Snapchat: Fade Away, and Radiate
Moving on with my life on Snapchat
Every movie, TV show, magazine and newspaper article written about technological progress or millennials in the past 10 years has inevitably mentioned the rise of social media and the apparent decline of civilization. You can hear baby boomers and the last members of the great generation bemoaning what a shallow, frivolous culture consumes “the kids these days.” Every teenager to 35-year-old is attached at the hip (or the hand) to their cell phones. They are obsessed with their social media presence. They are fascinated by the stories and timelines and posts of their friends and on and on.
What these out of touch people don’t seem to understand is that it’s less and less about the story or the photo or the status or the friends: it’s about the image that you portray. Not just in order to maintain a reputation as a good cook or a fitness buff, but also about how you can use that pristine, carefully cultivated and heavily manicured and/or airbrushed image to launch your career as a social media influencer.
Post your post-workout selfie (with perfect hair, a taut tummy, with suspiciously perfect full contour on) not just to let people know you’re fit and attractive, but so that POM™ (the “healthy” pomegranate juice that costs more than a full McDonald’s™ meal) will send you free products, and eventually pay you to become a “POM™ ambassador.” All you have to do to get paid is post sickeningly sponsored content on the daily and, as your baby boomer parents might say, as if tuning in from a Grateful Dead concert, “sell out, man.”
Brand yourself well, and you’ll be a paid Instagrammer in no time! That’s the dream! No need to work your boring 9–5! Just sell your soul to the giants of advertising and live a glamorous and fully sponsored life.
So where, in this post-Myspace world, I ask, do Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat fall? I’ll tell you: on two separate sides of the winning equation. Originally developed to serve two completely different purposes, Instagram and Snapchat developments have been practically identical. But who has won this inevitable technological progression? Facebook.
At the tail-end of 2012, Mark Zuckerberg invited Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel to California. When he arrived, Zuckerberg told Spiegel that Facebook, then the giant that Snapchat was not yet, that the company was developing a photo sharing app that would delete the photos after 10 seconds (identical to Snapchat’s model) called Poke. The smugness was so thick you could cut it with a knife. This encroachment on Snapchat territory ruffled Spiegel’s feathers and he bought his employees all Sun Tzu’s The Art of War upon his return to Snapchat headquarters. A lot of good that did him.
“But I haven’t heard of Poke!” you might say. Seems like Snapchat won this battle of David and Goliath right? Wrong.
While Poke may not have taken off, and Zuckerberg’s threat to Spiegel may have been negated at that time, Facebook found another way to make Snapchat pretty much obsolete and a shadow of its former self.
Facebook bought Instagram and made it into a better Snapchat. You want stories? You got it. You want messaging? You got it. Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion and has been milking this golden goose (to mix metaphors) for all its worth.
Facebook not only uses its algorithms on Facebook to hijack your newsfeed with targeted ads, now they have Instagram for that as well, in addition to the paradigm Instagram has created where it is actually turning normal users into wannabe “Instagram Influencers,” which are basically human ads. It pays to be an advertiser yourself. Just pick a brand and the sponsorship will come! You want new yoga gear? Fitness maven. You want GoPro sponsorship? You’re an outdoorsy adventurer! You want free trips to Bali? Use the hashtag wanderlust (and tag @jetblue/@americanairlines/@delta) in every photo you post.
Facebook’s partnership with Instagram has created little need for Snapchat, and has made the once groundbreaking app look clunky and ill-conceived. So what does Snapchat do to try and compete with the relentless money-mongering of Facebook and Instagram? Obviously try and modify its design and business model to match that of the two titans of social media.
Snapchat went public early 2017 and many believe for too much. Much to the chagrin of those who bought SNAP stock at $24, the shares have dropped dramatically since its IPO (and now the IPO is being investigated by the Justice Department). Snapchat has decided that the way around this loss of income is redesign after redesign, and boy, have they got an ugly awakening lined up for themselves once they debut it.
Snapchat implemented a new “Discover” section for news and entertainment that was to become a plug for media brands. This section premiered its use of the same algorithms that Facebook has been using for over a decade to display targeted ads to users. This has been a embarrassing mistake so far.
Snapchat has little to no experience with these algorithms, while Facebook (and by association, Instagram) are basically the pioneers of this kind of ad targeting. This is like when your little brother tries to swing at you, and all you have to do to keep them out of range is keep a hand planted firmly on the top of their head and watch them flail their arms in frustration.
Additionally, all the Instagram influencers that make their living creating a personal brand, seem to use Snapchat not as an independent means of monetary enrichment, but as merely an accessory to their Instagram “business model.” It’s basically an optional additional way to promote yourself, and has been used as an optional feature, not a necessary product, if you catch my drift.
The best way I can explain the complete and utter domination of Facebook over Snapchat is actually an episode of South Park. In the episode, and over the course of the South Park season, Stan Smith becomes suspicious about the school newspaper’s content. He feels like its editors are writing ad content rather than actual stories, and starts to speak to the students writing the articles, only to discover that these kids are in fact “AI ads” that have taken human form and infiltrated human society in kind of a Matrix-like twist. This is what Facebook has been able to do in some respect: It has pioneered the algorithms that can target your product preferences and advertise to you easily. Why not? They’re basically the godfather of online ad content and every day is their daughter’s wedding.
Not only that, but now they have a platform (Instagram) that not only uses this algorithm successfully as well, but actually rewards individual users for advertising on their own. It’s a perfect model that Snapchat cannot compete with. Snapchat’s “pivots” are more like a trip and a fall. Snapchat is basically the “Friendster” of the 21st century, whereas Facebook is still the “Facebook,” with Instagram tucked solidly under its wing.
Miko Goldstein, a kale aficionado, is a product designer