled the Friends experience with the “media” that they claimed to be separating from the “social” by wedging ads between Friends’ Stories and personal messages.
So will Snapchat be sticking to their new look? Despite rumors of an update reverting to the previous interface to have been released February 20, no new changes have come from users’ outcries to the app designer. But you can be sure that execs at Facebook and Instagram are poised to take advantage of this sudden fall from grace by the social media platform Zuckerberg has yet to be able to acquire.
Comments