Snapchat heads towards enshittification

Coinciding with Snapchat’s 13th birthday, founder Evan Spiegel has just announced that the social network will start placing ads in users’ chat inbox.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, except that in 2014, when the company first began showing ads, it assured users, with a certain moral superiority, that it would never put them in personal communications.

The exact phrase, which I know by heart because I used it in my classes a lot of times, was:

“We won’t put advertisements in your personal communication — things like Snaps or Chats. That would be totally rude.”

And yet… time goes by and the revenue isn’t meeting expectations, and rudeness takes second place, so now it’s going to place ads wherever it wants, regardless of the user experience. Suffice to say, as Spiegel’s post puts it: “our advertising business is growing more slowly than our competitors’ own” and “investors are concerned that we’re not growing faster,” so now ads can now be placed everywhere, including the parts of the app previously considered “sacred.”

The other part of the promise made in 2014 was:

“We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and…