Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

I used to be a heavy user of Snapchat, and fall into its dominant demographic - young* (edit, had forgotten this word) users.

I remember buying stock in the company, and the same week, their big update rolling out, and quite literally burying my friends and their stories underneath the "overcrowded pile of clickbait" mentioned in the article. That, I believe, is where Snap really went wrong, and what drove 3 million users away from its platform.

When you combine Instagram's own story implementation with the fact that Snap's focus seems to be mainly on Discover from this point, it seems unlikely to me that they'll ever regain the interest of people who abandoned it back in February.

It will be interesting to see which changes they roll out in the months to come, but honestly, as long as the Discover page has even less meaningful content than a Taboola "Content you May Like" block, I can't foresee it being a real draw in for new users.

Snapchat has failed the test of feature vs. product.

Everything that made Snapchat unique is something easily emulated in a myriad of other apps. When you strip away the interface, the only unique part of it was the network/aggregator-effect they have. However, they were much smaller than Instagram and as a result would be fighting an uphill battle with a product that already has the network and could easily duplicate the features.

I don't use Snapchat, but now I understand why the redesign I saw so much hate on was pushed into production. I can't speak to the specifics of what changed, but I don't see why you wouldn't even A/B test such a massive change to your service.

Instagram Stories seem like they might've had a big impact on the popularity of the app as well.

The SEC allows companies to make corporate announcements through social media. Tweets of a public company’s CEO are thus corporate announcements. Leaks are reported on by third parties, and thus don’t fall under the same rules. The leaker might get in trouble for Reg FD violations, or for violating an NDA, but given the reduced risk of damage (particularly when the leaked information is not fabricated), it’s been a low enforcement priority.

Is there really a bubble? The players look fairly solidified to me.

You have Facebook, which might not be as cool in all countries with younger users, and has had a lot of controversy surrounding fake news, election influence, and privacy, but it's doing well.

You have Instagram, which is doing very well, was a great Facebook acquisition, helping their parent company even more.

You have Twitter, which seems to be struggling by, and is still very relevant.

Reddit is doing very well if you can even call it social meddia.

Apps like Yik Yak, Whisper, Snapchat, and such all seem to have been going downhill or are gone for some time now. But I think the players we have are here to stay.