Is Snapchat the New Myspace?
Why our favorite ghost may meet the same bitter end.
Hell hath no fury like a Mark Zuckerberg scorned. (Don’t forget, he tried to buy Snapchat for $3 billion in 2013.) And it wouldn’t be the first time Zuck took down a laid-back and youthful rival.
In 2008, Rupert Murdoch dismissively dubbed Facebook “the flavor of the month.” The media mogul, who had acquired MySpace three years earlier former $580 million, had reason to be confident. In April of 2005, MySpace had surpassed Google in monthly page views, and The New York Times called the time before the social network a “hazy memory.”
If you’d asked me in 2008 what I thought about Facebook, I would have agreed with Rupert. MySpace was the center of my high school social scene. Since middle school, every cool kid brave enough to lie about their age on the Internet had acquired a personalized corner of the web, complete with animated graphics and an angsty pop-punk soundtrack. It was the authoritative who’s-who of our mini teen universe.
One morning, in art class, I encountered the first evidence that change was afoot: A classmate whose sister was in college snootily informed me that she was deleting her MySpace in favor of a new platform. “Facebook is just like, way better” she explained without actually explaining.
Sure, I thought. Good luck with that. As I looked at the two side-by-side, it seemed comical to presume that dull blue-and-white Facebook would overtake loud and flashy MySpace. As far as I could tell, Facebook was a cheap replica of MySpace that had removed everything that made the former fun to use. Both allowed me to upload photos, post updates, and add “friends,” but MySpace encouraged me to make the page my own. It was fun and individualistic compared to Facebook’s well-ordered conformity. What was appealing about that?
Fast forward nearly a decade: Today, Snapchat is my favorite social platform. It’s the only place to which I post regularly, and like many users, I love the creative geotags, hilarious filters, and the fact that it’s built around the idea no two users post in the same way. It’s an intimate social network, compared to other apps, where having thousands of connections is commonplace. It’s my go-to place when I want to share funny things I see during my day, dumb videos of friends, and update my network on whatever I happen to be doing.
Unlike Instagram, in which each post is expected to project a curated — okay, let’s call it what it is: misleading — image of how spectacular your life is, Snapchat’s barrier to entry is low. I feel no pressure to perfectly frame a photo, and suffer no anxiety about whether enough people will “like” it.
That’s why I found myself laughing dismissively yet again when a friend told me she preferred Instagram Stories to Snapchat ones. When Instagram debuted its new feature, I had the same reaction as most people I knew: disbelief mingled with mild disgust at how blatantly they’d copied their competitor. For a while, the only stories on my friends’ fees were pictures of puzzled faces with captions like, “just snapchat me” and “why does this exist?” But not soon after, my Instagram feed began to populate regularly with friends’ stories. Some curated these in addition to their Snapchat ones, while some abandoned the little white ghost all together.
These days, while Instagram stories remain far less prevalent among my friends than Snapchat ones, I’m beginning to accept that I may have miscalculated the value users place on customization once again.
Less than a decade ago, Facebook proved that the reliable simplicity could win out over the excitement of using HTML lifted from sketchy websites to create gaudy MySpace backgrounds. We traded usernames for real names and customization for conformity. We traded a place where we had to search usernames to find friends for a place where it was simple and easy to find friends and friends-of-friends.
Today, Instagram stories offers us everything (and more) that Facebook enticed us with all those years ago. It’s easier to find people, easier to connect and tag, and simpler to share. Snapchat continues to entertain its millions of users with fun geotags, silly filters, and friend-focused interface, and continues to hold sway over Generation Z (78% of say they use it daily, compared with 76% for Instagram and only 66% for Facebook), but it may not be long until a simplified version wins out over an original. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Do you remember abandoning MySpace for Facebook? What was the last straw? Have you switched from Snapchat to Instagram? Let me know in the comments!
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