Snapchat and Retweeting video

There have been a two recent instances when I watched a friend of mine’s story and wished to share it myself. I was frustrated to realize that the best I could do was screenshot an image, but could not easily share the story.
This got me thinking…
Could Snapchat introduce a feature gave users (me) an ability to “re-tweet” stories from people I follow? Given that a picture can be shared, why not video too?
By simply adding a “re-tweet/quoting” functionality to the app, UX would improve in two main ways.
- Quality of my newsfeed: people will only share the best/most interesting/cool stories with their feed. This will improve the content everyone sees in Snapchat, increase time spent in-app, and the overall stickiness of the app.
- Diversity off my newsfeed: shareable stories infuses fresh ideas and perspectives. To be honest, many of the stories I see in Snapchat hit on 1 of 5 tropes: food, drinking, hanging, hiking. We (my cohort — 23 years old, 1–2 years out of college, living in large city) are all doing the same thing with our free time and it has decreased my interest in viewing every story. Shareable stories allows new types of stories to be viewed. Instead of the typical “look-what-I’m-doing-now” snap story that we produce, users will share stories that are happy, sad, interesting, ironic, etc. Quick metaphor: from my own personal experience, the former type of snap story comes from the fact that the story is about you…and as director your own story, you tend to edit your content in a way that gives off the impression you are living an amazing life. The later type of shared story is 1 degree of freedom removed from being about specifically your life, which will allow you, now the content producer rather than director, to share more interesting things stories with your followers.
Risk factors…
- Identity crisis: Snapchat competes with Facebook in a strategically simple way. Optimize (aka create tools) for bringing you closer to your best friends, whereas Facebook optimizes for you to reach out to your broader social network. Were Snapchat to introduce a re-tweet/quote feature, would it run counter to this strategy?
- Spam: Most of what I share on Twitter is in the form of a retweet or quoted tweet. Would allowing this sort of functionality encourage spam-like content or even disincentive users to ever create their own generated content (due to the relative ease of sharing someone else’s content)?
Ultimately, quote-tweets and re-tweets are the features that make Twitter so enjoyable (and addicting) for me. This type of entertainment I receive is not replicable on other social platforms (Facebook) and thus, keeps me coming back to the website/app. Snap should take note and develop features that create this same level of UX that will fend off Instagram.
