Unpopular Opinion Alert: Snapchat Stories Shouldn’t Disappear or How I Would Disrupt Snapchat
What if content disappearing specific to Snapchat Stories isn’t the reason Stories are the breakout product for Snapchat? If that’s true (and I think it is), here is how I’d disrupt Snapchat.
It’s not used in app store images anymore, but one of the main tags Snapchat ran with for years was “Delete by Default.”
I look at the core features in Snapchat through this lens. Private snaps and chat messages (everything to the left of the camera) delete after the recipient views it (you can tap on a chat message to save if you want), snaps posted to Stories (everything to the right of the camera) delete after 24 hours. Each piece of content on Snapchat deletes itself after a set time or being looked at and falls into the pattern of “delete by default.”
It’s silly at this point to question the merits of disappearing content (there’s $1.8 billion reasons it’s not worth discussing anymore). Turns out it’s a lot of fun communicating with pictures and videos that disappear. What Snapchat has tapped into better than anyone else is in creating an environment for you to be you. In Evan Spiegel’s words: “We no longer have to capture the ‘real world’ and recreate it online,” Spiegel explained during a speech he gave at a conference in early 2014. “We simply live and communicate at the same time." He’s right and this started with Snapchat centering itself around disappearing content.
I can capture myself doing silly, stupid, mundane things because I know that content will disappear. I’ve sent so many private snaps just zooming in as close as I can on someone’s face (protip: start recording and slide your finger up and it will zoom in). Silly, goofy and not worth keeping around.
Stories can’t be viewed through this same lens. I’m not posting the same content on Stories that I send in private snaps (and if you’re one of those people who send me a private snap and post it to your Story please stop). Snapchat has made design decisions for their platform that when evaluating Stories have to be looked at differently. Some design decisions in Snapchat in no particular order:
- App opens on the camera. This values creating content over consuming content.
- No User Profiles. This means my followers can’t see past information about me such as pictures, videos, likes or a bio.
- No ability to like or comment publicly on content.
- No concept of group snaps or private Snapchat Stories for select friends. Everything is sent 1 to 1 even if I select multiple recipients.
- All content “deletes by default.”
- No ability to upload content to a Snapchat Story or private snap. It all must be created on Snapchat.
- All created content uses the full real estate of the phone screen.
This combination of decisions is what has made Snapchat successful in creating this environment for you to be you, but if you unbundled these features and think about what you would do specific to improving the Stories product, I think you’d do things differently. In case you don’t know me, this is the perspective of a 28 year old dude. If you’re 14, you’re going to have different views and you probably want most things to expire — delete being your default makes total sense. I’m not sure at what age this shift changes, but it does by 28.
An important construct here is : 1. content being deleted and 2. that it can’t be viewed after a certain timeframe or action are two separate things. In Snapchat’s world content being deleted prevents content from being viewed again, but outside of this world, it’s entirely possible to prevent content from being viewed again without deleting it. This is an important construct in how it relates to improving Stories.
If I was thinking in percentages, I’d want somewhere around 80% of my private snaps deleted or that I simply don’t have any need for them once viewed by the recipient. That number for Stories has to be close to the inverse. Most all of my Story content I’d like to be able to watch later.
Another construct important to Snapchat Stories is your own Snapchat Story is more important than anyone else’s. I usually watch my own Story 2 or 3 times all the way through when I have one. There’s certainly times where I watch someone’s Story more than once, but there’s no way I’ve watched any friends’ Story nearly as many times as I’ve watched mine. I’m guessing I’m not unique in this behavior.
Let’s take a deeper look into Snapchat’s design decisions to see how we might improve Stories.
- App opens on camera…
If you’re trying to make a better Stories product, you wouldn’t change this. Opening the app on the camera prioritizes capturing content. This was a huge flaw in Poke the Facebook Snapchat clone.
2. No user profiles…
Not much to change here. I’m happy to put whatever I’m doing on Snapchat because I don’t have to think about how this fits with my “online persona.” — it’s just me.
Thinking in Profile terms that’s more accustomed to Facebook or Instagram, I don’t want anyone being able to add me and watch the last 10 years of my life. When I accept a new friend on Facebook they have access from my freshman year of college until now. Why on earth should anyone be able to see that far back in my life? This goes back to content being deleted versus content that persists and rules around who can and can’t see content or information about me. This is horribly convoluted on Facebook. The beauty of Snapchat is that it’s so f*cking simple — the content deletes itself! I have no bio or about me! Why do my friends need an about me? Don’t they already know me? I’m convinced not even the engineers who built the privacy settings for Facebook could describe how they work in detail let alone the average Facebook user. Privacy still matters whether Facebook would have you believe that or not.
3. No ability to like or comment…
If comments were added, the door opens for multiple parties to interact. I’m not sure allowing friends or followers to comment really compels me to share the real me. Believe it or not long lost relative, I don’t care what you think about what I just posted. Comments prevent me from being me — especially in a forum where multiple parties who don’t know each other can interact. In this free for all format, it’s hard for comments to be genuine. If you have something to say, send me a message — exactly how it’s handled on Snapchat.
Adding the ability to like content is interesting to think about — is a view the same as a like? On Stories you can see who viewed each individual snap by name so I assume the viewers cared enough about me to watch to the end? Do I really need them to like my Story too?
Tangent — I’m convinced that Instagram should have a like lock mode, where I can use it without the risk of actually liking something. I don’t think I’m alone in wanting this.
If likes were added to Stories are they public and can I see who else liked other people’s snaps (this raises a different question of how one would add in a like feature given snapchat’s current UX)? Can I only see a total number of likes? Can I only see who liked my Story and not other people’s Stories? I’m not a huge fan of public like counts because I think it prevents you from being you and forces you to post content around what gets the most likes. I do believe that likes direct to the snapper would be fun and it’s a low friction way to acknowledge you enjoyed, saw, laughed, etc. at someone’s content.
I’ve always thought it would be fun to have an unlimited number of likes so if I wanted I could like something 12 times (except they don’t need to send a push — just look at the above). This might be a fun metric to add into a users’ Snapchat score and still keep likes somewhat hidden since I don’t think they should be public if you’re trying to improve Stories.
4. No ability to do anything with more than 1 party…
There is an argument to be made that a smaller audience or a completely private audience I might feel more comfortable being myself in.
There have been quite a few times where I’ve captured something, saved it to my camera roll and then sent it to a group of friends on iMessage so we could talk about as a group. I do wish many of my private snaps functioned in this way, but there’s been a clear choice made by Snapchat for everything to be a 1 to 1 relationship so no one ever feels left out. If you were thinking about going after Snapchat, there is an opportunity in thinking about things a little differently here.
But back to how this might make the Stories product better. There is something interesting about seeing your day or a shared experience from someone else’s perspective. It would be interesting to take other people’s content and add that to my Story if they captured a moment better than I did. You see this behavior happen in the Snapchat Live Stories where you can see multiple angles of the same thing. I’m not advocating for full on takeovers that you’re starting to see become super popular with brands, but some ability to pull in friend’s content while at a mutual event or location so I can save that content for later is interesting and would improve my Stories.
5. All content deletes by default…
Snapchat has created the best way to capture your day. It’s fun. It’s easy. It’s intuitive. It turns out that capturing my life through Stories is the easiest way for me to document my life, my voice, my emotions, who I’m with, etc. Six months or five years from now I want to watch and experience my Stories all over again. I want to remember the trips to New York and San Fran and the silly mundane things I did in between. My camera roll is not good enough — the Story format is better in almost every way.
Timehop is a blast — that in Story format would be at least 100x better. The important distinguishing factor here is “I”. I want to see my Stories — I don’t want or need anyone else to see my old Stories, unless I choose to share it with them.
To me the entire crux of how one would improve Snapchat Stories comes down to what matters more — that content is deleted or that it can’t be seen again. I’m afraid that every time I post something to my Story unless I remember to download it, it’s gone forever. Yes, you can download individual snaps posted to Stories or the entire Story, it’s just way too much of a hassle. The downloaded Story content then gets compressed and lost somewhere in your photo library. There has to be a better way to solve this than manually downloading it after the fact.
Is this solved with a toggle in my Snapchat settings for my Stories to be saved by default? How would that even work? How would Snapchat package this content together? Is a Story saved by days, weeks, locations or people? Do you build out a simple calendar where I can watch what I did on each day from now until the rest of time? Can I share my past Stories so my friend’s can watch and relive them with me? I’m not fully convinced there’s a simple solution to this (which is the crux of all great software — taking really complex ideas and feelings and wrapping that in pretty package that’s simple to use). From a viewer’s standpoint, being able to watch around a rolling 24 hour clock makes a ton of sense and I’m not sure I would change that even if content is saved forever.
Much of the beauty of Snapchat is once you understand the basic concepts, there isn’t much to think about. I post content and the next day it’s gone. It’s an easy concept to understand. How do you start explaining the Story format if it no longer deletes by default? Can Snapchat even make that kind of transition?
I’d be very surprised if this isn’t something the Snapchat team is already experimenting with and thinking about. If I’m trying to disrupt Snapchat — this is where I’d go after them. They’ve gotten so many things right and there’s tons of things you wouldn’t change, but this has to be the way in which they can be disrupted. At what age do you not want delete to be your default and how do you create a product to better handle this? How do you take the Story format and get that in more places?
Additionally, I’m certain they’ve gotten tons of requests for being able to embed a Story on the web — I think this becomes important to them going forward even if they start with just embedding Stories on their own website (which they did for the Oscars). Embedding begs an even deeper question you’re starting to see them wrangle with — should Snapchat be the only place to watch Snapchat content?
6. No Ability to upload…
This is really interesting as it relates to Snapchat. Because you can’t upload directly to Snapchat, all content on Snapchat is unique to Snapchat. It can’t be understated how important this is to Snapchat. Facebook has turned into meme heaven and Instagram is close behind. By not being able to upload directly to Snapchat, when you’re thinking about capturing, you’re forced to open Snapchat first so you don’t miss being able to share that moment on Snapchat — the cool things you’re doing have to be on your Story.
It’s semi counterintuitive because Snapchat has always been about not being perfect, but since it’s close to becoming the default camera and Stories is how I want to capture my life — I want higher res videos and pictures from my default camera. Once videos on Snapchat are posted to a Story, they are compressed for faster sending and to fit with this “not perfect” aesthetic, but if I’m using a tool to document my life the quality has to be better. I don’t want to look at shitty, compressed videos 10 years from now. Will looking at old snaps be what looking at polaroids feels like to my generation?
I do think if you’re trying to disrupt Snapchat and make a better Stories product you’d have to allow for uploads so you can leech off of it — even if it might not make for a better product initially. You’d simply want to let users have the ability to upload so they can add their snaps to whatever this new Story platform would be.
7. All created content uses the full real estate of the phone screen…
This is what a mobile first content creation platform should look like. Content that takes up the entirety of my phone screen is so much more engaging than an Instagram video or a Vine (← which has about 6 months of life left). I’d personally love it when I was watching a Snap or a Story that all notifications on my phone would be blocked. By filling up the entire screen it doesn’t allow for other distractions or to let me do something else on my phone. I’m not distracted by looking at like counts or looking at the comments.
Content has always been king and Snapchat has better content from the people that I care about more so than anywhere else. The more tools they develop to continue down that path, the richer and more engaging the platform becomes. Snapchat has prioritized and gotten incredibly good at building tools that let you feel comfortable being who you really are. This should be terrifying to Facebook.
Additionally, if you were thinking of making a better Stories product and wanted to go at Snapchat, advertisers are increasingly spending more and more money creating content specific to Snapchat’s 3v format. I’m certain advertisers would love to repurpose this full bleed content on other platforms, so by creating a competing full screen Story product that had legs, you could leech off these ads created for Snapchat. Obviously you need a built in-audience to sell advertisers on, but let’s say Facebook were to come after Stories and actually got it right, this becomes a nice fringe benefit.
When does a person no longer want delete to be their default?
I don’t know exactly when this shift happens in your life, but it does happen. If I was a Snapchat PM, these are the questions I’d be trying to answer. Stories is simply not the same product as private snaps and has to be evaluated differently. It’s unfair to the quality of the Stories product to evaluate it through the “delete by default” lens. If I were trying to disrupt Snapchat, this is where I’d start. This is not to say Snapchat can’t and won’t create a solution to this problem.
You can’t beat Evan at his own game. You’ve got to find a way to change the playing field. You can’t beat Snapchat by trying to be Snapchat. Evan is just too smart. You’ve got to believe that the delete by default construct when applied to Stories is wrong and find a way to prove that you’re right.
If you enjoyed this, add me on Snapchat. Username: jmjerlecki
If anyone is working on a product that fits the criteria I outlined in this post, I’d love to check it out or help if I can — james@mytable.org
