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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 co
by thosakwe 8y ago
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.
- 21 8y agoI don't have many friends on Snapchat, but I follow a lot of celebrities. Literally the same week, 90% of them stopped posting, and it never recovered. Now it's a ghost town. People who followed friends got hit, people who follow celebrities got hit, I just don't get it what was on their mind.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jboy55 8y agoI would have to wonder how many true celebrities, people whose fame come from outside of social media, felt the same frustrations at not being able to see their friends feeds as other users.
- sytelus 8y agoWhy they didn’t do extensive internal testing before rolling out such a huge UX changes? At least they should have rolled it out to smaller groups, measure metrics and expand group over time. The general rule in UX update is that larger the changes, longer it needs the A/B testing for impact on metrics. All botched UX updates have root cause in circumventing this rule by some passionate folks.
- jackmodern 8y agoIt was forced down the company's throat by the CEO. 0 testing was done by Snap before rolling it out, and he was 100% behind it. All of product design/management said no, he over ruled them. This is what I was told by a snap employee.
- realusername 8y agoThey were changing things all the time anyway, in 6 months I had maybe 3 complete redesign of the home page. And if you were on Android like me, you know testing and stability certainly wasn't part of the company motto, Snapshat was easily the most buggy mainstream app I know.
- MrMember 8y agoOne update broke notifications for me for like three months. The Android client is a joke.
- realusername 8y agoYeah notifications broke for a pretty long time indeed... That's hard to believe but during my one year of usage before I gave up, I had an issue with playing videos. Videos were always laggy, they would play for two seconds and then freeze until the end. They did not fix that in one year of updates. And that's a core feature of the app, it's unbelievably buggy, it would be the same as Facebook freezing when you like a post or Youtube freezing when switching videos.