According to a teen: When it comes to Snapchat, it’s all about photo editing

This morning I woke up nursing a soft hangover and thinking about a conversation I had with my teenage cousin a couple of weeks ago about Snapchat.

We were sitting at my grandmother’s dinner table after devouring our weekly Sunday meal and each had our phones out. I was mindlessly scrolling through Twitter — something I’ve talked about before— and she, like most people her age, was transfixed on applying the perfect filter to her selife on Snapchat. I glanced up quickly to see her sticking her tongue out, tilting her head, throwing up a peace sign, and trying a couple of other quirks to make the selfie absolutely perfect.

This went on for a couple of minutes before she nodded her head at what I assume was the correct selfie, played with her phone for a few seconds longer, and then put it away, asking me if I had listened to the new Lil Yachty song. I confirmed that I had (I hadn’t), and asked her if she shared that selfie with her friends on Snapchat. At 24, and after spending endless hours trying to figure out how to navigate Snapchat’s terrible UI, I had given up on the platform but was endlessly fascinated by it. My cousin, at 17, had adapted to the app well enough. Although it was much more vital to her social life and her standing with her peers that she not only understand how to use Snapchat, but master it.

I had always assumed that Snapchat’s main priority was acting as a social network for people to share selfies and videos. After all, that’s how artists like DJ Khaled found their audience and it’s a platform that publications have taken to in an attempt to engage with that very important younger demographic of people that may eventually come to their site. The point of Snapchat, I assumed, was to share and to engage, but based on the look my cousin gave me when I asked her that rather harmless, innocent question, maybe it wasn’t.

“I don’t share photos on Snapchat,” she admonished to me while biting into a cannoli. “I use the filters because they’re better than Instagrams and then I share it on Instagram.”

“So you don’t share anything on Snapchat,” I asked.

“I share videos from concerts, I guess,” she admitted. “But I don’t really share selfies. That’s what Instagram is for.”

“But why would you go through all that extra work?”

“Photos get lost in Snapchat,” she answered, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. And I suppose, to my realization, it was. “But on Instagram, people are going to see it and I can find it again if I need it.”

“So,” I asked, making sure she wasn’t getting annoyed with my line of questioning that I understood made me look like the older cousin who was so out of touch with technology that I couldn’t sit at the kids table anymore and drink the Kool-Aid. “Snapchat is a photo editor for you?”

“Mmm,” she kind of hummed, her mouth full of cannoli. “I guess? I still use it to share videos, but I haven’t shared a selfie in a while.”

My cousin, who had moved on from talking to me about what she perceived to be a pretty boring conversation, had returned to taking selfies, raving about some new filter that made her look “a billion times better than I actually look.” To her, the idea that she had taken a tool to make sharing a photo on a specific social network and removing the social network aspect wasn’t very interesting. To me, it was the first time I had heard someone say they weren’t interested in using Snapchat’s primary service, but had found a way to make their presence bigger and better on other platforms.

It got me thinking about other companies that set out to do one thing and ended up providing a different, more successful model for something else. I wrote about Slack recently and that’s an example of a company that didn’t set out to become a team messaging platform, but ended up creating a better product out of it. Snapchat didn’t intend to become a photo editor — at least not entirely— but that’s what it had become for my cousin and her friends.

Just like my cousin had learned to adapt her skills from Snapchat and use them on Instagram, Snapchat has had to adapt to meet the demands of its audience. It’s an audience that went from saying, “We already have a platform to share photos on that we like, but we want better photo editing options” and Snapchat provided that.

Yes, the filters are silly or gimmicky, but they’re also engaging and funky. When it comes to getting someone’s attention and making a statement, which if we’re being honest is exactly what the point of a selfie is, having a funky flair to your photo that stands out is what sells it. It’s why we obsess over apps like Prisma and use those gimmicky illustrations as our new Twitter profile pictures. We’re obsessed with changing our image, constantly warping it, and then hyperfocusing on the one or two images that we think are the best. As such, photo editing tools have become all the more popular and when Snapchat is giving users one of the best editing tools with the most options for free, it feels like it shouldn’t be so surprising that users would turn to it as an editor first and social network second.

To be a company that survives in this incredibly competitive, dog-eat-dog world of modern day Silicon Valley means learning to adapt and move forward. Instagram was the leader in photo sharing, but realized it lacked the storytelling ability that Snapchat could give users. As a result, Instagram introduced Instagram Stories and blatantly credited the Snapchat for coming up with the idea first. Twitter and Periscope saw a demand for livestreaming and Facebook jumped on that, launching their own competitor platform called Facebook Live.

Snapchat started off as a social network, and no one is arguing that we’ll see that aspect disappear. That’s a ridiculous notion. But we are seeing Snapchat learn and adapt to what its user base wants and embracing the fact that some people are just using it as a photo editing suite. We’re seeing Snapchat enter a period of self-realization and evolve into something it didn’t think it would ever be a go-to destination for.

Today, I booted up Snapchat for the first time in a while and used one of the filters that placed gold butterflies on your head to take a selfie. It was by no means unique — just about everyone on Facebook had updated their profile picture with a photo using the exact same filter — but I thought it looked alright and, as such, shared it with my cousin on Snapchat.

She messaged me a couple of seconds later to say that it was a cute picture — giving me the validation I didn’t even know I was seeking from someone seven years my junior— and that I should Instagram it immediately.

“I don’t really know if I want to Instagram this though,” I said.

“Julia, you need to Instagram it before someone else does. It’s cute, but there are a lot of cute girls on Instagram. Get in now. Text me when you upload it and I’ll like it.”

Once again, I had the realization that it wasn’t just about getting the cute photo and posting it. It was being one of the first people to take the photo, post it, collect the likes and sit on that sense of faux accomplishment for a few minutes before it was on to the next one.

To be honest, I still haven’t uploaded it. It all seems very stressful.