Snapchat splits social from media
Snapchat has long thumbed its nose at social media conventions. The messaging app initially emphasized posts that disappeared rather than remaining permanent. It encouraged users to connect with just a few friends instead of many. And it prized human editing and curation instead of encouraging anybody to post anything.
On Wednesday, its parent company, Snap, continued that unconventional approach, unveiling a redesign that effectively separates social and media into two separate parts of the Snapchat app.
Where users of Facebook see one giant news feed of information, typically determined by what they have liked and what their friends post, Snapchat users will now see a left side of the app that includes chats and stories shared with, or by, their friends. That’s the social part. On the right side, there will be content from publishers, amateur creators, celebrities and stories that Snap curates from user-generated videos and photos. That’s the media part.
“While blurring the lines between professional content creators and your friends has been an interesting internet experiment, it has also produced some strange side effects [like fake news] and made us feel like we have to perform for our friends rather than just express ourselves,” Evan Spiegel, Snap’s chief executive, said in a blog post about the redesign, which is to begin rolling out Wednesday and continue through the end of the week.
Some things about Snapchat are not changing. For instance, the app still opens to the phone camera, allowing users to make and share photos and videos with friends.
But the redesign otherwise moves Snapchat even further away from a traditional social media model.
“Separating social from media has allowed us to build the best way to communicate with friends and the best way to watch great content — while addressing many of the problems that plague the internet today,” Spiegel said in his blog post.
Philip Napoli, a professor of public policy at Duke University who studies media and democracy, said that Snapchat’s redesign would test people’s willingness to embrace a social media app that relied more on human curators than algorithms.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s enough of a consumer backlash to make this potentially viable,” Napoli said.
Snap said it was using a kind of artificial intelligence known as machine learning to understand what people like to see, based on their activity, and planned to offer them new content in line with those preferences.